3rd Degree

I picked up 3rd Degree because I had read 1st to Die a long time ago and remembered one thing about it clearly: four women with four different jobs, comparing cases over drinks. What I had forgotten was how quickly Patterson works. This third book opens on a Sunday jog and is over in roughly a week, and by the end one of the four is dead, a vice president has been shot, and a plane on the tarmac does not leave the gate. It is a rare book where the line on the cover is also the plot, because the cover warns you that one of Patterson's best-loved heroines is about to die, and then the book spends three hundred pages making you care which one.

Little, Brown and Company published it on March 1, 2004. The US first edition hardcover runs 341 pages and carries the ISBN 9780316603577. It is the third Women's Murder Club novel, after 1st to Die in 2001 and 2nd Chance in 2003, and 4th of July followed later the same year. The book went to number one on the New York Times hardcover fiction list on March 21, 2004, and Publishers Weekly reported that it landed in the top slot with more than a million copies in print. The title page credits James Patterson with Andrew Gross, who had worked with him on 2nd Chance and would go on to write several more books in the series. Patterson's name alone goes on the cover and into most catalogues, which is how this site lists it too.

Sunday morning on Alhambra Street

The first chapter is two pages of setup and then a bomb. Lindsay Boxer, a San Francisco homicide lieutenant, is out for her Sunday run with her border collie, Martha, and her friend Jill Bernhardt, an assistant district attorney whose labrador needs the same walk. The Marina district, with its restored town houses, gulls and sea air, gets a paragraph of loving attention before the middle of the sentence goes wrong. A three-story house with a terra-cotta roof explodes while Lindsay is looking at it. She ties Martha to a lamppost, calls 911, and runs inside.

What she finds is the book's argument in miniature. Two bodies on the second floor, clothes still burning. A third adult in a back room. And in a child's bedroom, under a collapsed bed, a boy of about ten, alive. Lindsay carries him out and gets her own eyebrows singed for it. Then she sees a red school knapsack sitting on the sidewalk, and the mood changes, because a knapsack in the middle of a blast is not a thing that just happened to be there.

The house belongs to Mort Lightower, an Internet millionaire. A note at the scene is signed August Spies. The infant who lived in the house cannot be found. The Bomb Squad later tells Lindsay the device was C-4, detonated electronically, "maybe by phone." The red knapsack is a second charge that had not gone off, which is why she starts shouting for everyone to get back before anyone understands why.

How the club works

The Women's Murder Club is four women, and the novel is at its best when it shows how they divide the work. Lindsay has the badge and the body count. Claire Washburn is the medical examiner, who can look at a corpse and tell the club what killed it and how fast. Jill is the prosecutor, who knows which cases the district attorney's office has already run. Cindy Thomas is a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, which in this book means she has a newsroom database, a source network, and a way to get a story in print before anyone else has a statement.

They meet at Susie's, a bar where they have a corner booth, and they do most of their real thinking there over tea and margaritas. The structure repeats through the series and it works because the four skills are genuinely different. When the second victim, businessman George Bengosian, turns up dead of ricin, Claire is the one who can explain what ricin does and how a person might get hold of it. When the Chronicle archive turns up an article about a 1970 prosecution, Cindy is the one who finds it. When the case turns federal, the club's most useful asset is the man who walks into their orbit, Joe Molinari, deputy director of the Office of Homeland Security, sent from Washington because the bombings are pointed at the G-8 summit on the city's calendar.

The point of view moves around as well. Most of the book is in Lindsay's first person, and Publishers Weekly's notice says she narrates most of the action, but the novel also slips into third person for Claire, for Cindy, and, more interestingly, for the bombers. You get to watch Charles Danko calculate the angle of a fountain plume before he leaves a briefcase under a piano.

