by James Patterson

A Mystery/Thriller, 2025 by Little Brown, 416 Pages 

What I Didn’t Like:

• The timeline raised a lot of questions for me. Was 20 years back enough? Nana was teaching still in her 70s? Did we know that? I’d need to plot this out (if I wanted to dedicate that much time to it) to convince myself it’s right. Also my copy of Along Came a Spider says it takes place in 1992 with a 4 year old baby girl so this one would be late 80s. I didn’t pick up the late 80s vibe from this one. Also that means the newest ones are only in the 2000s? But I could swear Ali interacts with things that would be in the 2020s. The timeline on this one sent me into a spiral. 
• Soneji reads very different in this book. Still terrifying, no question, but somehow more subdued, almost. Part of the problem, I think, is that we have already seen Soneji at his worst. We already know where this is going. Rewinding doesn’t give us new information so it just feels different.
• Did we go an entire book without Sampson calling Cross “Sugar”? Again, I’m confused. If you had asked me to name something you can count on to be included in a Cross book, that would have been one of them. It’s been canon in the books that he has called Cross “Sugar” from a young age. I don’t know why it’s missing from this book.

What I Did Like:

• This has a very different vibe to the rest of the series. Barely any Nana Mama, Maria alive and well, and a Cross who isn’t well known. It’s almost like a gateway into what things could have been. In a way, that’s the point. To look at what started it all. 
• When I read the original Soneji books I had a lot of questions about how what he did could have been possible. This addresses that in a way that helps answer some of those questions. 
• Ultimately, this one humbles Cross in an interesting way. There’s a lot of almost superhero energy about Cross, especially in the recent books. This one takes us back to his early days on the force and shows him making a huge mistake. Those kinds of things humanize him. 

Who Should Read This One:

• Fans of the series, obviously, should throw this one onto their TBR. It’s nice to walk back what you know and get a glimpse of how this all started. Warning: if you’re a fan of the books and have read them all, you will likely have a lot of the same continuity errors and timeline issues I had. Be aware. 
• If you’re just discovering Alex Cross through the TV show, this one will match the vibe you’re looking for and since it’s a prequel you’re fine to start with this one.

My Rating: 2 Stars

• I really struggled with what to rate this one. If anyone else had these kinds of continuity errors in their timeline, they’d be ripped apart by readers. But I can’t find much mention of it online and, yet, this feels like a really big one. Is this a good book? Yes. Does it feel like it tore the entire Alex Cross universe timeline to shreds? Also yes. As much as it pains me to rate it this way, that timeline bothered me enough for it to be problematic.