Title: 2 Sisters Detective Agency
Author: James Patterson; Candice Fox
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Genre: Mystery/Thrillers
Format: Audiobook ARC
No. of Pages: 416
Date of Publication: October 5, 2021
My Rating: 3 Stars
From the world's #1 bestselling author comes a thrilling new standalone novel where a detective duo of sisters finds themselves in the crosshairs of a dangerous and lawless group.
Attorney Rhonda Bird returns home after a long estrangement when she learns her father has died. There she makes two important discoveries: her father stopped being an accountant and had opened up a private detective agency, and she has a teenage half sister named Baby. Baby brings in a client to the detective agency, a young man who claims he was abducted. During the course of the investigation, Rhonda and Baby become entangled in a dangerous case involving a group of overprivileged young adults who break laws for fun, their psychopath ringleader, and an ex-assassin victim who decides to hunt them down for revenge.
MY THOUGHTS:
She is 15 years old. She vapes. She has an attitude. And now she is the sole responsibility of her half sister. Rhonda Bird is an attorney that is none too pleased that she is now the legal guardian of her half-sister Baby. Rhonda was estranged from her father and she has just learned of his death, and that she has a sister. The first thing Rhonda wonders is why was her father raising Baby when he once abandoned her. That is just one of the reasons that Rhonda immediately resents Baby. Then the fact that Baby is rife with attitude.
Rhonda finds that she must push her feelings aside when someone shows up at their father's detective agency claiming that he was abducted. Yet he is free. What is his story? And what is the mystery involved in his story? Can Rhonda and Baby put their differences aside and work together long enough to get to the bottom of things?
Not only do Rhonda and Baby find themselves involved in this case, they soon find that it ties into a group of youths who commit violent crimes for no reasons other than that they can. The deeper Rhonda and Baby get into the case, the more disturbing they discover that things are. The danger is great and Rhonda and Baby learn that they must begin to trust one another in order to stay safe.
It has been awhile since I have read a James Patterson book that wasn't Alex Cross or The Women's Murder Club. This book, 2 Sisters Detective Agency, was a pretty good read. The level of danger never lets up, especially as the troublesome teens escalate in their violent behavior. Rhonda and Baby's byplay was great although Baby was a typical teenager on the one hand, while acting wise beyond her years on other occasions.
Those are the good points.
There is a negative, and a very strong one at that. This book is full of fat shaming from beginning to end. Remove that, and the overly precociousness that is Baby and this standalone book would lay a fine groundwork for an enjoyable series.
Many thanks to Grand Central Publishing and to NetGalley for this ARC for review. This is my honest opinion.
The son of an insurance salesman and a schoolteacher, Patterson grew up in Newburgh, New York, and began casually writing at the age of nineteen. In 1969, he graduated from Manhattan College. He was given a full ride to Vanderbilt University’s graduate program in English but dropped out after a year, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to continue reading and writing for pleasure if he became a college professor.
Instead, he moved to New York to become a junior copywriter for the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, eventually becoming CEO of its North American company.
In 1976, while still working for J. Walter Thompson, Patterson published his first novel, The Thomas Berryman Number, with Little, Brown and Company. After being turned down by thirty-one publishers, it won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel. Patterson’s 1993 novel, Along Came a Spider, his first novel to feature Alex Cross, was also his first New York Times bestseller in fiction.
In 2001, Morgan Freeman starred as Alex Cross in a film adaptation of Along Came a Spider, and Tyler Perry also played the character in the 2012 film Alex Cross. A film adaptation of Patterson’s middle-grade novel Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life was released in theaters in October 2016.
For his initiatives to help kids become passionate readers and for his philanthropic efforts, Patterson was awarded the National Book Foundation’s 2015 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.
James Patterson has donated more than one million books to students, emphasizing some of the most under-resourced schools and youth programs in the country. In 2015, Patterson donated $1.75 million to public school libraries throughout the United States, $1 million to independent bookstores, and a further $250,000 in holiday bonuses to individual bookstore employees. He also gave $1 million to independent bookstores in 2014.
Patterson has recently donated over $26 million to his and his wife’s alma maters—the University of Wisconsin, Vanderbilt University, and Manhattan College—and he has established over four hundred Teacher Education Scholarships at twenty-four colleges and universities throughout the country. Patterson has also donated over 650,000 books to U.S. soldiers at home and overseas.
In May 2015, Patterson launched a new children’s book imprint at Little, Brown, called JIMMY Patterson, that is unwaveringly focused on one goal: turning kids into lifelong readers. This imprint also provides resources, strategies, and programs to serve teachers, parents, librarians, and booksellers. Patterson invests proceeds from the sales of JIMMY Patterson Books in pro-reading initiatives.
Patterson has also founded ReadKiddoRead.com, a website designed to help parents, teachers, and librarians ignite a new generation’s excitement for reading. Awarded the National Book Foundation’s Innovations in Reading Prize and the American Library Association’s Great Websites for Kids, the site features thoughtful book reviews from a variety of genres and age ranges, a large and lively Facebook community, and contributions from other authors.
Mr. Patterson’s awards for adult and children’s literature include the Edgar Award, the International Thriller of the Year Award, and the Children’s Choice Award for Author of the Year.
He lives in Palm Beach with his wife, Sue, and his son, Jack.
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As a cynical and trouble-making teenager, her crime and gothic fiction writing was an escape from the calamity of her home life. She was constantly in trouble for reading Anne Rice in church and scaring her friends with tales from Australia's wealth of true crime writers.
Bankstown born and bred, she failed to conform to military life in a brief stint as an officer in the Royal Australian Navy at age eighteen. At twenty, she turned her hand to academia, and taught high school through two undergraduate and two postgraduate degrees. Candice lectures in writing at the University of Notre Dame, Sydney, while undertaking a PhD in literary censorship and terrorism.
Hades is her first novel, and she is currently working on its sequel.
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