USA TODAY International Edition
Patterson blitzes true NFL tragedy
Best-selling author James Patterson populates his murder-mystery novels with cold-blooded killers, smart detectives and hard-charging attorneys, driven by plots entangled in guns, money and drugs. You’ll find all that in Patterson’s latest. Except this one isn’t fiction.
Billed as “the definitive, never before told account” of the Aaron Hernandez story, All-American Murder: The Rise and Fall of Aaron Hernandez, The Superstar Whose Life Ended on Murderers’ Row by Patterson with Alex Abramovich and Mike Harvkey (Little, Brown, 400 pp., ★★★) is as “ripped from the headlines” as it gets.
Inspired by news accounts that broke in the summer of 2013, when police tied the New England Patriots’ tight end to a gruesome homicide in North Attleboro, Mass., it digs deep into four years of breaking news culminating in Hernandez’s prison-cell suicide.
All-American Murder starts with a high school football player who, jogging home on June 17, 2013, finds a body near an industrial park in North Attleboro. Police determine it’s an execution-style homicide.
Incriminating evidence includes bullet casings, sneaker prints, a baseball cap, a smoked blunt. A wallet ID identifies the victim as Odin Lloyd, the boyfriend of Hernandez’s fiancée’s sister. Rental car keys in Lloyd’s pocket link to Hernandez, who lives nearby. Security cameras were rolling. Patterson had to be thinking you couldn’t get by with this in fiction.
The book backtracks to Hernandez growing up in working-class Bristol, Conn. His father, Dennis, was a UConn gridiron legend who kept sons Aaron and D.J. on the straight and narrow.
Trouble started when Hernandez’s mother, Terri, cheated on Dennis, causing a family rift. When his father died unexpectedly, Hernandez was distraught and started hanging with gangbangers and druggies.
At the University of Florida, the prized baller got into bar fights, failed drug tests and was rumored to have been involved in a shooting. Seems that after the Gators won the 2006 and 2008 national championships, UF players became celebrities in Gainesville, some behaving as if they could “get by with murder.”
Because of his drug problems and questionable character, Hernandez was drafted a lowly 113th in the 2010 NFL draft by the Patriots. Even as a rising NFL star, he was troubled, mercurial and paranoid.
Meanwhile, besides the Lloyd killing, Hernandez apparently shot his best friend in the face in Miami. And, though acquitted, he likely had a hand in a 2012 double murder in Boston.
So, despite millions of reasons not to waste his life, including a $40 million contract from the Patriots and a baby daughter with his fiancée, Hernandez never stopped believing he could get by with murder.
The authors effectively tabloid-proof this shocking story by lining up the facts and labeling rumors. And while the matter-of-fact narrative’s Dragnet vibe might drone on at times and its toomany cliffhangers feel like a cable TV series in the making, Patterson fans will be delighted. This disturbing true-crime thriller is another fast and captivating Patterson read.