In 2nd Chance, a young girl is shot down on the steps of a San Francisco church, and Detective Lindsay Boxer decides that the time is right to reconvene the Women's Murder Club, the loosely-knit group that cracked a baffling mystery in James Patterson's earlier 1st to Die. Collaborating with assistant DA Jill Bernhardt, reporter Cindy Thomas and coroner Claire Washburn, Boxer is soon on the trail of a canny murderer who has the knack of making his trackers into his quarry. Boxer and the Women's Murder Club begin to believe that the killer might have been on the force, but his ultimate aims are unguessable--and the revelations in store shock them all.

Patterson is the maestro behind such winners as Cat and Mouse and Roses are Red, but his Alex Cross books are familiar territory for readers. His new team, however, are individually characterised with great skill, and though the short time we spend with each of them forces concision on the author--and his mysterious co-writer Andrew Gross's--part, the customary skills are all brought into play in this diverting mystery. It's always a gamble for an author who has established a highly successful series with one much-loved protagonist to inaugurate a new one with fresh characters but The Women's Murder Club has all kinds of possibilities and chances are will prove a formidable force. --Barry Forshaw

2008-10-06 Second in series

This review is of the Audiobook version in the Women's Murder Club Box Set (3 books)

This is the second story in the series and follows on a couple of months after the shocking conclusion to the previous book. In this story Lindsay Boxer, newly promoted to Lieutenant, finds herself investigating some race hate crimes. She discovers fairly quickly that the crimes are being committed by a person who is part of a specific white group with an identifying tattoo - but it proves very difficult to pin down exactly who he is. When he starts toying with Lindsay and the police department, including killing someone close to her as well as attacking her friends, the stakes are even higher.

There are some additional side-plots in this story, including the return of Lindsay's father into her life, some significant events in Jill Bernhardt's life and a romance for Cindy Thomas. As in the previous book, the Women's Murder Club seems a rather unnecessary plot device where Lindsay talks over the case with her friends.

The writing style in this book felt at times rather clunky. I lost count of the time James Patterson used phrases like "My heart was exploding in my chest" or some other overblown description for Lindsay's excitement or fear. Although the action kept going I found some of the events a little difficult to swallow and I wasn't as gripped by this story as I had been by the previous one in the series.

The reader of this book had a less enjoyable voice than the reader of the previous one with a rather harsh delivery at times. Chapters where the narrator is the murderer were read by a male reader and unfortunately the volume on these chapters was notably quieter so that the volume had to be increased to hear him properly, then reduced again for the female narrator.