Book Review: Confessions of a Murder Suspect

Confessions of a Murder Suspect

James Patterson

372 Pages

Published September 24th 2012 by Little, Brown and Company

James Patterson returns to the genre that made him famous with a thrilling teen detective series about the mysterious and magnificently wealthy Angel family . . . and the dark secrets they're keeping from one another.
On the night Malcolm and Maud Angel are murdered, Tandy Angel knows just three things: 1) She was the last person to see her parents alive. 2) The police have no suspects besides Tandy and her three siblings. 3) She can't trust anyone—maybe not even herself. Having grown up under Malcolm and Maud's intense perfectionist demands, no child comes away undamaged. Tandy decides that she will have to clear the family name, but digging deeper into her powerful parents' affairs is a dangerous-and revealing-game. Who knows what the Angels are truly capable of?

This was surprisingly my first experience with James Patterson. I have to say I was impressed. The writing style and short chapters kept me engaged long enough to read this book in a few hour sitting. While the writing did seem for younger audiences at times, I still really enjoyed this one!

In this story, Tandy Angel wakes up in the middle of the night to discover that her parents were found dead in their own bedroom. With her and her siblings the only suspects the clock is ticking as Tandy tries to find her parents killer and bring him or her to justice - even if that killer is herself.

There was a lot more going on behind the scenes besides the murder case. The murdered parents weren't normal in the least, being so strange that they manufacture special pills for their children to take to enhance their performance. Talk about weird! I still don't know everything about these drugs but I expect that as the series continues we'll find out more - something I'm very eager to learn about.

There was also a forbidden romance between Tandy and a boy - a boy she doesn't remember. This is very strange and I was hoping to find out about this in book one, but it looks like I'll be waiting.  Other things going on were mysteries from the past including affairs and the mysterious ways in which Tandy's oldest brother is behaving.

Tandy was a great and inquisitive character. I just loved her, though she and the rest of her siblings were a bit strange and sociopath-like because of previous emotional conditioning their parents made them go through. She left no stone un-turned during the investigation and didn't let herself be biased. She made a great detective.

Overall I really enjoyed this one. The ending was very cliff-hangerish and left off with a lot of unanswered questions. I can't wait until the sequel in October!