Another winner from Patterson’s pen

Jack Morgan, head of international company Private, and the beautiful Tavia Reynaldo, who runs the Rio branch, fear a shutdown of the of the 2014 Fifa World Cup in Rio de Janeiro when two incidents of a deadly virus surface in the favelas.

Morgan and Reynaldo, who have been charged with the games’ security and prominent virologist Dr Lucas Castro want the incidents to be investigated but the authorities sweep them under the carpet.

There are no more outbreaks and Rio seems to have dodged the bullet.

But Castro is angry about being ignored.

Two years later Private Rio is charged with keeping the Rio Olympics safe and, with the help of the military and an elite police unit, all seems to be going well.

Then the twin daughters of a billionaire major contributor to the games (and a client of Private’s) are kidnapped while doing aide work in the favelas.

Morgan and his crew must divert their attention from the Olympics to deal with the problem which turns out to be much more complex than they imagined.

Meanwhile Castro, infuriated by the death of his wife and the 2014 snub, reaches the human experiment stage of developing the 2014 virus – Hydra – into a nine-headed super bug which he intends to release at the opening of the Olympics.

The discovery of the body of a prominent society woman in her burnt out car and her subsequent post mortem exam alert Morgan to the bug and the possible problem.

Superstar novelist Patterson teams up with Mark Sullivan again for this, another in the very successful “Private” series.

The Games is presented as a countdown to the Olympics opening ceremony which almost gives it the quality of developing news coverage for anyone reading it as the Games are actually opening.

For some reason the book was also released under the tile Private Rio but this does not detract from its readability.

The crisp sentences and brief, rapid-fire chapters which are a hallmark of Patterson’s offerings keep a tight hold on the reader’s attention and inveigle him/her to do “just one more” before putting the lights out.