Cheap Silent Witness (Book) (RICHARD NORTH PATTERSON) Price

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Customer Reviews of Silent Witness

I couldn't turn the pages fast enough!
SILENT WITNESS grabbed me from the first few pages. From the beginning, I could not put the book down - my eyes would close first! Richard North Patterson writes with a style that enables the reader to really understand the characters and feel what they feel. This book is written in such a way that I felt that I was in Lake City with the characters. Like Eyes of a Child, this book was riveting, yet disturbing at the same time. Even though I have finished the book, I feel that the characters are still with me. Patterson has a way of making you think you know these characters and you keep trying to figure them out even after the book is finished. I read Private Screening right before reading Silent Witness and it was a perfect background to Tony Lord. I hope that Patterson carries these characters forward in future books.

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many legal thrillers make promises . . . this one delivers
I just finished this book for the second time; it says something that you can still be riveted by a book you've already read & know the ending. Among RNP's best, and that's saying something, as he is among the very best at this type of book: legal thriller combined with gripping personal stories. The picture he paints of the friendship/rivalry of the two teenage protagonists & their girlfriends rings true, as does the angst he describes as his characters transition from high school to middle age. Secondary characters (often the difference between great writers & merely good ones) are also very strong, particularly John Taylor (father of a girl who is killed), Ernie Nixon (token black in town) and the aging lawyer Sol, past his prime but still hanging in.

One caution: the second half of the book deals openly with details (forensic & otherwise) of a middle-aged school administrator's sordid affair with a high school girl, who eventually ends up dead. On several levels, this aspect of the book can be disturbing & not for the squeamish.

All in all, RNP is one of the best, and this book is one of his best.

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Gripping to the last page
I really enjoyed this book. It was well written, had very well crafted characters and although you were never quite sure if Sam Robb had murdered Marcie Calder, it was the shocking revelation in the last few chapters which really took the biscuit. The book has a beautiful symmetry about it and charts the conflicts within the main character - Lawyer Tony Lord returned to his backwater home town, which he left as a teenager, the never indicted prime suspect of a horrendous murder, to defend his boyhood friend, Sam Robb charged with a similarly brutal murder. In his single-minded attempts to prove the circumstantial nature of the charges against his client, he comes close to destroying Ernie Nixon a black boyhood friend by blatantly exploiting the race card and Nixon's occassional lapses of judgement. Lord enlists the help of the Lawyer who so ably defended him 28 years previously, adding another interesting dimension to the story. Sue Robb rounds out the list of main characters - a rock in Sam's life, who nonetheless is conflicted by Sam's drunken lapses and now proven infidelities.
As I infer in my headline - once you get past the early chapters, you will struggle to put this book down. I intend to read more of Patterson's work.