Along Came a Spider

The ending of this was really well done but shocking which I liked.
This is the first book in the Alex Cross series.
Alex Cross is an african american police detective with a psychology degree who is investigating a series of murders in the black community when he and his partner (Sammy) is pulled off the case to investigate the high profile kidnapping case involving the child of an actress and the child of the minister of finance.
Patterson does a really good job building the suspense and setting the scene without making gorey descriptions. What he fails at miserably though is writing a sex scene that doesn't make you either spit take you hot beverage or just laugh at the patheticness of. Seriously, they so are terrible that I hope that is was nominated for Bad Sex in Fiction Award.
Thankfully that is not what I am reading these books for and I look forward to reading more in this series.

Alex Cross is a detective and a psychologist and he and his partner are investigating a triple homicide on Southside when they are pulled off the case to help locate two missing children. Alex and his partner are furious that the death of a black family is so easily disregarded and the kidnapping of 2 wealthy white children made the priority. The children were kidnapped from a private school for high profile families who had secret service protection. Alex Cross wants those children found safely but he can't get the image of the little black child that had been murdered out of his mind.

This book is fast-paced and has a lot of twists and turns. It is a great read.

Having a mind-numbing third-shift job that lets you listen to audiobooks while you work has led to me trying authors I don't usually care for, like James Patterson. When you need something to listen to and you're at the mercy of what's available, stuff happens.

I like the concept of Alex Cross. I understand why people like these books. To me, they're just okay. The first two books in the series are salacious for the sake of being salacious. Alex Cross is a frustrating protagonist, though. He's one of those “too good to be real” types who always has women falling for him, and never met a punch he couldn't shake off.

I think that's why I wrote the protagonists I did in my own mystery novel–they're the polar opposite of the Alex Cross-types. There's something exhausting about those beyond perfect protagonists. You just know they're the author's own avatar of who he wants to be, or thinks he is, and that's a little sad.

Officially: 2.5 Stars.

Ugh...I hate that I didn't love this book. For all it's popularity, I simply don't understand how people drool all over this story. Alex Cross is a compelling protagonist, but I would like to have seen far more of his human element come through. That is an understandably difficult thing to accomplish and it's hard to offer a coarse opinion. I sympathize and I have no answers. The only benchmark I have is in other author's work. Other authors do it for me.