Along Came a Spider

February 1, 1993
This second big winter thriller by a writer named Patterson (see Fiction Forecasts, Oct. 19) features a villain (a multiple-personality serial killer/kidnapper) whom the publisher hopes will remind readers of Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter, and a hero who is compared to those of Jonathan Kellerman. Unfortunately, the novel has few merits of its own to set against those authors' works. Hero Alex Cross is in fact a black senior detective in Washington, D.C., who is also a psychiatrist and has a facile but not entirely convincing line of sentimental-cynical patter. The villain is Gary Soneji/Murphy (read Hyde/Jekyll), who kills for recognition, and finally kidnaps the kids of prominent parents. Alex is soon on the case, more enraged by Gary's killing of poor ghetto blacks than by the Lindbergh-inspired kidnapping, and becomes involved with a gorgeous, motorcycle-riding Secret Service supervisor who is not what she seems. Soneji/Murphy is eventually captured--but can the bad part of him be proven guilty? There is even a hint at the end that he may survive for a sequel, though the reader has virtually forgotten him by then. Spider reads fluently enough, but its action and characters seem to have come out of some movie-inspired never-never land. If a contemporary would-be nail-biter is to thrill as it should, it urgently needs stronger connections to reality than this book has. Come back, Thomas Harris! 150,000 first printing; Literary Guild main selection.

December 1, 1992
Alex Cross, a black Washington, D.C., police detective with a Ph.D. in psychology, and Jezzie Flanagan, a white motorcycling Secret Service agent, become lovers as they work together to apprehend a chilling psychopath who has kidnapped two children from a posh private school. The psychotic villain, who aspires to become more notorious than Lindbergh baby kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann, is effectively nightmarish. Atypical characters, sex, sometimes shocking violence, and several surprising plot twists are all attention-grabbing, while short chapters with a shifting viewpoint add brisk pacing and genuine suspense. Patterson's storytelling talent is in top form in this grisly escapist yarn. Highly recommended for public libraries. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/92.-- Will Hepfer, SUNY at Buffalo Libs.

Copyright 1992 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 1992
Touted by its publisher as "the first new fiction bestseller of 1993," "Along Came a Spider" opens with a gruesome multiple murder in the projects southeast of Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. and the kidnapping of two famous children--the son of the Treasury secretary and the daughter of a movie star--from Georgetown Day School by the school's math and computer teacher. Is the teacher (whose ransom bid is signed "Son of Lindbergh") a victim of a rare multiple personality disorder, or a psychopath who feigns multiple personalities to prove his brilliance and escape punishment? African-American psychologist Alex Cross, a widowed district police detective with two children and a very wise grandmother, seeks the answer in tense collaboration with FBI and Secret Service agents. As Son of Lindbergh produces one surprise after another, Cross is startled to find both interracial love and icy psychopathology within the team of law enforcement professionals pursuing the clever, manipulative criminal. Patterson, author of such previous Little, Brown novels as "The Thomas Berryman Number" (1975) and "The Midnight Club" (1989), seems a bit less confident inside the mind of a possible psychopath than retired psychologist Jonathan Kellerman in his Alex Delaware mysteries (or Thomas Harris in his Hannibal Lector books); but "Along Came a Spider"'s fascinating characters and pulse-pounding plot ensure that Patterson's latest will keep readers guessing from chapter one's mutilated corpses to the execution of someone (who?) in the novel's final pages. ((Reviewed Sept. 15, 1992))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1992, American Library Association.)