Billy Harney is a new addition to my roster of Favorite Detectives in Literature and book 3 did not disappoint. I am late to the series, but quite a bit has happened to Billy in the first two entries, THE BLACK BOOK and THE RED BOOK. Patterson and Ellis have worked well together on this series and this is another positive outcome, proving that there is still something to be said of books that bear the former’s name.

Bill does standup at the cop bar when he’s needing to unwind and is on the special assignments force handling the tough stuff. Their arrival at the abandoned farm house began a chain of events, including the death of Carla, that kept Billy forging forward, determined to find the kidnapper and cop killer. ESCAPE meets all the James Patterson tests --- clear, sharp writing; an entertaining plot; and 121 chapters in 400 pages. I would read another one of his and hope they improve their storytelling and develop him more in his own unique way. Hachette Book Group is a leading book publisher based in New York and a division of Hachette Livre, the third-largest publisher in the world.Now, in 2022, Patterson and Ellis have brought back Harney for a third thriller, changing the book type title lingo to “Escape” and setting up Detective Harney’s hunt for a child kidnapper. The character of Billy’s sister was further developed in this book, which added depth to the series. As Chicago’s special-ops leader Detective Billy Harney knows well, money is not the only valuable currency.

Escape” starts off with Harney and his partner tailing a potential kidnapper of a teenage girl, and ends in a devastating outcome that surprisingly caught me off guard.

I had no idea where this story was going; it was all over the place at one point, but the authors did a phenomenal job of bringing everything together for a nice ending which included one hell of a surprise! Firm plot lines offer the reader some suspense and leave the book from being too predictable, helping to keep the book mysterious when needed. Though started (and continued almost till the middle of book) like a juggler juggling too many balls, managed to salvage the position and handled things much better towards the end.

The big kicker is that the mystery was well thought out, had multiple layers, and even more important (for those of us who confidently feel that we can figure out the guilty party before he/she is revealed), the outcome was surprising and extremely well-delivered! The cast of villains includes a sadistic sexual predator and an evil billionaire who believes his money makes him invulnerable to the criminal justice system. While not the best of the Patterson’s attributed series, it kept me intrigued until the final page turn, with a cliffhanger of its own. When five teenage girls are abducted, Chicago PD Detective Billy Harney leads the investigation to find them. I was especially disappointed that so much unnecessary nasty language was used in this middle school story ~ I know middle schoolers hear and use profanity all the time but I see no reason for a popular author to encourage it!Great story lines, with some interesting curves and the ending is a perfect setup for another installment of this character.