Lifeguard

Lifeguard is a thriller by the American writer James Patterson, published in 2005 and set in Florida and the north-east.

Ned is a lifeguard with a garage apartment and a cousin who has spent his life looking for angles, and the two of them join a burglary that is supposed to be over in minutes. What happens instead leaves several people dead, and Ned is the one who has to run: he leaves his job, his town and the woman he had fallen in love with, on the principle that being fast and unfindable is the only protection available. The book follows the hunt for him and his own attempts to work out who set the robbery up, moving between Florida and the north-east, and it brings in an FBI art-theft investigator whose case turns out to be the same one. Patterson writes short chapters with several points of view, and the pace is the point.

It is one of the author's stand-alone thrillers, written between instalments of his longer series.