"Three terrifying murders in the South."
That's what the description promises. And look — Patterson delivers on the body count. But what nobody warns you about is how disorienting the ride between those bodies actually is.
I was shelving returns at the library on a Wednesday evening, headphones in, last hour before close. The branch was empty except for me and that particular silence old buildings get when it's raining outside. Perfect conditions. Steel guitar twanging through my earbuds like some ghost blues player sitting in the stacks with me. And I'm thinking: okay, this has atmosphere. This has something.
But then I kept waiting for that something to tighten into dread. And it just… didn't.
Before Patterson Became a Machine
Here's what's wild about this book — it won the Edgar Award for Best First Mystery in 1976. The Edgar. And you can feel why the committee noticed it. Patterson was doing something genuinely different here. The structure is fractured, almost journalistic — a reporter piecing together the story of an assassination after the fact, threading between timelines and perspectives. It's ambitious. It reads (or rather, listens) like someone who wanted to write literary crime fiction, not the assembly-line thrillers Patterson would later become synonymous with.
But ambition and execution are two different things, and this is where I land closer to the frustrated listeners than the admirers. The plot meanders. There's a difference between a slow burn that builds pressure and a narrative that just... wanders through its own landscape hoping you'll follow. Thomas Berryman as a character — this cold, professional assassin with a complicated relationship to a woman — should be terrifying. He should haunt you. Instead, he feels like a sketch that never gets filled in. Patterson gives us observations about the South, about violence, about power, and some of them are sharp. But they're floating in a structure that doesn't always know where it's going.
At seven hours, it shouldn't feel long. But it does.
Will Patton and That Bluegrass Ghost
Now. Will Patton. This is where it gets complicated for me, because I want to love what he's doing here. His bluegrass drawl for the Southern characters — that honeyed, slow-drip accent — it's good. It's lived-in. And then he shifts into this softer, almost flat affect for the New York voices, this drug-world hustler register that's completely different. The character differentiation is real. He's not just doing accents as party tricks; he's using vocal texture to signal class and geography and moral alignment.
But — and this is the thing — the narrator commits, and the material doesn't always meet him there. Patton brings this bluesy weight to Patterson's prose, and sometimes the prose just isn't heavy enough to carry it. There are stretches where his pacing is doing all the work, trying to generate tension that the plot hasn't earned. I've heard Patton in other things and the man can act. Here, he's acting against a headwind.
That steel guitar music woven into the production? It sets a mood. Southern gothic, sun-baked menace. I appreciated it early on. By hour five, I was ready for it to stop telling me how to feel.
Who This Is Actually For
If you're a Patterson completist who wants to hear where it all started — before Alex Cross, before the co-author empire, before the BookShots — this is genuinely interesting as an artifact. You can hear a young writer reaching for something literary and dark, and you can trace the DNA of what he'd later streamline (and arguably sand down) into his blockbuster formula.
If you're coming to this expecting the pace of Along Came a Spider? You're going to be confused and possibly annoyed.
If you're a horror-adjacent thriller listener like me, someone who wants assassin stories to crawl under your skin the way Shirley Jackson crawls under your skin? This isn't that. It wants to be. There are flashes. But it pulls its punches in the places that matter.
Shirley (my cat) was unimpressed. For once, I kind of agreed with her.
The Stacks Are Closing
I respect what this book tried to do in 1976. I respect that it won an Edgar. I respect Will Patton for bringing more to it than it probably deserved. But respect isn't the same as recommendation. If you scare easily, this won't test you. If you don't, you won't find what you need here either. It's a curiosity — Patterson before Patterson — and that's worth something. Just not a full credit. When I want Southern menace that actually delivers on its promise, I end up somewhere like Pretty Little Wife — a thriller that understands how to make the dread functional rather than decorative.
