Violets Are Blue

Violets Are Blue is a novel by the American writer James Patterson, published in 2001 and the seventh of his books about the detective and forensic psychiatrist Alex Cross.

Alex Cross is a homicide detective in Washington, D.C., with a second career as a psychologist, and the case he is pulled into begins with two bodies found in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. The victims were mauled and bitten in ways that suggest an animal attack and, in one case, a human one, and the local police are at a loss, so Cross is asked to join the investigation. What he finds is a killing pattern that reaches across the country and a group of people who follow the rituals of an old tradition around vampires, hunting together in a way that has gone unnoticed for years. At the same time, the man who has been taunting Cross across two earlier books continues to make himself felt.

Patterson's Alex Cross novels follow the detective and the cases that arrive through his work as a psychologist, and they are among the longest-running series in American crime fiction.