I've read the first 80 pages or so of "Private Las Vegas" and have made a fairly unusual decision for me, which is, having started a book, I am going to discard it and not bother finishing it. Frankly it is a load of tosh, and I have no idea what the point of the story is at all. Coming to the book straight after Stephen King's "Revival" probably doesn't help either. That was excellent, and deserves another post all of its own at some point.
I did read one other in the "Private" series (Private Games) in 2012 as it was based around the London Olympics, and from what little I remember, that was pretty far-fetched, but did at least have the games a centrepiece around which to build a story. This one is just rubbish. I don't know how much Mr Patterson is to blame - I expect he just lends his name to the title to help shift copies (and so deserves a fair degree of the blame anyway) and that the vast majority of the writing gets done by his co-writer Maxine Paetro. After all, despite a rocky period a while back, most of the recent Alex Cross books have been OK - I enjoyed "Hope to Die".
Good job this one was a library book. I will be taking it back so that someone else can give it a try, but my reading time is too precious to be wasting it on this drivel.