COUNT TO TEN

3 stars out of 5

I've read and for the most part enjoyed almost all of the "Private" series (this is the 13th), but this one was a bit of a disappointment. Release of the book in November 2017 also raised a question: Earlier this year, I learned of upcoming publication of a book titled Private Delhi. I put it on my must-get list, but the release date came and went and I was never able to get my hands on it. When I saw this one, a "Private" set in Delhi with the same co-author, I wondered why there were two.

Apparently, I wasn't wrong about an original version. I found it listed on Amazon with a totally different cover, a different publisher, just eight customer reviews and available only through third-party sellers. I don't know what happened, but I'd have to guess there were serious issues that resulted in rewriting and reissuing. Curious!

As for this installment, I'm honestly not sure why it didn't quite measure up (especially when I'm assuming a rewrite was done to make improvements). For one thing, though, I admit it was hard to keep all the names straight. Because I always review books I read, I keep notes on the main characters - and thank goodness for that, because it's the only thing that kept me at least somewhat on track here. The story, too, was a bit hard to follow, with two different investigations going on which - when coupled with the confusing names - more than a few times left me lost and backtracking pages to see what I'd missed.

The "star" of this one isn't Jack Morgan, founder of the global investigation agency; rather, it's Santosh Wagh, whom Jack installed as head of the new office in Delhi, and his assistant Nisha Gandhe. Shortly after the opening, a bunch of human remains that are in various stages of being dissolved is unearthed. It seems the Delhi powers-that-be may be trying to cover the whole thing up, and Jack gets called in by another government official (an enemy of the aforementioned powers) to learn why the incident is being withheld from the press. After passing the baton to Santosh, Jack turns to other tasks and makes only the occasional reappearance.

Meanwhile, other mutilated bodies are turning up right and left (there's no shortage of blood and gore here, BTW), and questions arise as to whether they're connected to the original bodies or the work of a serial killer. As all this plays out, more questions crop up along the who-can-you-trust lines, further complicating Private's ongoing investigation. Everything comes together at the end, but not without serious disruptions in the (ahem!) private lives of Santosh and Nisha.

All things considered, it's not an awful book - but if you're a newbie to this series, I suggest that you start elsewhere.

Count to Ten by James Patterson and Ashwin Sanghi (Grand Central Publishing, November 2017); 416 pp.

THE GAMES

4 stars out of 5

Talk about perfect timing! This book, set in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, makes a great lead-in to the 2016 Olympics, set to begin there Aug. 5. In fact, I read chunks of it with one eye on my Kindle and the other on our TV set, so I wouldn't miss swimming, gymnastics and track-and-field trials.

Hopefully, though, none of the events of the book - most of which take place within a couple of weeks of the Olympics - will be replicated at the real thing. The story actually begins a couple of years earlier at the World Games, when Jack Morgan's international security and consulting firm, Private, is hired to help make sure things go off without a hitch. Almost unnoticed amid all that action is the death of two young children, who mysteriously contracted an Ebola-like virus. 

Now Morgan is back in the "Marvelous City," teaming up with the beautiful and super-qualified chief of Private's Rio office. He's actually there to protect the two teenage daughters of a client - a filthy rich guy who's company won bids to help build the Olympics venues. The daughters, it seems, are volunteers in the city's favelas - extremely poor neighborhoods interspersed among those filled with million-dollar homes. As bad luck would have it, the girls turn up missing - and Jack's capable team now has the new, near-impossible task of finding them before it's too late. 

As all this is happening, another potentially deadly scenario is taking place unbeknownst to the kidnapping. Someone connected to the earlier World Games, it seems, has decided that no bad deed shall go unpunished. As the two story lines begin to merge, Jack and his team are charged with a new, and potentially far more deadly, challenge: Preventing a deadly threat to the Olympics and the city as a whole from becoming reality.

It's an interesting, fast-paced book, but a modicum (or more) of predictability means it probably won't keep you on the edge of your seat. Still, this is probably my favorite series of the Patterson book empire; already, I'm looking forward to the next location.

The Games by James Patterson and Mark Sullivan (Little, Brown and Co., June 2016); 400 pp.