Cross

Cross is a novel by the American writer James Patterson, published in 2006 and one of his long series about the psychologist and detective Alex Cross.

The murder that opens the book is the one that made Cross who he is, and the case he is drawn back into brings the old investigation out of the file. Sampson, his partner and closest friend, is the man who asks him, and the two of them work the Georgetown attacks while the professional relationship is complicated by the fact that Cross is not officially anything any more. Patterson writes in very short chapters and switches between the investigators, the attacker and the women in danger, so the book moves quickly between points of view. The focus is the pursuit rather than the private life, although Cross's family is present throughout.

It is one of the later books in the series, and it returns to a case referred to in the earliest of them, giving the older investigation a shape it did not have before.