Title: Confessions of a Murder Suspect
Author: James Patterson and Maxine Paetro
Publisher: Little Brown
Rating: WARTY! with the stomch-churning bouquet of rotten eggs.
This is the first Maxine Paetro novel I've ever read and as long as we're all about confessions, I have to confess I started out not liking it and continued that way until I hated it. It's a bizarre story about abusive parents who might well have earned what they got! I have read James Patterson before. I read one or two of his Alex Cross books, but I was not impressed enough to start reading anything else of his, and especially not after finishing this one.
I know the cover is largely outside of the author's hands, but you'd think someone of Patterson's stature would have at least some say in it, which begs the question in my mind as to why his name is in something like a 36 point typeface, but Paetro's is about half that size. Does this mean she contributed 50% less than he did, or that she's merely a lesser known woman and therefore, even though she wrote 50% of the novel, doesn't merit equal billing? I don't know. But I'm giving them equal billing and referring to them jointly as Jamax (because Maxames doesn't sound as good, and Paeterson isn't pithy enough!).
The story's told in the first person (the supposed suspect) which I tend not to like as a rule, and the tone of it just irked me for some reason. I think part of that was that these are snotty little rich kids, but that wasn't the all of it. Another big contributing factor is that the narration employs the 'dear reader' and 'friend' motifs which is frankly pathetic unless you want people to laugh at it. The name of the family featured in this novel is 'Angel' but this isn't a paranormal novel, it's just your common-or-garden murder mystery, wiht no murder and no mystery, it turns out!
Malcolm and Maud Angel are murdered, apparently strangled or poisoned in their bed, in their twenty million dollar apartment in the Dakota building in New York City - the same one outside of which John Lennon was murdered. There's no immediate sign of a break in, or of violence other than the murders. Nothing has been stolen and no-one heard anything. The female protagonist is Tandy (yeah, like the old Radio Shack brand), who is their daughter. She has several siblings (Harry, her fraternal twin, Hugo, her younger brother, and Matthew her older brother), all but one of whom were home asleep. There's also her mother's personal assistant (Samantha) who is a resident. Tandy is short for Tandoori (I'm not making this up - Jamax is!), named after what Patterson and/or Paetro claim is West Indian cooking, but in this they're clearly clueless! The tandoor oven is from Asia, not the West Indies! They need a better researcher and they need to wise up about Asian culture so they catch serious mistakes like this one.
The absent sibling, a football (not soccer) star (Matthew) soon arrives, as does their Uncle Peter with the family lawyer, Phillipe Montaigne, who I immediately suspect! (Just kidding!) The lawyer quickly dismisses the obnoxious cops, Hayes, and Sgt. Caputo who (and I don't think it's going too far to describe it thus) abused the kids, threatening to bust into their apartment if they didn't open the door. This is NYC after all.
So if twins are born from separate eggs, and are both female, are they still fraternal twins? Just how immensely deep in our psyche does genderism run?
It's Tandy who lets them in to prevent them breaking down the door. Apparently they were alerted to the crime with a 911 call, but they had no other indication whatsoever that any crime was going on. Tandy told them no one from the apartment made that call. She lied. Hugo made it, we discover much later. The police threatened violence against children. This is NYC after all. Now that the family is assembled, red herrings are being tossed out ad libitum, so we're immediately supposed to suspect both Tandy (who has exhibited violence in the past) and Matty (Matthew, who is built like a brick period) as well as Harry who is a tormented artist, and Hugo who is just plain psychotic. The family gets into a fight about who amongst them had a motive! Yes, this is a seriously dysfunctional family, who are showing no signs of their loss, we get it. Finally, they all go to bed, whereupon Hugo takes a baseball bat and starts smashing up his wooden four-poster bed (I told you!). Tandy has to go comfort him.
For no reason other than this is a YA novel, Tandy also decides that she has to solve this crime! I don't know who wrote the book blurb (it comes from the publisher evidently), but it's really misleading. It states, "Tandy knows just three things: 1) She was one of the last people to see her parents alive. 2) The suspect list only includes Tandy and her three siblings. 3) She can't trust anyone—maybe not even herself." Item one is technically true, but rather melodramatic. Samantha was the person last to see them alive other than the murderer. Item 2 is a lie, since Samantha was also there that night and their brother was absent and has an alibi. As for item 3, unless Jamax is really edgy, the one telling the story isn't going to be the villain. It almost never is! Maybe I should maintain a running cliché count in this review?!
When Tandy finally gets to sleep she dreams, and her dreams are evidently all memories of real events. In this case it's where her father bribed the operator to let them take the three-year-old twins on the Cyclone at Coney Island, which Tandy loves, but over which Harry has massive blue fits, which is a state in New England, too. The kids were seated side-by-side with both parents seated not with them, but behind them. Why two three-year olds didn't literally fall out of the ride is a mystery, but not as big of a mystery as to how, when being carried pick-a-back by her father with her fingers twisted in his hair, she can also be simultaneously grabbing onto his shoulders! Perhaps Tandy has four arms? I mean, forewarned is four-armed, right? Anyway, the upshot of this event is that Harry is further abused by his parents: from that point onwards they treat him like a wimp adoptee rather than a dearly loved son and Tandy is so utterly clueless that she only just then realizes it. At this point I want to strangle Mal-colm and Maud-lin! They are the worst parents ever, as events will show.
Another person in this story who needs seriously abusing is the police sergeant who is abusing Tandy by calling her every name but her name, names like "Toots" and "Tinker Bell". But this is New York City after all, so I guess that's just fine. Not that I'm a big fan of Tandy. She is truly annoying with her "confessions" interleaved between chapters (so annoying in fact that I've quit reading them), which are not in any way confessions at all, and with her bringing up topics and then dismissing them with "but that's for another time". She truly is irksome, and sometimes I hope she did do it so she can get the death penalty and we can be done with her.
The police are coming to the apartment at all hours with no lawyer present, which means that even if one of the siblings did do it, this case is going to be thrown out of court. But this is New York City after all. Uncle Peter discovers that $1.7 million is missing from the pharmacy corporation's accounts (a corporation run by him and Malcolm), and coincidentally, an equal amount is found in a Channel Islands bank under Matthew's name! Matthew offers no explanation for this, and none is to be found in the entire novel.
Peter-head immediately calls Craputo about it and as good as states that he believes that Matthew perpetrated the murders. The average NFL salary is greater than $1.7 million! Matthew is a Heisman trophy winner who plays for the New York Giants. Mark Ingam was a recent Heisman winner and he started on a $7 million salary over four years! Where is Matthew's motive? Note that at no time in this entire investigation is suicide ever considered an option.
Tandy forgets to take her pills - her father insisted she and her siblings take a variety of ten pills every night pills which she could find nowhere identified. Tandy is now determined to find out what they are, and to stop taking them until she does find out. She talks Harry into doing the same. Yeah - way to drop off a daily regimen without knowign what it is and without even stepping it down. Tandy is an idiot, and she's supposed to be the smartest one in the family.
Craputo arrives early that morning. He accuses Tandy of poisoning her parents, and he arrests her for "obstructing governmental administration" along with the rest of her family. What? I'm sorry but while I am interested in finding out what's going on here, I'm also nauseated every other page by the bullshit writing. Jamax is making this story really hard to stay with. Right as of this moment I suspect Uncle Peter, the lawyer, and young Hugo, as well as a double suicide by the parents!
Tandy and all her family are arrested and carted off to jail, charged with obstruction. Their lawyer shows up the next morning and gets them out. The DA dropped the charges because it would be hard to make them stick, and he'd rather get one or more of them on a murder charge. The useless piece of trash lawyer who, if there's a conspiracy here, is no doubt in on it, offers her nothing when he should be filing a lawsuit against the NYPD for harassment. And the press are harassing them mercilessly, too. The fact that children are being subject to this and no one seems to care is what's criminal here and has taken this completely out of suspension of disbelief here. Oh, I'm in disbelief: that anyone could write so ham-fistedly. I guess that's what you get when you write a novel by committee!
So even though they're freed from holding, they do not all arrive home at the same time. While they're waiting for Samantha to get there, Harry calls Tandy's attention to a news item on TV where Matthew's girlfriend calmly announces that she's pregnant with Malcolm's (not Matthew's, but Malcolm's) baby! Tandy searches Samantha's room and finds a locket to Samantha from Maud, in which Maud gushes love. Samantha arrives at the apartment having showered and changed. Wait a minute - Samantha lives at the apartment! She has nowhere else. In fact, the first thing she announces is that she has found a place to live. So how did she shower and change without coming home to the apartment? Just another mystery in a long line of unsolved mysteries. So this novel is now a soap opera, and that soap is being voluminously shoved up your...well, you know where. I need to go get some anti-emetics.The soap continues to be mercilessly shoved where the sun doesn't even want to shine, as Matthew's girlfriend is found dead, and Matthew is arrested for it based on zero evidence. We hear no more about that for the entire rest of the novel!
After breaking into her neighbor's apartment based on nothing more than a wild hair up her busy-body ass, Tandy discovers that the neighbor has a video tape (DVDs and digital weren't invented when this antique was dredged up from the pond scum?), which shows exactly what happened. Maud decided to end her own life because she had pancreatic cancer and was about to be brought up on fraud charges, and her husnband committed suicide because he's a complete waste of skin. neither parent gave one nano-second's thought to theior children beign charged with murder, or not knowing what these pills were they ahd taken all their lvies, or not ahving a penny to their names. I'm truly sorry that their parents are dead - because they deserved far worse.
Tandy's brain-dead, idotic, jackass, clueless, moronic, dimwit conclusion for this complete abandonment by their abusive jerk-wad parents? Oh they must have loved each other at a Shakespearean level to have done this. Yeah, the lowlife criminal cowards abandoned their kids and left them to rot so they must be the world's greatest exponents of true love.
I'm sorry but this is hands-down the absolute worst crime novel I've ever been insulted with in my life. It's a shameful a waste of trees, which if they had to be cut down, would have been put to better use had they been rendered into toilet paper, because that's precisely what this novel is: a festering pile of excrement and nothing to wipe it up with.
