James Patterson’s The 5th Horseman
If I have four or five hours to spare and the latest James Patterson book available, I’ll usually avail myself of the opportunity to lie down and plough through the volume in a sitting or two, although I know some people don’t read quite as fast. With these books, I feel a need to reach the conclusion, to find out the proverbial whodunnit!
I know some literary purists deride James Patterson’s work for its quality and the fact that, along with the occasional co author, he has turned into something of a book factory, but I have to admit he’s good at what he does – as one critic remarks, almost sticking our finger in a lightsocket.
I do have to say that I prefer James Patterson’s earlier books to those he relentlessly releases these days, and I’m not quite as keen on the Women’s Murder Club as I am on the Alex Cross novels, but this series does nonetheless have a piquancy and intrigue of its own, and the Women’s Murder Club novels are still undeniably page turners.
The 5th Horseman weaves together threads from two different plots which borrow from a number of thriller subgenres, with medical murder mystery playing out against courtroom drama with a nasty pair of serial killers thrown into the mix for good measure. The novel is punchy and fast-paced, and written in Patterson’s usual style, what I have come to regard as cinematic prose, a style which is crisp, clean and efficient, and however stripped of embellishments it may be, however abrupt (most chapters are only a page and half) it certainly does its job of propelling the reader through the story and projecting a mind movie of the events within the book into the reader’s mind. It may not be Dickens, but in my view writing that’s exciting enough to tempt a person to read rather than simply watching a movie, however movie-like the prose is, is a worthwhile thing 
You might also be interested in these other James Patterson Bestsellers and audio books: