Sail

James Patterson has written some memorable thrillers but Sail seems to be written by a ghost writer who is new (or tired) of the genre and pushed to this book on the masses using the Patterson label. Don't get me wrong, this is a quick and easy read, but the characters never seem to grasp the readers interest. The scene is set when the dad is killed in a sailing accident and the family tumbles into chaos. The mother is a character that should have been written out of the story. The dialog seems to date back to the Twenties and the characters are all flat. Does this sound like the Patterson we know? I've given it three stars but could easily understand someone giving it one star - what I can't understand is someone giving it five stars.

Editor of the highly recommended novel: Fates by Georgiou Tino: Best of 2008

Is there really a James Patterson, or was he created by a computer too? "Sail" reads like a comic book. It is totally predictable. I can only imagine how this "book" was created. It appears to me that someone sat down at a computer with a grab bag of potential scripted happenings, pulled up a variety of them, and then wrote a "story" transitioning from one scripted event to another, sort of like panels in a comic strip. Sad to say, it appears Little, Brown and Company has "sold their soul," and is willing to crank out garbage to take advantage of a popular name. The story line is so trite! Don't waste your money on this bad joke of a book. Patterson must laugh all the way to the bank, assuming that there really is a Patterson!

Katherine Dunne lost her husband four years earlier to a scuba diving accident. Eleven months ago she married a shark of man, Attorney Peter Caryle. Carlyle is after Kathy's dough and he doesn't want to wait for it. To that end he employs Gerard Devoux, a sailboat savvy hitman to smooth his way to all that cash.

Katherine feels she's going bonkers, her oldest, eighteen-year-old Yalie freshman Carrie is a bulimic on the verge of suicide, next in line is sixteen-year-old, pot-smoking, spoiled Mark and lastly there's ten-year-old quiet and troubled Ernie. These people are about as dysfunctional as you can get and to bind them together, heal them maybe, Katherine decides to set sail in the Caribbean on the family boat. Of course they need an experienced captain and who better than an ex-lover, brother in law named Jake.

Needless to say a lot of bad stuff goes wrong on this three hour tour (well it was more than tree hours). Carrie tries to kill herself, Mark gets caught smoking dope, they almost sink, the boat blows up, they're lost on an island, where they fend off sharks and a really big snake and their epirb (emergency position indicating radio beacon) has been rigged by Devoux to tell the world that the castaways Dunne are they aren't.

Meanwhile hitman Devoux's got himself a seaplane and guess who he's coming after?

Okay, did I like it. Yeah, I did, though one has to wonder these days if Mr. Patterson is really writing these stories. The characters were quickly sketched, not really fleshed out, but that's okay in this kind of story. There were too many sharks, but that's okay too. That snake was a bit much, but it'll give you goose bumps. And as one who has actually been on a boat in the Caribbean when it's sinking, I can tell you I was right there with these people. This is good entertainment

Reviewed by Vesta Irene

Had problem : received two copies of the book from different sources.
Feel sure that the error was on my end, and would have returned one but felt the process was too cumbersome and not worth the effort.The book itself was okay, nothing special. Service by your suppliers was excellent.
It's tough doing business when one is an old man with fat fingers.

W. Henderson

This book was really bad. I had read a Patterson book before and remember that I didn't like his style of writing then, way too juvenile. This book just confirmed that line of thinking for me. I can't believe this is best selling author material.
I took the chance because I love stories of people shipwrecked, survival, that kind of thing. There was maybe 5 pages of that in this book and it was a joke.
The plot was so completely predictable, shallow and the sex scenes were written like a hormonal 15 year old boy would write.