Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsA rollercoaster ride -- but it's a predictable one
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 8, 2009
The Teacher, the latest serial killer to stalk the streets of New York, ostensibly wants to persuade us all to be less frivolous, ill-mannered and materialistic. But is that the REAL reason he is killing everyone from a sales clerk in a designer boutique to an Air France stewardess?
That's the question NYPD detective Michael Bennett has to decipher if he is to capture the apparently obsessive killer. But Bennett has his own problems: half of his ten motherless children are down with the flu and he's just talked a crazed man into surrendering his hostages, only to have a random shooter take the life of the surrendering criminal. He could do without the hassles of trying to track down the Teacher as he claims all kinds of upscale victims.
Patterson's book, needless to say, is far from flawless, but it comes as a welcome relief after the truly dreadful Cross Country. The only reason to pick it up is for a quick infusion of rollercoaster suspense -- but this book, unlike many of Patterson's earliest efforts and like too many of his more recent books, becomes so predictable that the reader ends up feeling as though he or she has been back on one of those rollercoasters that you first rode as a young child and that now, while still exciting, has lost much of its ability to terrify and enthrall.
Part of the problem is that, for a thriller, the book spends too much time on Bennett's cutesy kids and the problems he confronts raising them and too little on the process of figuring out who is doing this and why. Indeed, Bennett, on the evidence of this book, is a rather prosaic investigator at best and his actions in the final confrontation with the Teacher are a little improbable (as is the confrontation itself). Clues about the real identity of the well-clad foodie who is the Teacher are scattered throughout, and it's the portions of the book that give the reader a look inside his brain and actions that -- oddly -- emerge as the most powerful and suspenseful.
It's painfully obvious that Patterson's involvement in these books is to craft the outlines while his co-authors devote themselves to the writing. For the sake of his readers, I wish that now that he has made his tens of millions of dollars, he'd decide to turn out two books a year instead of five or so, and end up with meatier and more carefully-thought-out books instead. (There are all kinds of dangling threads in this one, including just who shoots the murderer Bennett has persuaded to surrender in the introductory chapter.) That compromise would give us better written and more thoughtful plots and stronger characters, like the Alex Cross of yore. But since that isn't likely to happen, I'd recommend getting this from the library, buying it in paperback, and saving it for when you need a book that doesn't require too many braincells, like a cross-country plane trip.
