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Readers can pick up a James Patterson novel at an airport bookshop and more often than not finish it by the end of their flight (or, in some cases, before they've made it through airport security). Though not great literature, Patterson's books are popular entertainment. His Women's Murder Club series, co-written with Andrew Gross and Maxine Paetro, remains reliably entertaining and engrossing. The same can be said of BEACH ROAD.
A collaborative effort with Peter de Jonge, BEACH ROAD is a fooler. It appears at first blush to be a well-told but predictable tale involving an underachieving yet competent attorney named Tom Dunleavy, who is content to eke out an existence in East Hampton representing the not-so-rich-and-famous who work for the rich-and-famous.
All of that abruptly changes when Dante Halleyville, a local star athlete, is charged with a triple murder and asks his friend Dunleavy to represent him. Dunleavy knows he is outclassed and goes to his long-lost love, Kate Costello, for assistance. Costello is a superstar in Manhattan legal circles and initially rebuffs Dunleavy's request for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the way that Dunleavy unceremoniously dumped her years before. It so happens, however, that Costello is in the midst of a vocational crisis and decides that Halleyville is the type of client whom she became a lawyer to represent.
Thus, Dunleavy and Costello begin a long, uphill and unpopular representation of Halleyville. Stereotypes abound; there is a whole deck of race and class warfare cards played here, and the appearance of a number of real-world political panderers will turn all but the strongest stomachs. The book's conclusion would seem predictable, given what occurs before, but it isn't. Patterson and de Jonge masterfully lead the reader down an entertaining but well-worn path that abruptly drops off into an abyss, a conclusion (actually a few of them) that will leave you stunned. I re-read the last 40 or so pages a couple of times to be sure that I wasn't having a late-night, sleep-deprived hallucination. I wasn't.
Is BEACH ROAD a literary masterpiece? No. It is, however, a heck of a story that is well-told, and the erotic vignettes --- short and few, but sweet --- are near perfect. Patterson and de Jonge have a winner here.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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