James Patterson is one of the greatest storytellers of this era who has created characters that people can't get enough of, from Alex Cross to the Women's Murder Club and Maximum Ride, as well as his captivating true stories of the Kennedys, John Lennon, and Tiger Woods. Patterson is also known for collaborations with leading people such as former President Bill Clinton and singer Dolly Parton.
Mike Lupica, A sportswriter by day who has a Sunday column in the New York Daily News who has been inducted into the National Sports Media Hall of Fame and the author of seventeen New York Times bestsellers, collaborated with Patterson on the Jane Smith series. In this review, we will look at the two installments of this thrilling series, 12 Months to Live and Hard to Kill.
12 Months to Live: Jane Smith has a year to live, unless they kill her first
By James Patterson & Mike Lupica
Little, Brown and Company; 400 pages; hardcover $30.00; paperback, $19.99
Jane Smith is a tough-as-nails attorney whose career has seen taken her from being an NYPD beat cop to a private investigator before her time in the courtroom.
Smith is knee-deep into the trial of the century. She has also fallen in love with a wonderful guy, and an equally wonderful dog, mutt. And, to top it all off, Smith has received a terminal diagnosis giving her twelve months. That is, unless she isn't murdered by a relentless killer before then.
In this gripping novel that has a cinematic style that brings you right into the action immediately, Smith is mounting a defense for her charmless client, Rob Jacobson, who might have committed several murders.
The victims were the Gates family - father, mother, and teenage daughter. All were shot in the head, sometime in the middle of the night. The state says that whoever did it used a suppressor.
Rob Jacobson is the heir to a legendary publishing house who also owned the biggest real estate company in the Hamptons, and he is facing a life sentence. He has been used to a life of people telling him what he wants to hear, so this is certainly a departure from that.
Patterson and Lupica write in this excerpt: "We are in one of the attorney rooms down the hall from the courtroom. My client and me. Long window at the other end of the room where the guard can keep an eye on us. Not for my safety, I tell myself. Rob Jacobson's. Maybe the guard can tell from my body language that I occasionally feel the urge to strangle him.
He's wearing his orange jumpsuit. I'm in the same dark-gray skirt and jacket I'll be wearing tomorrow. What I think of as my sincerity suit.
'Important to you,' I say, 'not to me. I need twelve people to believe you. And I'm not one of the twelve.'
'You have to know that I'm not capable of doing something like this.'
'Sure. Let's go with that.'
'You sound sarcastic,' he says.
'No. I am sarcastic.'
This is our last pretrial meeting, one he's asked for and that is a complete waste of time. Mine, not his. He looks for any excuse to get out of his cell at the Riverhead Correctional Facility for even an hour and has insisted on going over once more what he calls 'our game plan.'
Our - I run into a lot of that.
I've tried to explain to him that any lawyer who allows his or her client to run the show ought to save everybody a lot of time and effort - and a boatload of the state's money - and drive the client straight to Attica or Green Haven Correctional.
But Rob Jacobson never listens. Lifelong affliction, as far as I can tell.
'Rob, you don't just want me to believe you. You want me to like you.'
'Is there something so wrong with that?' he asks.
'This is a murder trial,' I tell him. 'Not a dating app.'
Looks-wise he reminds me of George Clooney. But all good-looking guys with salt-and-pepper remind me of George. If I had met him several years ago and could have gotten him to stay still long enough, I might have married him.
But only if I had been between marriages at the time.
'Stop me if you've heard me say this before, but I was set up.'
I sigh. It's louder than I intended. 'Okay. Stop.'
'I was,' he says. 'Set up. Nothing else makes sense.'
'Now, you stop me if you've heard this one from me before. Set up by whom? And with your DNA and fingerprints sprinkled around that house like pixie dust?'
'That's for you to find out,' he says. 'One of the reasons I hired you is because I was told you're as good a detective as you are a lawyer. You and your guy.'
Jimmy Cunniff. Ex-NYPD, the way I'm ex-NYPD, even if I only lasted a grand total of eight months as a street cop, before lasting barely longer than that as a licensed private investigator. It was why I'd served as my own investigator for the first few years after I'd gotten my law degree. Then I'd hired Jimmy, and finally started delegating, almost as a last resort.
'Not to put too fine a point on things,' I say to him, 'we're not just good. We happen to be the best. Which is why you hired both of us.'
'And why I'm counting on you to find the real killers eventually. So people will know I'm innocent.'
I lean forward and smile at him.
'Rob? Do me a favor and never talk about the real killers ever again.'"
Hard To Kill: A Jane Smith Thriller
By James Patterson & Mike Lupica
Little, Brown and Company; hardcover, 384 pages; $30.00
In this latest installment, we meet Smith again as she is tasked with mounting an impossible criminal defense.
Smith's client, Rob Jacobson, is unlucky, to say the least. As soon as Johnson is accused of killing a family of three in the Hamptons, he is connected to another family gunned down in another part of Long Island. That also is a triple homicide.
Patterson and Lupica write in this excerpt: "Jimmy Cunniff calls to tell me to get dressed, we're taking a ride.
'Am I allowed to ask where we're going?'
'To check in on an old friend.'
'Am I allowed to ask which one?'
He tells me. And I tell him I'll be ready when he gets to my house.
Now we're standing at the top of steps leading up and into a courthouse, a new one for us, the Nassau County Courthouse in Mineola.
Rob Jacobson, my former client, one I recently got acquitted of a triple homicide in Suffolk County, is about to turn himself in one county over. On another triple homicide. Like Jimmy always says: You can't make this shit up.
'Apparently, he's gonna tour,' Jimmy says. 'Like the Ice Capades. 'Ice Capades ended years ago.'
'I was making a larger point,' he says. 'You often are.'
Jimmy is an investigator, wing man, best friend, former hot-ticket NYPD detective. His divorce from the cops wasn't pretty. But then neither were my divorces from husbands one and two.
'Here he comes,' I say.
'It's a perp walk,' Jimmy says. 'Not a red carpet.'
With plenty of time to spare, it got out, the way everything gets out in the modern world, that Jacobson and his new lawyer, Howie 'the Horse' Friedlander, were going to do it this way, here at the courthouse. Jacobson's renting a house not far from mine in Amagansett, between East Hampton and Montauk. Having him led out of a residence in handcuffs was not the optic Howie or Rob wanted, as if any good optics could come from a moment like this."
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