The Medical Examiner by James Patterson with Maxine Paetro
Synopsis: Two bodies arrived at the morgue. One was still breathing.
A woman checks into a hotel room and entertains a man who is not her husband. A shooter blows away the lover and wounds the millionaires, leaving her for dead. Is it the perfect case for the Women’s Murder Club – or just the most twisted?
Pages: 144 Pages
Writer: James Patterson
Recommendations:
Rating:
First thing is that this book is very short by design. It takes places with the characters of A Women’s Murder Club but does not have Lindsay in the book. In a way I suspect this is a way to repair the damage done in the relationship with Lindsay and Joe. They took them out of this story so they could go repair things and then come back stronger. If you have read my other reviews I was very critical of this direction for the characters and hope that this puts thing back on track. Though this book does not have Lindsay it does have other characters we know from the series. Much like a spin off tv series where the minor characters take the lead for the new series. That means you end up with a book that is 144 pages and does not have Lindsay at the center of the story. Both how short the book is and missing Lindsay from the story makes this book does make it hard to have a book with a lot of depth. The story follows a couple bodies that show up in the morgue but one of them is not dead. This creates the mystery of who shot the victim and how the living person ended up in the morgue. As mentioned the depth is lacking, actually so much so that this felt like a script to a 90’s video game. The ones where you would click on a person, they would give you dialog, you would click on a question and try to solve what you should do next. As the story unfolded that is what kept coming to my mind.
Overall, I think any story with these characters in them without Lindsay would feel like it lacked depth when she really is the star of the series. Then you factor in the size of the book and you really don’t have a lot of space to create depth. It really feels like they needed an excuse to reset the relationship with Lindsay and Joe and used this story to create that environment. I will be curious how the next story starts out and if magically Lindsay and Joe are back to being together again. If not, then I am not sure what this mini story was for.