The Beach House

Jack Mullen's life is working out perfectly. A Harvard law student, he's loving his summer job in a Boston law firm, and the weekends spent at Martha's Vineyard. Until, that is, he arrives home, and his father greets him with the news that his brother, Peter, is dead. The police believe Peter committed suicide, but Jack senses a darker, dangerous truth, and is determined to bring a killer to justice... James Patterson's previous international number one bestsellers include Along Came a Spider, Kiss the Girls and Cat and Mouse, and now that he appears to have got his ill-advised desire to write saccharine Love Story-style fiction out of his system, Headline can confidently await another massive hit. Peter de Jonge wrote A Miracle on the 17th Green with Patterson. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Beach House, The/Unabridged CD By James Patterson Time Warner AudioBooks Copyright © 2002 James PattersonAll right reserved. ISBN: 9781586212872 Chapter One EVEN BY THE HEADY NORM of millennial boomtown Manhattan, wheremaster craftsmen paint frescoes on subway walls, the new law officesof Nelson, Goodwin and Mickel were over the top. If the greatdowntown courthouses around Broadway were palaces of justice, thegleaming fortyeight-story tower at 454 Lexington Avenue was amonument to winning. My name is Jack Mullen, and as a summer associate at Nelson,Goodwin, I guess I was winning, too. Still, it wasn't exactly what Ihad in mind when I entered Columbia Law School at the advanced ageof twenty-six. But when a secondyear student with $50,000 in collegeloans is offered a summer position at the most prestigious firm inthe city, he doesn't turn it down. The phone started ringing the instant I stepped into my smalloffice. I picked up. Female operator on tape: "You have a collect call fromHuntsville, Texas, from ..." Male voice, also recorded: "The Mudman." Female operator again ontape: "If you wish to accept, please say yes or push the number-" "Yes, absolutely," I interrupted. "Mudman, how are you?" "Not bad,Jack, except maybe for the fact that the state of Texas is pissingits pants at the thought of putting me down like a dog." "Dumbquestion." The surprisingly high-pitched voice at the other end of the linebelonged to outlaw biker Billy "Mudman" Simon, and it was comingfrom the pay phone in Huntsville Prison's death row. Mudman wasthere waiting for the lethal injection that would put him to deathfor murdering his teenage girlfriend nineteen years earlier. Mudman is no saint. He admits to all manner of misdemeanors and anoccasional felony during his run in the Houston chapter of theDiablos. But killing Carmina Velasquez, he says, wasn't one of them. "Carmina was a great woman," the Mudman told me the first time Iinterviewed him. "One of my best friends in this miserable world.But I was never in love with her. So why would I kill her?" His letters, trial transcripts, and records of repeated failedattempts to win a new trial were dropped on my desk three days afterI started working for the firm. After two weeks decoding everywildly misspelled word, contorted phrase, and hundreds of footnotespainstakingly transcribed in tiny block letters that looked as ifthey had come from the unsteady hand of a grade-schooler, I wasconvinced he was telling the truth. And I liked him. He was smart and funny, and he didn't feel sorryfor himself, despite a truckload of reasons why he should. Ninetypercent of the convicts on death row were as good as screwed the daythey were born, and Mudman, with his deranged junkie parents, was nodifferent. Nevertheless, he had no enthusiasm for blaming them for what hadhappened. "They did their best, like everyone else," he said the one time Imentioned them. "Their best sucked, but let 'em rest in peace." Rick Exley, my supervisor on the project, couldn't have cared lessabout Mudman's character or my rookie intuition. What mattered tohim was that there were no witnesses to Velasquez's murder and thatthe Mudman had been convicted completely on the basis of blood andhair samples from the crime scene. That all happened before theforensic breakthrough of DNA testing. It meant we had a reasonablechance to be granted our request that blood and hair samples betaken to confirm that they matched the DNA of the physical evidenceheld in a vault somewhere in Lubbock. "I'd hate to get your hopes up for nothing, but if the state lets ustest, we could get a stay of execution." "Don't ever worry about getting my hopes up for nothing, Jack. WhereI'm at, insane hope is welcome anytime. Bring 'em on." I was trying not to get too excited myself. I knew this pro bonoproject, with the pompous name of "the Innocence Quest," wasprimarily a PR stunt and that Nelson, Goodwin and Mickel didn'tbuild forty-eight stories in midtown by looking out for the innocentpoor on death row. Still, when the Mudman was cut off after his allotted fifteenminutes, my hands were shaking. Continues... Excerpted from Beach House, The/Unabridged CD by James Patterson Copyright © 2002 by James Patterson. