BOOK REVIEW: Along Came A Spider – by James Patterson

Title: Along Came A Spider
(Alex Cross Series #1)
Author: James Patterson
Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Crime
First published: 1993
Finished reading: February 4th 2014
Pages: 435

“It’s a common enough psych term,” I told him. “All of us shrinks talk about VFC when we get together. Very fucking crazy, Gerry.”

Ok, so I said to myself I wouldn’t read another Patterson for a while. But I guess I just couldn’t resist in the end… I was looking for some easy reading before chewing on some classics, and there is nothing better than a novel written by James Patterson. I chose  to read the first of the Alex Cross series, partly because I couldn’t remember reading it before. It didn’t wow me, but it did the job: easy entertaining and a brain now ready for some real literature.

In this first of a long row of books in this series, the world is introduced to African-American Detective Alex Cross. He is trying to get over the violent death of his wife (although nothing is explained about how that happened), and lives with Nana Mama and his two children. Then the world is shocked by the kidnapping of two children with famous parents. The kidnapper is Gary Soneji, the math teacher at their school, and soon a man hunt starts… But Gary is a true psychopath and a serial killer and hard to catch. And things are not as they seem… It is a real challenge for Cross and his parter Sampson to catch the kidnapper, who is leaving a trail of deaths behind him. And it becomes even complicated when he starts an affair with Jezzie Flanagan, who was in charge of the two Secret Service agents employed to protect the two children…

Not a bad read, I guess it serves its purpose. As long as you don’t expect the next Nobel prize for literature and don’t mind the sometimes tacky references to the whole racism theme, you won’t have problems with this novel.