In many ways, Black Friday fits more firmly in a cinematic tradition than a literary tradition. Patterson's techniques are quite filmic. For example, he uses flashback extensively, particularly when detailing the past of David Hudson. Two chapters are devoted exclusively to Hudson's experience in a Vietnamese POW camp; the chapters are titled "La Hoc Noh Prison," and give the dates on which the events were supposed to take place. This technique shows the reader how real and vivid the experience still is for Hudson and ties his past directly and explicitly to his present.

The characters are also familiar to us from popular films of the 1980s. They are instantly recognizable stock characters: the tough but sensitive cop, the-cold bureaucrat, the angry vet with a chip on his shoulder. These characters are echoed in the Lethal Weapon films and the Die Hard films, in particular.

Throughout the novel...