Cross Fire
by James Patterson
(Century, R215)
The world’s best-selling thriller writer takes the concept of a fox in the henhouse to another level in his latest offering.
Our protagonist, Detective Alex Cross, is assigned to a case where prominent lobbyists, and the judges who support them, are being meticulously assassinated by a sniper team that refers to itself as The Patriot.
With the crimes reported in the media, law enforcement is placed under tremendous pressure as the vigilantes’ actions portray a kind of crude justice.
The criminals work scrupu-lously, with no trace of evidence being left at the crime scenes. That’s until one of them, who’s kind of a retarded genius with deadly rifle crafts-manship, leads the operation astray.
The investigation becomes tedious when corpses start popping up with numbers encrypted on them. Cross and his team are faced with a new kind of homicide that incorporates different killing methods, taking him back to square one.
As the story progresses, bits of the pieces start fitting together, but little does Cross know that there’s a much greater threat closer to home.
Kyle Craig, the most wanted man in America, who escaped from prison after being arrested by Cross a few years back, has returned to take his revenge.
It soon turns to a deadly game with bodies everywhere. Clues are incorporated into murders that notify Cross that his nemesis is looming, not knowing that he is closer to home than he can imagine. With the cesspool of carcasses and unknown motives, the story ensues with a huge question hanging in the air: How is Craig going to kill Cross?
The plot is thick and intense. Cunning separates those who prevail from the ones who meet their makers. – Tshepo Tshabalala