The three-day clock

The structure that makes 3rd Degree readable in a single sitting is the countdown. The August Spies promise that someone will die every three days, and they are good at their arithmetic. A caller phones the Chronicle and says the city has three more days, and that what has happened so far was only practice. The second killing is ricin. Then the Rincon Center, a glass atrium where people eat lunch under a fountain, goes up at noon on a cell phone trigger, and sixteen people die there. The briefcase left under the piano has a strap monogrammed A.S., which is the bombers taunting the club in the middle of a massacre.

The most effective stretch in that section is the schoolchildren. At 8:42 on a morning the city is braced for a chemical attack, kids at a Redwood City elementary school collapse after drinking from a fountain, and the whole command center assumes ricin. Claire, talking to a toxicologist while a helicopter hovers overhead, talks the room out of it: the incubation period is wrong, the lungs are clear, and the blood work turns up staphylococcal enterotoxin B. It is a page of procedure doing the work of a page of suspense, and it is also the clearest statement of what the medical examiner is for in this series.

Then the terror stops being about the city. Cindy's anonymous correspondent starts writing to her, and the messages get stranger and more personal, until one explains that Jill Bernhardt had nothing to do with the G-8, that this one was not like the others, that this one was personal.

Jill's bruises and Jill's empty chair

Jill is the book's real subject, and the book is not shy about it. On the opening jog, before the explosion, Lindsay notices dark bruises on Jill's shoulder, small and shaped like finger marks. Jill says she mashed herself getting out of the shower and jokes about it. The reader knows immediately what that means. So does Lindsay, and she says nothing, which is the correct instinct and also the start of everything that goes wrong.

Steve is Jill's husband's name, and he is a bully with a career and a way of making a lawyer feel small. He lives in Chicago and rides in on weekends. The abuse is handled as a slow reveal, because Jill keeps defending it and keeps handing the club a version of it that sounds survivable. The women press her. Lindsay confronts Steve about it, and it does not go the way she wants. In the end Jill does throw him out. It does not save her.

The reason it turns is the case. Jill has been a deputy district attorney for eight years, and the club pulls her entire case file, all of it, out of the law morgue and reads it. Jill is then found dead, and the cause of death is ricin, and the front page asks whether the water supply is safe. She is buried in Highland Park, Texas, in a Jewish temple with a woman rabbi, and Claire plays the cello. Afterward the three of them go back to Susie's, take the corner booth, and there is an empty chair at the table for the rest of the book.

The Berkeley cell and the professor from Portland

The investigation is what turns the book from a thriller into a detective story with a spine. Cindy searches the Chronicle archive for Jill's father, Robert Meyer, a prosecutor who had worked in San Francisco before moving back to Texas, and the search opens onto a case the club did not know about. The history is invented and dressed up as the record, which is the trick Patterson plays well. On the night of December 6, 1969, federal agents raided a Black National Army hideout on Hope Street in Berkeley. Five people were shot dead in the house, among them a leader named Fred Whitehouse, two women, and a white Berkeley student named William "Billy" Danko. The case went to the rising prosecutor in the district attorney's office, which was Robert Meyer, Jill's father. The jury found no evidence of police misconduct. A 1971 Chronicle Sunday magazine piece, in the book's own fiction, titled What Really Happened to the Hope Street Five, argued the opposite, that the crime scene had been fabricated and the victims were asleep in their beds. And Billy Danko's code name inside the movement was August Spies.

That is the lock and the key. Lightower was Danko's college roommate. Bengosian was the confidential informant who tipped the FBI off to the house. Frank Seymour, who led the raid, ends up dead in the Rincon Center blast. And Charles Danko, Billy's younger brother, is the man running the campaign, living under the name Jeffrey Stanzer and teaching at Reed College in Portland. The professor in Berkeley who assembled the cell and pushed Danko into it is Roger Lemouz.

Lemouz is the book's most interesting villain and also its weakest piece of writing. He lectures Lindsay about the Haymarket martyrs of 1886, and the lecture is wrong in ways that are easy to check. August Spies spoke at the rally on May 4, 1886, and he was one of the four men executed on November 11, 1887. Not all eight defendants were hanged, and the standard accounts make clear that the man who spoke at Haymarket Square was very much there. A thriller that leans on an inflated lecture rather than a footnote is asking for more charity than it has earned.

