French detective by James Patterson - book review

America vs France seems to be the battle in whichever media I check into in recent times. Ever since they tricked themselves into a deal with Australia, its battle of bickering between the 2 nations. In the recent Netflix series “Emily in Paris” I had ranted about how they’ve shown French customs in poor light while spotlighting the beauties of Paris, out comes this book ,where the American equivalent of our Rajeshkumar, James Patterson, collaborates with Richard diLallo. Though the book might’ve been couple of years old, the timing of its recommendation curiously coincided with other items mentioned above. I often wonder how 2 authors collaborate in coming up with one novel!! Even for a thesis presentation it is quite challenging and confusing as to who would’ve contributed to which section unless clearly demarcated. In a novel that runs by a single theme, its hard to imagine how two authors could’ve collaborated with the wors!! Either its ghost written by the lesser known author piggy backing on the fame of the other or the core of the theme being suggested by the famous one with the latter putting the scenes around it. Whichever way it may be, still doesn’t make sense as a concept for me.

As for the book, it involves 3 stories rolled into a single novel. It is neither a short story collection nor 3 different chapters of same book. It is more like 3 episodes that happen back to back in the life of the detective, who is on loan from France to NYPD. It stars with him losing his lady police partner and his lady love in first novel, followed by him being assigned with another lady police partner, with whom he solves couple of crimes across the 3 novels. Even though all the 3 events (investigations) happen in US, it feels as if the location is somewhere deep in France. There is so much of French dialogue interspersed that it almost feels like a French novel translated in English!! And almost every character speaks French, behaves French, eats French, dresses like French do and for every weekend or couple of hours break, the detective pair hop onto a plane and go to Paris for relaxation. Point being that the French detective is a multi-billionaire having his own plane, does help it a bit. Except for the first novel, with a slight twist in the end, overall the book is more of a dull police soap opera, with very less thrill factor. Half the time, they are eating some unspellable French cuisine across every French restaurant in and around Manhattan that it feels like reading some section out of Travel and Living rather than a crime story. Pacing is decent and is probably the one saving grace. May be the rest of the series, if any more, may leverage from this setting based from this troika of stories.