Authors: James Patterson, Howard Roughan
ISBN-13: 9780316091435, ISBN-10: 031609143X
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
Date Published: September 2010
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Not making any bones about his bid for success, James Patterson once declared he wanted to be known as the king of the page-turners. While that may seem like a pretty grand ambition, Patterson is as worthy of that title as any author working today.
The good
New York's Lombardo's Steak House is famous for three reasonsthe menu, the clientele, and now, the gruesome murder of an infamous mob lawyer. Effortlessly, the assassin slips through the police's fingers, and his absence sparks a blaze of accusations about who ordered the hit.
The bad
Seated at a nearby table, reporter Nick Daniels is conducting a once-in-a-lifetime interview with a legendary baseball bad-boy. In the chaos, he accidentally captures a key piece of evidence that lands him in the middle of an all-out war between Italian and Russian mafia forces. NYPD captains, district attorneys, mayoral candidates, media kingpins, and one shockingly beautiful magazine editor are all pushing their own agendason both sides of the law.
And the dead
Back offor dieis the clear message Nick receives as he investigates for a story of his own.Heedless, and perhaps in love with his beautiful editor, Nick endures humiliation, threats, violence, and worse in a thriller that overturns every expectation and finishes with the kind of flourish only James Patterson knows.
"Patterson's novels are sleek entertainment machines, the Porsches of commercial fiction, expertly engineered and lightning fast."