Along Came a Spider by James Patterson

Continuing on with James Patterson's books, and I finally managed to read an Alex Cross book. Along Came a Spider is the first one in the series, and is a story about an evil deranged kidnapper who kidnaps two children of hight profile families to make himself famous. Alex Cross is a homicide detective with a Ph.D. in psychology, a real hunk with adorable children and no wife, so no wonder he's seduced by a brilliant beautiful FBI detective Jezzie Flanagan who is also working on the case.

This book, like promised, is much better than 1st to Die - but similar elements bothered me about this one too. I thought the plot was really clever and well built - but the characters were just unbelievable. I like a good romance as much as the next girl, but come on - I want some kind of a build up. Not "I really felt I could talk to her, trust her like I hadn't trusted anyone in a long time" in one conversation - but building the trust and giving the reader some basis to believe that too. In other words: show, don't tell. And on several occasions things like that just happened - just stating in one sentence what the deal was (like how much he loved his kids, but then without a thought or a word would disappear to a romantic holiday with his lover for days on end), almost like Patterson didn't want to go through the trouble of showing what was happening so he just said it instead. It reminds me of what Katri of Kirjailijaelämää wrote some time ago - that it is much easier to let the actors deal with how the situation is conveyed to the audience instead of having to write every little nuance in words - it's like Patterson is writing a screenplay, not a book (and I have to add at this point that I quite enjoyed the film version of 1st to Die what I watched couple of weeks back - it worked much better than the book because of just that).

Another thing that bothered me was the huge deal and the fanfare Patterson makes about Alex being black. It's partly probably because I've been living in Vancouver for a year where race absolutely does not matter, and "mixed couples" are an everyday thing. But the way he wallows in the fact that this black guy had done so well but was so much hindered with all these white folks, and how dating this blond white woman was like the biggest taboo and what was everyone thinking when they saw them... After a while it just started to annoy me - and I'm not saying he's not writing about real issues, I'm just saying that he likes to make a big deal about "minority issues", first it was women in 1st to Die and now it's blacks in this one. I sincerely hope he eases off the issue in the later books... I would just like to deal with people as individuals, not categorized by the race or gender.

Having said all that, I did mostly enjoy the book and I always wanted to know what was happening next. And I am planning to read more in the future - but for now, next genre books I'm getting my hands on are from P.D. James, Minette Walters and Patricia Cornwell who have all new books out for the Christmas market.

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