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The best pattern (for action/thriller novels at least) is that they should have an slowly accellerating rhythm, aided by decreasing chapter length, with short chapters only around the face to face conflict at the end to give a sense of speed. But the chapters introducing the locale, the characters, the Maguffin (ie what it's all about) and the start of the action, should be long enough to do the job properly.
When I see a book of 100+ chapters, and the opening chapters are very short, I see an author who, I assume, doesn't know how to handle sustained scenes, exposition, and smooth transitions. Short sharp scenes are so much easier to write than a sustained narrative. So I usually avoid them; not my preference.
Frequent changes of point-of-view, or many different points-of-view, also annoy me. Unless there is a pressing need for it, this is a practice best avoided. I once read an award-winning novel which not only had many shifts in point of view, but had some chapters in first person, some in third person, and to make it worse, shifted from past to present tense among those chapters as well. It was a muddle from go to whoa. Don't ask me how it won a literary award. I gathered that the author did a creative writing course; what on earth did they teach?
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