James Patterson inaugurates a new crime series with the impressively complex First to Die: the Women's Murder Club, a group of San Francisco professionals--a homicide cop, an assistant district attorney, a pathologist and a reporter--share their information and thinking on cases. Someone is killing honeymoon couples on their first night together and nothing that we know about the killer is, we realise, entirely reliable: the connections between the victims are tenuous and the killer's method varies significantly. Intelligent, sensitive, tough cop Lindsay Boxer has problems of her own--a potentially fatal blood condition and a suspicion that she is falling for the intelligent divorced spin-doctor forced on her as partner by a publicity-conscious city government. The conversations she has with her friends are partly a matter of looking again at the results of legwork--sometimes explaining something to people who do not share your automatic assumptions makes you look at it again--and partly a matter of sharing expertise; rapidly they realise that they are up against someone for whom murder is a sexual game. Patterson has always had an eye for the psychology of killers--here he adds empathy for those to whom caring about victims is a way of life. --Roz Kaveney
