Rating: 
Summary: The fine line between cop and criminal
Review: If you've read one of Richard North Patterson's previous suspense/crime novels (among them, "Silent Witness," "Eyes of a Child," "Degree of Guilt"), you know him to be a first-rate storyteller. His law degree guarantees fine details of prosecution. His experience as a fictioneer shows that every time he asks himself "What if?" he comes up with a stunning new plot line. Patterson has special talent for terse and telling dialogue. As real-life crime becomes more bizarre, crime writers must dream up more complicated and grisly narratives. Patterson succeeds here, too. The setting of his new novel is the fictional city of Steelton. Stella Marz, the narrator and heroine, is a determined lady who works her way out of a turbid working-class background and through law school to become an assistant county prosecutor, head of the homicide unit. The "Dark Lady" of the title, she's an intriguing female who can hold her own in an all-male enclave. Jack Novak, Stella's onetime employer and former lover, is first introduced as a mutilated corpse dangling from his closet door. He's wearing a garter belt, stockings and high heels. Next, an officer in the development company building Steelton's stadium is found dead in bed from a heroin overdose. He's got a needle in his arm and a dead prostitute at his side. What's particularly horrifying is that victims' lives and reputations do not match their modes of death. Political corruption in Steelton and deceitful colleagues in the homicide unit make Stella's self-appointed task of solving the two murders a formidable challenge. Let the squeamish reader beware: Patterson's novels are always hypnotic, with in-your-face situations that make you blink. On the other hand, fans of psychological/suspense drama will relish the good read Patterson always provides.
Rating: 
Summary: Grime & Punishment
Review: A lot can be said making it all seem real, or based on elements that mirror the culture. I guess that's one way to describe absorption and recycling of this and that from here and there in fact and fiction. In Patterson's beautiful hometown San Francisco (unlike drab, uninteresting fictional(?) Steelton), real life embattled Black hero Mayor Willie Brown was and is embroiled in a conflict to save 3Com Park's Bayview Stadium project, but, unlike Patterson's mayor in the story, aligned on the "pro" side against some elements which would unseat SF from its status as a world class city. WE'LL MEET AGAIN's Molly Lasch was the accused in the murder of an ex. Patterson's Stella faces crisis growing out of the killing of one of her ex-squeezes. "Similar, but not?" Except for complexion and branch of public service Dark Lady Marz could be a clone of the less pedestrian Kay Scarpetta of BLACK NOTICE and previous installments. Even components clearly of Patterson's creation are burdened with what could pass for - as it says, "the hard edge of reality." It's like reading a documentary. The best fiction shrouds within a gossamer semi-reality that even intrudes to the level of fantasy once credibility is expendable. A prime case of the latter is the masterpiece FIELD OF DREAMS. A marginal example is DANCES WITH WOLVES, wherein a person's imagination indulges the unlikely behavior and logic of the animals. An in-between is A CAT'S FULL NINE, that challenges your grasp of what is chance/coincidence and how much is just beyond touch and just within the charms and palls of ancient forces that impel - if not compel - the perameters of an explosive and exquisite tale. Even a rough jolt like HANNIBAL communicates implicitly the presence of a tongue in a cheek back there somewhere. A person reads for escape. Escape to a different level of reality - even if it's a made up one - doesn't make it.
Rating:
Summary: Good but not Great
Review: This book was enjoyable reading even though some parts dragged out more than necessary. The cast of characters were somewhat confusing but it was all brought together nicely in the end. There were some interesting twists and story lines within the book.
Rating: 
Summary: The Dark Lady is One Tough Cookie
Review: Steelton is a fictional American Midwest town on the shores of Lake Erie, where the proposed construction of a two hundred and seventy-five million dollar baseball stadium is the background for a political battle. Mayor Tom Krajek hails the proposal as the hallmark of a new era of urban renewal. The Prosecuter of Erie County, Arthur Bright, calls it a boondoggle, saying the money would be better spent elsewhere. Bright's ally in his attempt to unseat the mayor is his protégé, Stella Marz, dubbed the "Dark Lady" by defence lawyers, who don't take kindly to her aggressive style and relentless pursuit of convictions. Stella's latched onto Bright's coattails, so she has a real interest in his political future. Things turn nasty when Tommy Fielding, the project manager of the stadium, is found dead with a hooker, both of an apparant heroin overdose. However Chief Detective Nathaniel Dance suspects more than just foul play, particularly when Stella's ex-lover and Bright supporter Jack Novak is also found dead, castrated and hanging in his closet, dressed in a garter belt and stockings. It's of no small significance that Jack was a Mob lawyer. Though her relationship with Novak is long over, Stella can't help but feel the collision of her personal and professional lives at the crime scene. But she hangs tough, partly because it's her nature, but also because she has is a political animal. She wants to be the first woman prosecutor of Erie County, after all. And for her to reach that goal, Arthur Bright has to win the Democratic primary against incumbent Mayor Thomas Krajek. Is there a connection between the Fielding and Novak murders? Where does the stadium construction belong in all of this? Can Stella draw the threads together? In answering these questions you'll find that you have the makings of a good thriller, but wait, there's more, add a some greed and corruption, a whole lot of double-dealing and back-stabbing and you've added the fixings of a blockbuster.
