Black Friday

I’ve read a number of other Patterson novels. This is an older one, written in 1989, and was somewhat inspired by the 1987 stock market crash. The premise is a weird merging of Viet Nam tragedy and betrayal and Wall Street high finance. The plot was average but some of the characters were memorable. In particular, the characters of Hudson and Arch Carroll were interesting. This novel was of the standard paperback length of around 400+ pages but easily could have been longer with a little more background on the above characters. That background information would have been fascinating, I’m sure, and certainly worth the extra reading. This is a novel that could have been great but was instead mediocre because of missing details and unfulfilled character promises.

This book was given to me several years ago and did not interest me much then. I only read it now because I am trying to clear that backlog of unread books in my bookcases. I have a habit of buying 3 or 4 books that I am interested in, reading 2 or 3 of them, and then getting sidetracked by a new novel. This leaves an unread book or two that soon becomes forgotten, hence the effort to read these books now. Black Friday is one of those books that could have fallen behind the bookcase and never missed.