Hard to put down

James Patterson is synonymous with Dr Alex Cross – he has written more than 20 novels in the Cross series.

By now the adventures of the Washington DC Metro cop and former FBI profiler have become an opiate to his fans.

Usually Cross is cool, analytical and impersonal as he marches unerringly towards identifying and reigning in his villains.

In Cross My Heart it’s all personal. For some reason Thierry Mulch (what a glorious name for a baddie, it conjures up mud inexorably sucking the life out of his victims) kidnaps Cross’s family – Mama Nana, Bree, Ali … the lot of them. Analytical thinking is impossible.

Mulch is not alone. He is assisted by the lovely and scintillating Acadia le Duc, for whom killing is merely an aphrodisiac.

Woven through the plot is a series of massage parlour murders which serve to deliciously obfuscate it and relentlessly draw in the reader.

Don’t be lulled by a subliminal conviction that the guys in the white hats always win in the end. The future is uncertain.

Patterson has put his name to more than 80 books, including the Women’s Murder Club and the Michael Bennett series and a slew of stand-alone novels.

Newcomers to his work (it is hard to believe there are any) should be delighted by this new morsel. Long-standing fans will be far from disappointed. And they’ll find the book hard to put down.