Kill Alex Cross

October 3, 2011
The 18th Alex Cross thriller (after 2010’s Cross Fire) recycles the kidnapping story line from the African-American super detective’s debut, Along Came a Spider. When the U.S. president’s children, 12-year-old Ethan and 14-year-old Zoe, elude their Secret Service detail by slipping out of a lecture hall window at their Washington, D.C., school, they end up the captives of a sadist, who sends the chief executive a note reading: “There is no ransom. There are no demands. The price, Mr. President, is knowing that you will never see your children again.” After some perfunctory turf battles, Cross, who’s with the D.C. Metropolitan police, gets assigned to the case, but he takes much longer than most readers will to identify the abductor. A Muslim terrorist subplot to destabilize the federal government does little to redeem the tired main plot. Patterson neither sweats the details nor invests his lead with more than two dimensions.

January 30, 2012
There’s one thing listeners can be sure Patterson will not do in this audio edition of the latest installment in the Alex Cross series, and that is kill Alex Cross. This time around, the famous detective finds himself investigating the kidnapping of the president’s children and several terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C. Andre Braugher—who smoothly reads sections of the book narrated by Cross—captures the tough, often frustrated, at times furious lawman, but also portrays Cross’s warmer side as he deals with domestic problems involving his children, a streetwise waif, and his cantankerous aunt. Zach Grenier—who reads portions of the book not narrated by Cross—deftly renders a husband and wife terrorist team, while creating a variety of foreign accents. But his major achievement is his interpretation of the psychotic kidnapper whose oral dairy of the abduction and its aftermath is bone-chillingly creepy. A Little, Brown hardcover.