No Demands. No Ransom. No Negotiations. (James Patterson in general)

Member Name: wampyrii

Product:	James Patterson in general
Date:	01/10/02 (75 review reads)
Rating:

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Black Market - James Patterson

"Good morning. This is Green Band speaking. Today is December 4th. A Friday. A history-making Friday, we believe...The Wall Street financial district from the East river to Broadway, is scheduled to be firebombed today. A large number of randomly selected targets will be completely destroyed late this afternoon...It might be an attack by air; it might be a ground attack. Whichever - it will occur at five minutes past five precisely...Begin the evacuation of the Wall Street financial district now. Green Band cannot possibly be stopped or deterred. Nothing I've said is negotiable. Our decision is irrevocable."

Black Market opens with a bang and keeps up the pace to the very last page. Who or what is Green Band? Who would put into effect a chain of events which would threaten to forcibly undermine the entire Western economy and change the whole world order? What do they want? Why don't they make demands or negotiate terms? No one knows but it's up to agent Archer Carroll to find out. If the nonnegotiable destruction of America's financial heart is merely a begining, just where the hell will it end?

Black Market is a thriller, and what's more, it is entirely unashamed of being a *just* a thriller with no agenda other than to entertain as it moves at a lightening pace, drawing in global terrorism, government conspiracies, billion dollar fraudsters and corruption to the very highest levels and beyond as it hurtles to it's wholly satisfying conclusion. I like James Patterson's novels because they don't ask me to think to much. Those times when I have analysed them, I find them so full of holes that it encouraged me to not do so again, so I'm not going to and if you want to enjoy his thrillers, I'd advise you not to either. Black Market is a page-turner and as such, it's a good one. It'll not teach you much, it's probably enormously inaccurate in it's
portrayal of Wall Street practices, the effect an attack like this would have, terrorist activities, blah, but it's still bloody entertaining so I personally couldn't care less. I'm a lazy reader. If a book gets too convoluted or bogs down too deeply in the trivialities of reality I tend to put it down and come back to it fitfully over the course of months or not at all. Black Market never lets up with the pace, dispenses with virtually all peripheral fluff and I finished it feeling satisfied I had been suitably entertained for my cash within two days.

If you like complex character-driven novels then this isn't going to be for you. It's basically the literary equivalent of a generic Hollywood thriller complete with cookie-cutter bad guys and the tough, uncompromising anti-hero in Arch Carroll who doesn't play by the book but gets results. Carroll's character is the central focus and he is the most developed, coming across as an experimental blueprint fore-runner to Patterson's better known hero Alex Cross who made it into a number of novels and a few generic Hollywood thrillers. He is one of the new breed of action hero - tough and unconventional but with a softer, emotional side depicted through his time with his 4 young children and time spent mourning the death of his wife from cancer some years previously. Patterson throws in a little romance too as sparks fly between him and Caitlin Dillon, a tough-but-vulnerable Wall Street high-flyer...but the rest (with one notable exception, who to talk of would be to spoil the plot, but who makes a fascinating combatant) are pretty much glossed over or as I said, cookie-cutter bad guys. Why this hasn't been made into a movie I'll never know, it has all the generic elements of a popcorn thriller! To do so now would perhaps be a little distasteful though.

The thing which makes Black Market so appealing though is the pace. It scoots along at light speed with Patterson&
#39;s trademark short, punchy chapters rattling off his story without bogging down in 'unecessary' explaination but just getting on with action. Like I said, as page-turners go, it's a good one but if you require more depth in a novel then you'll be poorly served here. There are a few niggles to mention simply because of the age of the book. Any mention of monetary facts and figures(bearing in mind it's mentioned a lot as Wall Street is the focus of the attack and base of the investigation) has a negative effect on it's realism. Obviously inflation has taken a toll since this book was written(I doubt the loss of a billion-ish dollars would collapse the world economy now) and also a few of the world orders are slightly different now (Communist Russia gets a little attention here for instance) but that's to be expected in any of the older thrillers and therefore these are minor gripes. Ultimately, if you're going to grumble about Ruskies and a few skewed sums then you'd undoubtedly hate this book for all it's other shortcomings too.

The bottom line is that if you liked James Patterson's other novels or non-convoluted thrillers in general then I feel you'll like this one as well. It's certainly nothing special but it's fast paced, easy reading and entertaining...which is about my level when it comes to books. Whether you'll want to read a fictionalised novel about a terrorist attack on America's financial district in the wake of recent events is another matter of course. I have a first edition prefaced with the words "although Black market is written as fiction, all of what follows could happen..." and dedicated to "...everyone who's ever dreamed about some small and delicious revenge against the moneychangers on Wall Street and around the world."...words which are a little 'unfortunate' and, I would imagine, no longer appear in the current edition. If you can accep
t the premise though, it's one of those novels which is perfect to no-brain to on a bus or train into work, plane journey etc. and recommended to thriller fans.

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