In the Torture Room

“The Murder House”

James Patterson and David Ellis

Little, Brown, $28

It’s not easy criticizing a writer who gives independent bookstores a million bucks just because he likes them, and who a year later, out of the largesse of his one-man bailout program, doubles down and offers to pay their employees’ Christmas bonuses.

Then again, who’s to say how much of “The Murder House” James Patterson actually wrote, collaborating as he does, and not for the first time, with David Ellis, an Illinois novelist and appellate court justice unafraid to invoke an “excited utterance” exception in a scene of courtroom evidentiary proceedings. (Inadmissible!)

Presumably Mr. Patterson is more than a mere sketcher of outlines or a reviewer of pages, signing off on one brief chapter after another. Mr. Ellis himself has said the man with top billing acts as a goad, urging drama and heat, not polysyllabic words and description, sex and ratcheted-up violence, not research.

So this, in other words, is a page-turner, the fastest read in the East. “The Murder House” is so plot-driven, in fact, the twists and guessing games so plentiful, its plot can scarcely be discussed without giving it all away. 

Be that as it may, there’s this house. It sits at the end of what’s called Ocean Drive in Bridgehampton and it’s rumored to be haunted. Not by the ghosts of great-grandchildren stiffed out of their pen company inheritance, not even by the specter of a Midwestern industrialist howling over the bulldozing of his historic Gilded Age stick style manse. No, the place has simply seen its share of slaughter — mostly women, often prostitutes, many in a ­basement torture chamber outfitted with chains, cages, and a metal spike for victims to be lowered upon, all at the hands of generations of a twisted family, beginning with the patriarch, Winston Dahlquist, a Dutch settler, we’re told, who built the house in the late 1700s and ran a lucrative potato farm.

And yet one surviving visitor from the recent past turns out to be our heroine, Jenna Murphy, a Southampton Town cop late of the N.Y.P.D. Smart, tough yet attractive, red-headed, Bronx background, a fondness for drink — have I read too many of these or is this Detective Darlene O’Hara, from another Patterson protégé, Peter de Jonge, all over again? 

Regardless, she’s at once companionable and relentless, if a little clueless in the boyfriend department. Can it be other than diminishing to have her notice the ringless finger of the “hunky owner” of Tasty’s Diner? But at least she kicks a slick-haired Wall Streeter with a “hocus pocus” investment job to the curb (after punching him in the mouth, no less).

The Hamptons are described as the realm of “socialites, the mega-wealthy, the trust fund babies and personal injury lawyers, the songwriters and tennis pros, the TV producers and stock speculators.” Fair enough. And by the by, the authors (Mr. Patterson’s a Floridian) get a lot right, from the references to Bridgehampton as a hamlet to the description of its school, “red brick and white pillars on Main Street — Montauk Highway, if you prefer.” 

More welcome, however, is the tour we get of the underside hereabouts as Murphy pursues her hunches: the self-consciously named Dive Bar, for instance, or the hell of the Riverhead jail, “a dank, dark, miserable cesspool, purgatory for the accused in Suffolk County, short on hope and long on desperation and bitterness.” A female visitor is “a rose sprouting in a swamp of manure.”

It must be said that the murders, in more than one passage, can be rough and graphic going. Consider: The perp carries in his “Fun Bag” a corkscrew, handcuffs, and a “handheld kitchen torch.” There’s death by hot poker through kidney, and up in Sing Sing, when a set-up (and, yes, hunky) local construction worker, dubbed “Surfer Jesus” by the glib media, finds himself crucified on a wooden worktable, the reader may start questioning the redeeming value.

At any rate, something smaller than a railroad spike was used, so let’s move on.

But, to where? Given the strictures of not blowing the whodunit, perhaps we can safely leave off with an image from near the book’s close, where, after decades of Bridgehampton history in which one great old structure after another was torn down, a tradition that dispiritingly continues, at last there’s a house that deserves it.