Thread: Have you noticed a trend in your favorite author's writing?

And by trend I mean, have you noticed that they seem to favor a word or a phrase or a physical description or even a place or time period that they use over and over again in different books?

I'm not an uber fan of James Patterson, but I like how his crazy serial killers work. Here's some things I've picked up in the Alex Cross series alone:

-most characters are 6 ft. 2 . 6 ft.. it seems that even people who haven't even measured the stranger described as being six feet know exactly how tall they are down to the inch..

-Captive males wear "nothing but a silver thong" .. Is that.. James Patterson's favorite lingerie on men? ._. Why siler? Why not white or orange or polka dots!?


Yeah I've noticed that in at least 3 books practically... perhaps they're there in more than that...

But do you notice your author likes to reuse certain places, words, phrases, descriptions, etc. in more than one book?

Punctuation mania by writer Tom Wolfe.

I stopped reading his Alex Cross series because Patterson is such a shameless media whore. He mentioned 6 times that Cross looked like Morgan Freeman in one book. It was such a turnoff to me I never touched anything else by him. If you want a really good detective series you should start the Prey series by John Sandford. Start with the Rules of Prey and continue. You won't be disappointed. The detective Lucas Davenport is so cool!

No, I haven't.