A thriller with 121 chapters

Last night I read Mary, Mary by James Patterson. "Hollywood has a new psycho and FBI agent Alex Cross is on the case."

According to his publishers, Mr Patterson is "one of the world's favourite storytellers with more than one hundred million books in print in forty languages, making him one of the top-selling writers of all time."



The distinguishing feature of Mary, Mary is that scattered through its 121 chapters are letters written by a homicidal maniac to the people the killer has just murdered. If my notes are correct, there are seven of these letters. There is also a clever twist at the end of the story. I quite liked the hero, Alex Cross, but not as much as Lee Child's Jack Reacher. Also there's a cringe-making Gaelen Foley-style sex scene in Chapter Eight.

So I'll have to be desperate for something to read before opening another Patterson thriller. Clearly I'm not among his target audience who, I suppose, are itinerant businessmen.

A Book for all Reasons

Yesterday I borrowed a photo of Georgette Heyer from a delightful website called A Book for all Reasons owned by Ann and Michael Sims who tell visitors they "have been buying and selling books by mail order for over 20 years. We have had a site on Internet since 1996. We are based in Lowestoft, the most easterly town in England, on the coast of Suffolk. Our household comprises the two of us and a dog, a German Shepherd called 'Tess'.
Until 1998 we also ran our three storey eight bedroomed house as a small private hotel, concentrating on bookselling in the winter. After nearly twenty years of that we decided that we wanted a home of our own again and converted most of the bedrooms to book-rooms."

Their website is a "must" for all fans of Jeffery Farnol, Georgette Heyer, J. B. Priestley, Nevil Shute, Howard Spring, Dennis Wheatley, P. G. Wodehouse and Dornford Yates.

After writing those two paragraphs, suddenly I had a feeling I'd blogged about Michael and Ann Sims before. So I put their names in the search slot at the top of this blog and up came a link to my third blog on 15 May 2005. Then I clicked Edit/Find and typed in Sims and an instant later there was the earlier reference.