Black Friday

I decided to finally do it, reading a book by a super-famous author. James Patterson’s Black Friday (original title Black Market) is a thriller of financial and physical chaos. It’s also a book that’s (as far as I can tell) genuinely his and not simply a “James Patterson’s” book with his name on it.

The chapters tend to be very short, in a style I already knew about from secondhand talk of his writing. I generally don’t mind short chapters, and he was not the first author to use them, but somehow they didn’t fit here. I think it’s a combination of them and a ton of shifting viewpoint characters that make the whole thing just look disjointed and sloppy.

And then there’s the tone, which is this constant plodding of Deep, Dark Seriousness. The jarring differences between that and the inaccuracies, particularly surrounding firearms, is astounding. This isn’t (just) having guns work on action movie logic or making mistakes like calling an SKS “automatic” and not knowing which airborne division has an eagle as its symbol. It isn’t even having a character use an American-180 for no discernable reason except the “it’s an exotic gun I’ve heard of” factor.

This is references to “machine gun pistols” (Exact words). This is talking about how submachine guns weren’t used in city fighting due to their high rate of fire (er…), and a gun that combines ridiculously effective silencing (even by cheap thriller/action movie standards) with implied heat seeking bullets. Said gun is only used in a single scene. It’s bad, even by the standards of someone who’s read a lot of cheap thrillers.

The plot feels like an absurdist jumble of cheap thriller cliches. There’s a super-conspiracy, lots of cutaways, and everything from international terrorists to crazy veterans. But with the tone and janky pacing getting in the way, it’s not the kind of book where you can enjoy the excess. There are a lot better books, even mainstream thrillers, out there.