Hide & Seek - Hardcover

Patterson, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316693863 ISBN 13: 9780316693868

Publisher: Little Brown & Co, 1996

Synopsis

Maggie Bradford, a successful singer/songwriter and loving mother, is accused of murdering her first husband, an abusive stalker, and her second husband, an irresistible monster, and struggles to escape a nightmarish legacy of terror and violence. 200,000 first printing. $200,000 ad/promo.

About this title

About the Author:

James Patterson combines his position as one of the fastest-rising stars of modern thriller writing with a career as the chairman of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York. He first reached the top of bestseller lists around the world with Along Came a Spider, which introduced his popular detective hero Alex Cross, who also appears in Kiss the Girls, Jack and Jill, Cat and Mouse and his most recent novel, Pop Goes the Weasel.

From Publishers Weekly:

If Thomas Harris's psycho-thrillers are the creme de la creme of the genre, then Patterson's (Kiss the Girls; Along Came a Spider) are the skimmed milk?fluid, but low in substance. In his new novel, the author again lays down a narrative line so gripping?an effect achieved partly through a plethora of one-sentence paragraphs, a la Sidney Sheldon?that the reader may not notice, or care, that characterization and originality have fallen by the wayside. Patterson tells his story through two points of view: there's the the first-person voice of Maggie Bradford, who kills her abusive husband in the novel's flashback prologue and has now become a world-famous singer-songwriter ("I love your music, Maggie," Barbra Streisand tells her); and there's a third-person narration that is often filtered through the eyes of Will Shepherd, the celebrated soccer star who romances Maggie after her interim lover, an older tycoon, dies of a heart attack. The devastatingly handsome Will likes to hurt women ("there was a distinctly good part in him, but also a bad part"), however, and sometimes even to kill them. Will seems to want Maggie to save him from himself. Using his beauty and charm on her and her children, he wins her hand in marriage. That union sets up a major-league deja vu, two murder trials that aren't quite riveting and a final Big Twist that will only surprise those fresh to the thriller genre. Still, Will's descent into cartoonishness, and various loose threads, will probably not bother readers swept along by this lightweight pop fiction.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Little Brown & Co
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0316693863
• ISBN 13: 9780316693868
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 302