The new addition to my ‘Charity Box’ (mind you, all the previous books have successfully gone to Church Charity, Salvation Army and local library. My karma feels so much lighter) is Judge and Jury by James Patterson.
Andie DeGrasse, an aspiring actress and single mom, is not your typical juror. Hoping to get dismissed from the pool, she tells the judge that most of her legal knowledge comes from a bit part curling around the stripper’s pole in The Sopranos. But she still ends up as juror number 11 in a landmark trial against a notorious mob boss.
The judge is terrified of the defendant.
The case quickly becomes the new Trial of the Century. Mafia don Dominic Cavello, known as the Electrician, is linked to hundreds of gruesome, unspeakable crimes. Senior FBI agent Nick Pellisante has been tracking him for years. He knows Cavello’s power reaches far beyond the courtroom but the FBI’s evidence against the ruthless killer is ironclad. Conviction is sure thing.
So is the jury.
As the jury is about to reach a verdict, the Electrician makes one devastating move that no one could have predicted. The entire nation is reeling, and Andie’s world is shattered. For her, the hunt for the Electrician becomes personal, and she and Pellisante come together in an unbreakable bond: they exact justice – at any cost.
The verdict: Run for your life.
It’s a legal thriller, courtroom thriller, procedural, psychological thriller – when it comes to genre. When it comes to quality of the book, it’s a waste of time. I only finished it because I gave myself a word ‘to read and then to charity’. This is one and only reason I read and finished Judge and Jury…. Now I know why I stopped reading James Patterson.
May be he can’t write anymore. May be he writes too much, too fast. May be he spreads himself thin. Judge and Jury, in my opinion, is a paperback proof to it.
The narration is too descriptive in places. It is too slow most of the time. It’s too convoluted (the thought that kept nagging at me – where to they get so much money to travel so vast and to stay at hotels, etc)
Main characters: FBI agent and actress-single mum are thrown together. Yes, there are reasons for them to end up together the way they do. However, the whole relationship plot-line is too non-believable.
The story stops at sort of happy ending. However, this ending has so many why’s to it.
- why the main characters stayed together (they have so much pulling them apart, so much dark past between them, so much bad memories
- why big, strong FBI man made a killer out of nice little lady
- why did she do it, become a killer (it was uncalled for, in my opinion. It was ‘overkill’)
Judge and Jury is not Alex Cross adventures, not at all. It’s way way lower calibre then earlier Alex Cross. It’s not Women Murder Club either. It’s something of its own. I hope it is one and only book (there won’t be series).
Judge and Jury is truly a ‘charity box’ book.
On a scale 1 to 5 stars, I can hardly give it a 2.
Svetlana Tishchenko 