Rating:
Summary: dark and edgy
Review: This is the first book I ever read by this author and it was a page turner. The plot reads like a NY Post headline and takes the reader on a roller coaster ride on the insider politics of a fictional town where a gruesome (and I mean graphic and icky) murder occurs. Some of the scenes had too much of a realistic ring for my peace of mind. I liked the anti-hero protagonist. Hugely entertaining. I highly recommend this book as long as you aren't easily offended by violence, sex or reality.
Rating: 
Summary: Lack of action
Review: Mr. Patterson spends far too much time developing the characters, not enough chasing clues, suspects, interviewing.
Rating:
Summary: Politics and Murder Hand and Hand Together
Review: In Steelton on the shores of Lake Erie controversy swirls around a $275 million taxpayer-funded baseball stadium dubbed Steelton 2000. The project is the brainchild of Mayor Tom Krajek, who's fighting for his political life in a hotly contested Democratic primary. Supporters believe Steelton 2000 is the city's last hope for urban renewal and employment. Opponents believe the stadium is a huge misappropriation of tax dollars.
Running against Krajek is Erie County prosecutor Arthur Bright. And in the middle is Bright's protégé, assistant prosecutor Stella Marz, whose relentless prosecution style has earned her the nickname the "Dark Lady" from defense lawyers. Now she plans to run for Erie County prosecutor if her boss is elected mayor. But a series of unexpected murders disrupt everyone's political goals and as Stella investigates, it becomes impossible to tell who she can trust.
Rating:
Summary: Not Patterson's best
Review: I have always though Richard North Patterson was an underrated writer. He's a bestseller, true enough, but not exactly in the same league as Grisham. I find his books to be tauter, grittier and with more believable character development than Grisham's often lazy prose. Not all Patterson's books are equal, however. DARK LADY is by no means terrible, and fans of Patterson's will be reasonably satisfied. But the plot is, frankly, just a bit too much. So MUCH corruption is exposed in the fictional city of Steelton that it becomes unbelievable. True, a major city might have one or two major political figures who are corrupt, but in this book EVERYONE is corrupt. The question becomes HOW, not WHO? It just gets to be too much like a soap opera. And towards the end, so much hell has broken loose that Patterson simply can't make the behavior of the characters believable. It's simply TOO MUCH. I would say the first 75% of the book is good fun. 100% of the book is fast-paced. It's just that Patterson works too hard to shock the reader, I think. The plot is thick enough already without the overblown help. I therefore cannot recommend this book for beginners in Patterson, because it might put them off some of his better books like DEGREE OF GUILT or EYES OF THE CHILD.
Rating: 
Summary: Frustrating Disappointment
Review: I have read and enjoyed all of RNP's books, and was thrilled to trip over this one, which I had not read. What a letdown. I am on page 90, and have decided to give up on it. It has been a real chore to get this far, and I feel that if I dread picking up a book and read it out of some sort of misplaced duty, it's time to give up on it. (I've only given up on two books before--Hunt for Red October, because there was too much technical stuff and I ended up tossing it across the room, and Turow's Pleading Guilty for much the same reason I don't like this one.) The character development just doesn't happen. I don't care what happens to any of them, another good reason not to finish a book.
Rating:
Summary: DARK STELLA
Review: Somehow Patterson doesn't quite match the intensity and structural excellence evidenced in his other books.
We met Stella Manz in an earlier Patterson thriller, "Silent Witness" which was brutally good book. Taking the lead in this novel, Stella's "darkness" and lack of trust in people deflates her character, and her relationship with Michael suffers because of this. The murders, while seemingly unrelated, will obviously be somehow connected. It is this plot device that fuels the book. Patterson spends a great deal of time fleshing out his plot in this one, but not as much as with his characters, and once again, as in previous books, suicide is used as a resolution, and in this one, it's just too contrived. I still admire Patterson's work and there are some effective scenes in this book, but oveall, it's not as passionate or sharply etched as earlier works.
I recommend it to those of us Patterson fans who still realize what a major talent he is.
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