The palace, the canister, and the last soldier

The climax happens at a G-8 reception in the Rodin Gallery at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, hosted by Vice President Eldridge Neal. Lindsay works out that Charles Danko is in the room, in a tuxedo, carrying his weapon in a briefcase, and gets to him. The weapon is a plastic canister with a pharmaceutical label and a prescription for an asthma inhaler called Proventil. It is ricin, and the bomb squad tells Lindsay afterward that it was enough to kill hundreds of people in a crowded museum.

The takedown is fast and ugly and involves Lindsay putting her hands on a canister full of poison. She gets Danko. He gets a faceful of his own ricin and dies of it. Then Annette Breiling, a red-haired teenager who had been in Lemouz's office and who turns out to be his former student, shoots the vice president in the courtyard as he is being moved out of the hall. Neal survives. Break the other two and Lemouz is arrested at his house in Kensington at four in the morning, in a robe, with his wife and two children in the next room. He kisses them, takes his son's handgun, and shoots himself in the bedroom.

The president telephones Lindsay from Washington to call her a hero. She tells Molinari, already on his way back east, that she cannot think about him yet, because the last time Jill called and said she was not okay, Lindsay was in Portland with him. When he is about to board a government jet, Lindsay calls the airport and asks them to hold the plane. She tells him she has a dog and her friends and a job and no life, and then she says the thing the whole book has been dodging.

What works and what does not

What works

The engine is the three-day clock. Every incident is both a crime scene and a countdown, which gives the procedural something a lot of crime novels this length lack, a reason to keep turning pages that has nothing to do with who the murderer is. The chapter breaks are extreme. Pages run so short that a scene can start and end before you have settled into it, which is why 3rd Degree is the kind of book that gets read in an afternoon.

Using the Women's Murder Club as a working method rather than a mood is the other thing that works. When the club requisitions eight years of Jill's case files and sits on the floor of the newspaper morgue reading old issues by flashlight, the series' premise becomes a way to investigate instead of a gimmick.

And Patterson with Gross knows how to put history under a thriller. The Hope Street raid, the code name, the confidential informant who betrayed his own friends: that material is specific enough to feel researched, and it gives the last third of the book a weight the opening does not have.

What does not work

The violence against women is the problem, and it is worth being plain about it. Jill's abuse is set up as a hook, her murder is the book's turn, and the prose around both treats a battered wife as a shock device rather than as a person with a life that was already complicated. The bruises on her shoulder are described the way a paperback describes them, as a hook to carry you toward the reveal, and there is not much room left over for the question of what a career prosecutor with a broken marriage and a lost baby does with the rest of her life. Publishers Weekly noted that Patterson does something unusual in this book, he kills off one of the leading characters, and readers who have spent the last few years thinking about how crime fiction handles violence against women will read that choice differently.

The politics are handled at arm's length. The bombers have a real grievance, about oil and the Third World and the rich, and the novel lets them say it at length and then lets the club decline to engage with it. You can be sure that the moment the moral argument would get interesting, the book puts a bomb in a lobby instead.

The romance runs through the middle of the story while Jill's marriage is falling apart, and it runs far too easily. The book would have been better with less of it.

Who it is for

This is a book for people who read crime fiction for the pleasure of a machine that works. If you like a countdown, a cold case dug out of microfilm, and a chapter that always ends on a hinge, it will not let you go.

It is not a book for readers who want the violence examined rather than delivered, or who want the political grievance on the table. It is also not the place to start the series. Read 1st to Die first, because the club's dynamic only means something once you have seen it work.

I finished it in a day and a half and then went back to reread Jill's chapters, which is the strange effect the book leaves behind. Its best idea is that a case can also be a grief. Its worst is that it treats that grief as a plot device on the way to a second act.