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HONEYMOON by James Patterson and Howard Roughan Little, Brown, February 2005 400 pages $27.95 ISBN: 0316710628 Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

James Patterson is a writer whose work I've sampled here and there, but have never quite connected with. The Alex Cross series was more my thing than the rather flimsy Women's Murder Club. HONEYMOON, his latest standalone thriller, written with Howard Roughan is an old-fashioned page-turner.

You need to know before you start that there's not a great deal of substance to it, and in many ways not much new. It's another of those books where the authors seem to have more than one beady eye on a movie deal. But I devoured it at one sitting and genuinely wanted to know what happened.

In a nutshell, it's the story of the femme fatale and the good guy on her trail. Yes, all very Hitchcockian, and there are more than a few nods to the Master of Suspense in the story.

Nora Sinclair is a very rich, very beautiful interior designer with impeccable taste when it comes to both furnishings and men. Her eye for the former has given her a list of top clients and an enviable lifestyle, whilst her eye for the latter means she is never short of a beau or two. However . . . being around Nora may not be good for the health.

FBI agent John O'Hara soon cottons on to the fact that things happen to those getting close to Nora. So he's charged with the task of finding out just who this enigmatic woman is. But in the very best bees round the honeypot tradition, he finds himself being lured closer to her.

As usual with Patterson, what you see is what you get -- lots of short, sharp chapters and crisp, laconic storytelling. The subplot, such as it is, is very thin and the ending is a bit of a cheat. It's not exactly a deus ex machina, but it was certainly a bit too pat for my liking and I'm pretty confident no clues were strewn along the way to lead me to expect what happened. But Patterson can tell a tale and knows just how to keep the reader hooked.

Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, February 2005

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)

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