JAMES PATTERSON – The Season of the Machete. Ballantine 27105, paperback original, 1977. Warner Books, hardcover, 1995.

   For reasons never made overly clear, the Mafia and the CIA combine forces to instigate a bloody revolution in the peaceful Caribbean Island of San Dominica. Well, there are some indications of what it’s all about, and it certainly is bloody, but this is not what you might call the entertainment of the year.

   Piles of dismembered bodies grow as eye witness Peter Macdonald tries to tell someone he saw a blond Englishman near the scene of the first murder. It is not the black revolutionary Colonel Dred who’s responsible, but the crack assassination team of Carrie and Damien Rose, and they seem to fear a double-cross.

   Although it’s not very appealing, there is a sense in which this is a gripping story. The narration is heavy-handed, however. Too much is revealed in advance, and worse, there’s nothing to clean up the mess afterward.

Rating: C plus.

— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 2, No. 4, July 1978 (very slightly revised).


Bibliographic Note: This was Patterson’s second book. The first was The Thomas Berryman Number (Little Brown, 1976), which I also remember reading. To say that he has written quite a few since then would be the understatement of the month.