This is just my opinion, so please take this with a grain of salt...
I personally hate the idea of moving from 1st to 3rd person. James Patterson does this in practically every book (at least the few I've forced myself to read), and it drives me nuts.
Here's the reason I personally don't like it. Logically, it makes no sense to me (at least the way Patterson does it). When you switch to 3rd person, who's telling the story? The narrator? Where's the narrator when I'm telling the story? It feels to me like two people are telling the story. I think it's the sort of thing that really aggravates some people (like me) and yet doesn't bother others in the slightest. If you take any of Patterson's Alex Cross novels and simply change "I" to "Alex" or "he" it would make a world of difference to me
I also think it's a cheap way out, plot wise. One of the things that's great about 1st-person stories is that the reader gets to discover things as the main character does (this is why many mysteries and detective stories are written in 1st person). When the writer breaks out of that, I feel cheated, like the writer wasn't clever enough to come up with a way to tell the story without moving to 3rd person to ramp up the suspense.
That being said, older novels, like Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), sort of do this, if memory serves. That book is technically written in first person (at least it starts out that way), but the writer of the novel is telling the story in 3rd person (he's telling Frankenstein's story as told to him by Frankenstein--I think I'm remembering that right, maybe not), which happens for most of the novel. It's much more logical to me than having disjointed switches in the form of scenes.
Anyway, like I said, this is strictly personal opinion, and I'm sure there are hundreds of examples that I've never read that make perfect sense...
-ZB
