"Richard North Patterson aims for something else" by Mark Shanahan | Globe Staff, September 28, 2013
You might expect to find Richard North Patterson, the best-selling author of so many meticulously researched thrillers, huddled in discreet conversation with an FBI agent in Washington, D.C., or interviewing an Israeli soldier on the narrow streets of Jerusalem.
I'm sure I have seen his paperbacks, but I've never read one.
But his new book, “Loss of Innocence,” is a departure for an author known for page-turners with plots that span the globe and grapple with topics like gun control, presidential politics, and terrorism.....
Patterson’s character-driven courtroom thriller, “Degree of Guilt” became an enormous best-seller. Among its many fans was George H.W. Bush....
The novel’s popularity also enabled Patterson to quit practicing law and embark on a career as a full-time writer....
Related: Taking the Globe For Granted
If I wrote a book instead of blogs I would never get published.
Journalist Jeff Greenfield, a friend of Patterson’s who spends a week with the author on Martha’s Vineyard every summer [and] who had been a speechwriter for Robert F. Kennedy during Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign, says, “If he’s writing about gun control, he’ll talk to someone with the NRA, the cops, gun-control people. If it’s Israel, he’ll talk to moderate Palestinians, radical Palestinians, an Israeli settler.”
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His house on the island is not small — he has a guest cottage where friends, including Greenfield, journalist Joe Klein, and Senator Barbara Boxer of California stay when they visit — for the last five years, he has been married to Nancy Clair, an educational consultant whose work focuses on urban schools in the United States and in developing countries....
Patterson is not a regular on the Vineyard social circuit in the summer. He eschews the porch at the Chilmark General Store, where the likes of Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, millionaire malpractice lawyer Alex MacDonald, and restaurateur Patrick Lyons often pass the lunch hour. And you will not find him hobnobbing at a catered cocktail party beside an infinity pool....
Instead, he and his wife prefer quiet dinners with friends and neighbors....
Patterson does know a lot of political people. Senator John McCain of Arizona, former US defense secretary Bill Cohen, and Vicki Kennedy, widow of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, are all friends. And Boxer, who introduced herself to the author after reading an oped piece he wrote during the Clinton impeachment hearings, officiated Patterson and Clair’s wedding at writer Linda Fairstein’s hard-to-find house in Chilmark....
In San Francisco, where Patterson lives during the rest of the year, he is at his desk every morning at 7:30, and writes until noon....
“This new novel is an act of courage,” says Greenfield....
It takes courage to read a Globe every day.
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In this case, you can just a book by its cover.
