Sail

Rating NR Genre suspense Author James Patterson and Howard Roughan Publisher Little, Brown and Company External Links Official James Patterson Website

The Dunnes are a family divided. Suicidal eighteen-year-old Carrie, pot-smoking sixteen-year-old Mark and super intelligent, eleven-year-old Ernie are not coping well with the loss of their father, their mother's recent remarriage or adolescence in general. Dr. Katherine Dunne, the mother, disturbed that the children argue constantly with each other and barely speak to her, decides a two month vacation on the family's sailboat -- a boat connected with her husband's death -- will work as a last effort to bring the family back together. Her new husband will stay behind, but they'll be accompanied by her former brother-in-law, Jake Dunne, a ruggedly handsome drifter, ostensibly because he's the only person aboard skilled enough to sail and repair the boat. When she asks her psychiatrist if she's crazy for proceeding with foolhardy plan, the answer should be a resounding, “Yes.” But then there wouldn't be a story.

Though not a pager-turner of a plot, the extremely short chapters -- some barely two pages long -- make this a quick read. Chapter five reveals that Katherine's husband left over $100 million dollars to her and the children, and also that Peter Carlyle, new husband and cut-throat lawyer, seems too good to be true. In chapter six, a suspicious thug watches the family set sail. Storms, “mysterious” mechanical malfunctions, sharks, and shipwrecks follow in due course. From Manhattan to Las Vegas to Florida, from high seas and uninhabited islands to New York courtrooms, the story jumps from one location and point of view to another as DEA agents and the Coast Guard search for the missing family.

Multiple points of view and abrupt time shifts lessen rather than build suspense in this novel. Whenever the book shifts to a chapter told in first person from the mother's perspective, any built-up tension suffers a painful death. Katherine Dunne's maudlin observations on her family's dilemmas better suit the tone of her teenage daughter than a mother of three and successful heart surgeon, but then this novel is not written to offer great insights into the human condition. Predictable plot twists and superficial characters make Sail easy to put down and come back to after a few hours of swimming at the beach. It's a perfectly timed product marketed to fill the best-seller tables at the front of your local bookstore. Expect nothing more than a no-brainer summer novel and you won't be disappointed; for a slightly more substantial story, one of Patterson's early Alex Cross novels is a better bet or perhaps try a novel written solely by his collaborator this time around, Howard Roughan.