James Patterson is not an author who appeals to me, generally. The sorts of thrillers he writes aren't my usual thing; I tried one once and could neither get into it nor get past the language: there were far too many sentence fragments for my liking. It's a writing style I don't mind in moderation, but when authors overuse it, it grates on me like almost nothing else. Zoo, though, with its promise of a Michael Crichton-esque plot, sounded more to my liking than Patterson's usual oeuvre, so I picked up an ARC at Book Expo and decided to give it a whirl.

Zoo did indeed, as I was expecting, read like a Crichton story. Animals all over the earth are going berserk, behaving in unprecedentedly bizarre ways and attacking humans with no provocation. Isolated incidents become more and more frequent, and eventually they can no longer be covered up or hidden from. Humans are being hunted everywhere, whether by lions in the wilds of Africa or rats in New York City. Biologist Jackson Oz -- who has little credibility in the scientific community, having dropped out of his PhD program at Columbia -- has been sounding the alarm about this frightening animal aggression, but people only start listening after the attacks can no longer be ignored.

As with so many thrillers, the plot is pretty preposterous and has holes you could drive a truck through, and there are some "twists" that are easily spotted from a mile away (not to mention a couple of plot points that are left dangling entirely, never to be resolved), but it moves along quickly. I found the ending unsatisfying; in the last quarter or so of the book it becomes clear that Patterson is (rather clunkily) using the book to deliver a message about technology and the environment. "Subtle" is clearly not a word in his vocabulary. The pacing of the action at the end was strange, too: it moved very quickly from a sort-of-resolution into an epilogue (and, honestly, even the last few pages before the actual epilogue) that seemed tacked on, somehow, as if he wasn't quite sure how to wrap things up after the climax. It was a reasonable enough way to end the story, but it just felt very clumsy, somehow, to me -- it seemed very hurried and didn't flow with the rest of the book.

Despite all of this, I can't say I didn't enjoy the novel. The premise was interesting, and I certainly wanted to know what was going to happen next. If the ending hadn't fallen flat for me, I probably would have given it four stars rather than three. It would be interesting to see what a different writer -- someone who more frequently writes this sort of scientific thriller -- would have done with the story.

(If I may be snarky, I did have to chuckle at the blurb on the cover of the book: "Once in a lifetime, a writer puts it all together." Once in a lifetime, huh? I guess we can all stop reading Patterson now. So much more room on the library shelves!)