Authors: James Patterson and Maxine Paetro
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
ISBN: 978-0-316-03627-6

Click Here To Purchase The 9th Judgment (The Women's Murder Club)

As the title indicates, The 9th Judgment is number nine in the Women’s Murder Club series. Once again Sergeant Lindsay Boxer of the SFPD and the three other members of the Club—Yuki Castellano of the DA’s office; Medical Examiner, Dr. Claire Washburn; journalist Cindy Thomas—are tangled in the viscous webs woven by two murders.

Self-named, Sneaky Pete, a veteran of the Iraq war, is the most heinous killer that has appeared in the WMC books. Sneaky Pete kills women and children. He shoots them at close range with a silenced gun.

Movie star Marc Dowling seizes an unexpected opportunity and shoots his wife Casey. Dowling’s opportunity is inadvertently presented by Sarah Wells, a high school English teacher moonlighting as a cat burglar dubbed Hello Kitty by the press.

Eventually, the intricacies of the plot lead to the intersecting of both murderous storylines.

Sneaky Pete, known to the residents of San Francisco as the Lipstick Killer because of the various arrangements of the letters WCF he leaves signed in lipstick at the scenes of his killings, holds the city for ransom; unless he is given two million dollars the killings will continue.

Lindsay Boxer gets the unenviable job of making the ransom drop. She is lead on the proverbial chase around the city until she ends up—minus most of her clothes—on the Golden Gate Bridge.

Meanwhile, Hello Kitty has been accused of murdering Casey Dowling. Her alter ego, Sarah Wells, finds herself in the precarious position of having to prove Kitty’s innocence at the same time she’s working to raise sufficient funds—by means of robbing wealthy people’s jewelry—for her and her companion, Heidi Gordon, to escape from their abusive husbands.

Complications abound.

At one point in the midst of the police department’s double barreled murder investigation, Dr. Claire Washburn incites the anger of the Police Department’s higher-ups by advising San Francisco’s young mothers to obtain weapons “and carry them.”

The 9th Judgment is not all mayhem, of course. There are hugs and kisses aplenty to satisfy readers looking for scenes of lusty romance. Cindy loves Rich Conklin; Lindsay loves Joe who she admits to Conklin “Is the one.”

An unexpected, explosive twist at the end of the novel puts one of those lovers in peril.

In The 9th Judgment, Patterson presents a story containing many of the expected clichés of a cops-and-killers thriller; but, as always, Patterson is fun to read.


Click Here To Purchase The 9th Judgment (The Women's Murder Club)