My 56

“I’m Alex Cross, with the FBI,” I said to Brigid, who seemed tremendously self-assured for her age, especially during this crisis. “I think that your father is expecting me.”

(Page 56 in hardcover, published in 1999)

Book Beginnings

The Phipps Plaza shopping mall in Atlanta was a showy montage of pink-granite floors, sweeping bronze-trimmed staircases, gilded Napoleonic design, lighting that sparkled like halgen spotlights. A man and a woman watched the target – “Mom”- as she left Niketown with sneakers and whatnot for her three daughters packed under one arm.

GOODREADS BLURB: Alex Cross, Patterson”s black lawman hero, has left the D.C. police force for the FBI. But Cross was a star cop, so when the Bureau becomes aware that attractive white women are disappearing at an unusually high rate in the nation”s capital, Cross, despite still being in training at Quantico, is brought onto the case and is personally mentored by the Bureau”s director, earning the ire of some Feds but the support of others. Behind the disappearances is a sexual slavery operation run as a sideline by one of the more believable and most compellingly evil villains in the Patterson universe, the Wolf, a mysterious former KGB man who”s now the world”s top mobster. The narrative throughout is swift and varied, as Patterson cuts among the diabolical schemes of a Russian magnate who may be the Wolf, the plight of several kidnap victims, the dogged pursuit by Cross and company of the Wolf, and the hideous designs of the members of an encrypted computer chat room who pay the Wolf fortunes to snatch women who fit their fantasies. And there”s domestic drama, too, as the mother of Cross”s young son, Alex, decides that she wants her boy back. Full of plot surprises and featuring a balanced mix of intrigue, hard action and angst, the novel, on which Patterson notably does not share cover credit, grips from start to finish. The Alex Cross series remains Patterson”s finest, and this is the finest Cross in years.

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