London Bridges

London Bridges is a thriller by the American writer James Patterson, published in 2004 and the tenth of his novels about Alex Cross.

The book opens with a town in the Nevada desert being emptied in daylight and then destroyed by a bomb, an attack claimed by a Russian criminal known as the Wolf. Alex Cross, who has moved from homicide in Washington to work for the FBI, is on holiday in San Francisco when he is told what has happened, and he is drawn back into a case that gets larger as it goes on. The Wolf has engaged an old enemy of Cross, a colonel called Geoffrey Shafer, to help him with a plan of attacks in several countries, and the novel follows the search for the people behind them while the threat keeps moving. Cross is a forensic psychiatrist by training and the books are written from inside his head, which is why the investigation and the family he is trying to keep out of it are always running at the same time.

The Alex Cross novels are one of the longest-running series in American crime fiction, and this volume sits in the middle of it.