For the most part I really liked Jack Morgan, the protagonist of James Patterson’s new series, but I had trouble sustaining my belief that such a stand-up guy would struggle with wondering whether he did the right thing for so long. As a Marine, I think he would have believed in the decision handed down by his commanding officers. As a good friend of Rick Del Rio, who was there in Afghanistan with Jack, I think he would have believed his friend’s story as well. That subplot almost seemed like an annoyance, especially when it intersected the subplot with Jack’s twin brother, Tom.
There was just too much going on in Private. It felt like 10 novels crammed into one. Many of Patterson’s fans like the cursory view he takes of his plot and characters, the hurry up and keep the balls in the air approach, but the caseload shifts as well as roving points of view from other characters became problematic for an easy read.
I wanted to know more about Jack’s relationship with his father, and how his father had managed to put together a private eye company like Private. (Though I have to give props to the idea of the agency name. All these years of private eye novels, and no one had thought of simply using the name Private Investigations for a detective agency.) I also want to know more about how Jack was trained to be a private eye after his military career ended. Maybe that information will come in later installments in the series, though.
The second tier characters were great. Jack Morgan has an impressive array of detectives and specialists backing his play. Sci (the techno-geek responsible for all the gadgetry and encryption breaking during the course of the novel) is fun and reminds me a lot of Abby Sciuto from NCIS. The online romance part was a turn-off, though.
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