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Publishers Weekly atterson's second coauthored novel of the year (after the current bestseller 2nd Chance, written with Andrew Gross) is a relatively rare stand-alone for this immensely popular writer. Unlike some of Patterson's stand-alones, however, including the most recent, Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas, this doesn't move Patterson into new territory: it's a slick, vastly enjoyable yet far-fetched thriller i.e., typical Patterson. Its hero is a Columbia University law student, Jack Mullen, who's out to avenge the death of his younger brother, Peter, found dead on the Amagansett, L.I., property of the immensely wealthy Neubauer family, a few miles from Jack and Peter's Montauk home. The cops say Peter drowned; a glance at the corpse tells Jack that his brother was beaten to death. The rest of the novel traces Jack's efforts, with the help of a female private eye/love interest, plus his elderly grandfather and a band of Montauk locals, to prove that Peter was murdered and that billionaire Barry Neubauer played a role in his demise. Arrayed against Jack are a tough cop, high-placed lawyers and a sadistic killer all owned by Neubauer money. Jack's diggings lead to evidence not only of Peter's murder but of its part in a coverup involving sexual scandal and blackmail; to get the justice that's denied them, Jack and his friends take the law into their own hands, kidnapping Neubauer and his cohorts and trying them in a kangaroo court whose proceedings they broadcast on TV. Smooth as a vanilla milk shake and no more sophisticated, written in 113 short chapters that won't tax anyone's attention span, this is smart, market-savvy, populist entertainment. (On sale June 10)Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Library Journal Yes, another book by Patterson; the prolific author can spin out three books a year. This one centers on law student Jack Mullen, who doesn't believe that his brother's drowning death is an accident. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From AudioFile James Patterson and Peter de Jonge team up to tell the sordid tale of a group of townies as they seek justice for the death of one of their own. Gil Bellows of "Ally McBeal" epitomizes the 20-something angst and grief experienced by narrator Jack Mullen as he identifies his brother's killers, a group of rich part-time residents. Bellows also expertly portrays Mac, Jack's 87-year-old grandfather, as the two struggle with their feelings of sadness, injustice, and indignation. Bellows's voice has just enough of a tough-guy edge to it to make his narration believable and compelling. A good story with many twists, THE BEACH HOUSE is a great story to curl up with. H.L.S. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Booklist Hot on the heels of 2nd Chance [BKL Ja 1 & 15 02], Patterson's latest thriller is a stand-alone mystery about the death of a young man in the Hamptons. Jack Mullen, a law-school student, is devastated when he learns that his beloved younger brother, Peter, has drowned while working as a valet at a ritzy party in the Hamptons. Jack is also suspicious; although Peter's death is ruled a suicide by the local police, Jack can't believe that his brother would go for a swim on a chilly evening when he was supposed to be working. The bruises covering Peter's body also lead Jack to suspect foul play. Jack begins to think that Barry and Compton Neubauer, the hosts of the party, and also the parents of Jack's girlfriend, Dana, are covering up the truth about what happened to Peter. Although Jack gets help from his school friends and Pauline, an attractive investigator, he faces seemingly insurmountable odds. The police, led by Frank Volpi, continue to stonewall, and a mysterious man threatens anyone who tries to produce evidence of Peter's murder. Despite the danger and the unexpected and often unpleasant revelations about his brother along the way, Jack is tenacious, and the novel races along to a somewhat implausible climax. But if Patterson fails to completely convince, he certainly doesn't fail to thrill, and readers will be turning the pages until the end. Kristine Huntley Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. James Patterson is the author of many international bestsellers, including the #1 bestseller 1st to Die. He lives in Florida. Peter de Jonge wrote the bestselling Miracle on the 17th Green with James Patterson, and has written for several national publications. He lives in New York. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Jack Mullen's life is working out perfectly. A Harvard law student, he's loving his summer job in a Boston law firm, and the weekends spent at Martha's Vineyard. Until, that is, he arrives home, and his father greets him with the news that his brother, Peter, is dead. The police believe Peter committed suicide, but Jack senses a darker, dangerous truth, and is determined to bring a killer to justice... James Patterson's previous international number one bestsellers include Along Came a Spider, Kiss the Girls and Cat and Mouse, and now that he appears to have got his ill-advised desire to write saccharine Love Story-style fiction out of his system, Headline can confidently await another massive hit. Peter de Jonge wrote A Miracle on the 17th Green with Patterson. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. James Patterson and Peter de Jonge's The Beach House opens with the death of a handsome townie on Memorial Day weekend in the Hamptons, where being a single-digit millionaire is laughable and being poor is unthinkable. Peter Mullen is a high school dropout who parks cars at the private bashes of the superwealthy Barry and Campion Neubauer. When Peter is found dead on the beach, the Neubauers and their friends insist that he drowned, but his brother Jack, a law student who saw Peter's body, knows he was beaten to death. As Jack uncovers evidence of his brother's secret life, he begins to realize that the very rich are indeed different from the rest of us. Revenge is a dish best served cold, and Jack's patiently plotted payback for Peter's death is one that the Hamptons will not soon forget. There are no big surprises in The Beach House , but it's vintage Patterson, with plenty of action, villains with hearts blacker than obsidian, and a working-class hero who pulls himself up by the bootstraps. Patterson and de Jonge previously coauthored the inspirational golf romance Miracle on the 17th Green , but this new game of money, mayhem, and murder clearly suits them to a tee. --Barrie Trinkle --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more