Soon into CROSS, I realized Patterson is a powerful writer who can jack up the emotional impact of a scene in just a few words.
That’s kind of easy when it comes to his hero, Alex Cross, since this story involves the death Cross’ wife about twelve years ago early in his career.
Yet I also found the initial scene introducing the main psychopathic killer an effective one. Who’s bold and brash enough to just walk into a Mafia social club and kill one of the soldiers in front of everybody?
Okay, it turns out he was working for another Mafia boss and did it on orders to threaten them, but it was still such a wild and crazy thing to do it you have to wonder what else he’s capable of.
Turns out, quite a lot. The killer is also a serial rapist. He’s so into death and mutilation and taking pictures of his victims that it’s difficult to believe that he was able to remain free of the law for as long as he did, especially after the Mafia boss stopped using him because he was such a loose cannon.
Patterson is such an emotionally strong writer that it’s easy to get caught up in the story — the sequence of scenes and character interactions and want to know how it will turn out. It kept me up past my bedtime, and not many books do that these days.
Unfortunately, in the afterglow of finishing the books, as I thought about it, I realized many pieces did not fit together.
At the time of the book’s present, the psychopath has married and had a family and is living in Maryland, and likes to go hunting for women to rape in Washington D.C. He’s evidently been at this for years, but only recently did this string of serial rapes of terrified women who refuse to talk come to the attention of the police.
Why not before this? And why didn’t this become a problem while he still lived in New York City?
He’s an assassin for hire, but he’s so wild and sadistic it’s hard to believe. He’s good in the sense of enjoying his work, but without his Mafia connections how did he hold up. I could believe he’s good with a knife, but he’s not so good at other skills you’d think a hit man for hire would have.
Certainly discretion — at the end of the book we see him on a job kill both the husband who hired him and the wife he was hired to kill, after making them bid up his fee. Who would want to hire him after that?
Near the end of a book we meet — for the first time — a friend of his from childhood who deliberately leads Cross astray. Introducing this character so close to the end of the book is poor planning. And how did he know the address of an innocent family to send Cross to? And why did Cross just let him walk away?
Near the end of the book a Mafia guy is introduced. After Sampson Cross’ partner arrests the man, he tells the partner he has information about who killed Cross’ wife. But before he can talk — while still locked up in the police station, mind you — he’s killed. We never learn by whom or why. Or how or why he knew anything about the death of Cross’ wife. He’s dead and then totally forgotten by the other characters and the plot line.
I believe Patterson meant to imply this killing was done by Sampson himself, for reasons I can’t explain without giving away the book’s final revelation about who actually did kill Cross’ wife and what happened to him. But this is never made explicit.
And I could be wrong. It certainly critical police ethical issues, but so does what Sampson did, though we can sympathize. Patterson avoids all this. We’re just left happy for Cross.
Fiction writing is the ultimate exercise in balancing right brain logic with left brain emotions. Patterson wins on emotions but, at least in this book, still needs to concoct plots that hold up to rational analysis — in some cases just a few lines would have provided the rational connective tissue needed to satisfy the reader’s whole brain.
Still, emotional but irrational writers are more fun to read than rational but unemotional writers (such as Agatha Christie and her many descendants).
Related Game Books
Cross by James Patterson
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