I, Alex Cross

I, Alex Cross is a novel by the American writer James Patterson, published on 16 November 2009 by Little, Brown. It is the sixteenth book in the series about the detective Alex Cross.

The book opens with a celebration, which is where the news finds Cross: Caroline, twenty-four years old and the only daughter of his late brother, has been killed in Virginia. He takes his girlfriend, Briana Stone, with him to Richmond and finds that the body was dismembered in the boot of a car driven by someone with connections to organised crime, which turns a family tragedy into a case with a much larger shape. The investigation is also personal in a way that Cross does not expect, because Caroline was living a few miles from him, in a life she had never mentioned and that included work as a high-end escort.

Patterson alternates Cross's domestic life with the pursuit of the people responsible, and the series runs on the pressure between the detective's job and the family he is trying to keep out of it.