Private Berlin

January 7, 2013
The brave efforts of the heroes alternate with the sadistic musings of the bad guy in Patterson's formulaic fifth thriller centered on the global investigations firm known as Private (after 2012's Private London), this one written with Sullivan (Rogue). Private operative Chris Schneider comes to Berlin on personal leave to confront a demon from his past, only to become its latest victim. When Schneider fails to show up for work and no one can reach him, his ex-fiancée, Mattie Engel, who's still a Private colleague, agrees that his tracking device should be activated. This leads to a grisly discovery in an abandoned slaughterhouse in a wooded area outside Berlin. The mask-wearing psycho behind Schneider's death, who calls himself the Invisible Man and revels in the pain others, shares a familiar origin story in which a warped relationship with his mother is the cause of his savagery. Readers should be prepared for some things that don't make a lot of sense (e.g., at one point Engel admires a colleague for connecting a suspect with another person who has the suspect's first name as his middle name and his middle name as his first) and the usual stock characters.

April 1, 2013
Another industrial thriller from the Patterson (Private Games, 2012, etc.) factory. The Wall has fallen, and in Berlin, a security firm named Private flourishes. Among its many other activities, Private is recently back from the London Olympics--the subject of Patterson et al.'s Private Games--only to find that things are emphatically not cool in the Heimat. When top agent and earner Chris Schneider goes missing, everyone fears the worst. Rightly, too, for the worst comes to pass in gruesome ways that are best described by a first-person narrator, who interrupts the omniscient third-person narrator at the most inconvenient of moments. There's a gimmick to that, showy enough to let us know that the bad guy is most definitely a very bad guy, implicated and in league with all sorts of lesser villains in a Blofeld-ian sort of way. (Sneers he of a new toy of torture, "I click on the starter. There's a snapping noise and then a thin, intense flame bursts from a tube. 'Twenty-four hundred degrees, ' I say, enjoying the terror flaring in Mattie's face.") Said Mattie is the heroine of the piece, a tough cookie with a talent for mayhem and a sharp, analytical mind, like Private's other operatives, whether good or evil. In the end, we get a revisitation of the Cold War, complete with Stasi files and the requisite intrigues; it's nothing fans of the Bond and Ludlum franchises haven't seen before, and though it's second-tier, it's competent enough. Call it cut-rate Bourne, then, with enough action to keep the story moving and enough verisimilitude to belay having to suspend disbelief too often.

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