Review: Cross Kill by James Patterson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Plot Summary:

From GoodReads:

Along Came a Spider killer Gary Soneji has been dead for over ten years. Alex Cross watched him die. But today, Cross saw him gun down his partner. Is Soneji alive? A ghost? Or something even more sinister?  

Nothing will prepare you for the wicked truth.

The story begins with Alex Cross and his partner John Sampson working at a community soup kitchen.  Shots ring out and kitchen workers are injured.  In tending to them, the two men are also attacked by the shooter.  Sampson is shot in the head, and Cross in the chest, protected only by his Kelvar.  Even more of a blow, Cross sees the shooter as a man whom he saw die over ten years previously (for perspective, Along Came a Spider was the first Alex Cross book, while this is #23.5).  While Sampson fights for his life in the hospital, Cross hunts for the shooter.  He doubts his eyes and his memories, trying to find answers about one of the worst criminals he has encountered in his long career.

Story comments:

This is one of the first Alex Cross stories I've read (or listened to). I think it might even be the first, though it seems hard to imagine, as many Cross stories as Patterson has written.  Maybe I'm just familiar with the few which have been made into movies.  At any rate, there it is. 

Book Shots are novellas, really, designed to be single-sitting (or single-day) reads.  They are written to fall in-between the full-length novels in the series.  This one, for example, is listed as #23.5 in the Alex Cross Series.  In terms of listening length, I listened to the audiobook during my commute to work, and it took me less that a week.

Part of the story centers on Sampson's shooting and recovery. It honestly felt like those sections dragged a little, lots of hospital visits and emotional build-up over whether Cross would lose his childhood friend and partner.  Good emotional build-up (especially in such a short book), but not having read others in the series, I just didn't have the same emotional investment in John Sampson that others might have. 

I also was probably more interested in the mystery of the man rising from the dead to shoot at Cross and his partner. That side of the story really drew me in. There were so many questions and potential twists and clues and suspense, that the big reveal at the end was a bit of a let-down, quite honestly. The solution seemed a bit simple and rushed, but it is only a BookShot after all.

My BIGGEST frustration was by far the huge cliffhanger! I don't mind books in a series carrying subplots over between books; characters do have to develop, after all, and some series create an archnemesis (a Big Bad, to quote Buffy) or extreme set of circumstances, which may take several books to solve or overcome.  I am not, however, a fan of huge cliffhangers where you MUST go out and get the next book to find out what happens in the main plot. Just makes it feel like you've read an excerpt of a book, and not a book in itself (at least in my opinion).  If you don't mind these, or are already well-invested in Alex Cross and his world, then you probably won't mind the cliffhanger nearly as much as I did.  For me, it was almost a, "Wait, what just happened??" moment.  At which point the audiobook credits began playing...

Audiobook comments:

Ruben Santiago-Hudson does a good job putting emotion into the character, and I enjoyed listening to him. Of course, Alex Cross now looks like Capt Roy Montgomery (Castle) in my mind, but that's a minor issue. My only real complaint was that they put in sound effects for the sirens, gunshots, etc.  Other books I've listened to just had the narrator say something ("bang!", "crack!", etc.).  The actual noises were very startling, especially if I was listening as I did something else (driving, running, etc.).

Overall comments:

As I said, this is my first Alex Cross book.  I'm interested to read more, starting at the beginning.  Even though I know Soneji died in that book, I'm interested in Patterson's writing now.  The suspense and tension he built in the story was very well done.  My minor complaints are really partially my own fault - who starts a series 23 books in, after all?  The biggest reason I gave it only three stars was the cliffhanger at the end.  It'd probably have another star from me if that wasn't there (side note: the plot twist was a good one; I just wish it had been developed and resolved in this book instead of the next).  If you're already sucked into Alex Cross's world, or if you don't mind huge cliffhangers in your books, then you'd probably not mind that nearly as much as I did.