A handful of observations about this book — the first in the long-running Alex Cross crime novels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
First, it is a very long book, much longer than, for example, Roses are Red<\/em>, the sixth book in the series, which I recently read. Patterson’s sense of pacing probably improved after this one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Second, two important aspects of Alex Cross’ life — the fact that he is a psychologist and the fact that he is Black — take centre stage here. In some later books, both are on the back burner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Third, the book has almost nothing in common with the film based on it. It’s been a while since I saw the film, but I remember it as being tighter, with better command of plot twists than this book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And finally, if this had been the first James Patterson book I read, or if I’d never seen the films, I’m not sure I would have continued with the series. But the books do improve after this one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A handful of observations about this book — the first in the long-running Alex Cross crime novels. First, it is a very long book, much longer than, for example, Roses are Red, the sixth book…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3186,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3185"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3187,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3185\/revisions\/3187"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}