The House of Cross by James Patterson

Published by ‎ Little, Brown and Company on November 25, 2024

I’m not a huge fan of Alex Cross, in part because I can’t take FBI profilers seriously. Fortunately, Cross (who left the FBI but still works for the agency as a contractor) does no profiling in The House of Cross. The novel is essentially an action thriller with little crime detection but lots of gunfire.

Series fans might be pleased to note that recurring supervillain M, who leads a vigilante organization called Maestro, returns in The House of Cross. His identity and origin occupy a good chunk of the story. The mystery begins when Ryan Malcolm’s car crashes on a mountain road as he’s being pursued by killers. Malcolm founded a data-mining company that contracts with American intelligence agencies. Poor cell service prevents him from calling Cross during the car chase, but he leaves a Tor message to explain the “things I want to tell you so that you may bring to justice those responsible for my death.” He should have skipped the preamble and spit out the facts because the message ends when his vehicle goes off a cliff.

Who is M? The story delves into his background. All I’ll say is that thriller writers too often rely on evil twin brothers to explain criminal behavior. The mildly refreshing twist here is that both brothers are evil, even if one is worse than the other.

The main plot, in keeping with the modern thriller custom, is outlandish. A newly elected but not yet inaugurated president is making a list of potential Supreme Court appointments so she will be prepared if a position becomes vacant. Before the inauguration can occur, one of the candidates near the top of the list is shot between the eyes, another is stabbed in the kidneys, and a third (because the assassin apparently ran out of ideas despite testing a new superweapon) is shot to death. The killings are orchestrated by Maestro with the intention of changing the balance on the Supreme Court. That plan will require multiple vacancies on the Court, so the final chapters follow Cross, his buddy John Samson, and his wife Bree Stone as they try to thwart assassinations.

Now, the idea that an appointment to the Supreme Court can be influenced by killing all the potential nominees who don’t satisfy M, in anticipation that the president will appoint the three he doesn’t kill, is just nonsensical. The list of potential justices is always fluid. Hell, George Bush wanted to nominate his personal lawyer before senators quietly told him she wasn’t remotely qualified for the job. When candidates are scrubbed from the list, more candidates are added. Will Maestro just keep killing them until he approves of all the survivors? And since all the potential nominees are likely to share roughly the same ideology, it's unclear why Maestro views some as better than others (apart from some silliness about one candidate being insufficiently supportive of Indian treaties, as if treaty law issues are a burning issue in the Supreme Court).

The assassin keeps the aforementioned weapon (something about sonic waves) in reserve until the novel’s end, but by that point everyone (including the new president) understands what’s happening, so you’d think the Supreme Court Police, the US Marshals, and the FBI would manage to protect Supreme Court justices until the assassin is caught. Of course they don’t. Naturally, it all comes down to Cross in the end, because that’s how thrillers work.

So the plot makes no sense, but how often do plots in modern thrillers make sense? For the sake of enjoying the story, it’s best to ignore the plot’s foundation and view the book as an action novel. From that perspective, James Patterson succeeds in delivering some exciting chase scenes and gunfights. The snowmobile chases made me feel cold (not necessarily a plus since I hate being cold, but my point is that Patterson creates a vivid albeit chilly atmosphere). Naturally, being a supervillain, M finds a need to gloat before giving Cross and company a chance to escape. That’s a standard Bond movie formula and is routinely mocked, but readers don’t want the supervillain to win, so the formula is one way to assure the heroes’ victory. If there is a better way, Patterson didn’t find it. Still, readers expect a thriller to deliver thrills and this one does, ridiculous plot notwithstanding.

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Lion & Lamb by James Patterson and Duane Swierczynski

Published by ‎ Little, Brown and Company on August 14, 2023

Lion & Lamb. Isn’t that a little too cute? More troublesome is that it’s a little too obvious. The title, like the novel itself, doesn’t reflect an abundance of effort.

The novel is a murder mystery. The victim, Archie Hughes, is an NFL quarterback. Someone with the stature of a Tom Brady, including the hot celebrity wife (although Brady’s is now an ex-wife). I doubt the novel intends to invite other comparisons, as the novel’s quarterback is more than a little sleazy, not to mention dead. He also played for the Eagles. Perhaps Archie’s sleaziness has something to do with the bullet that found its way into his skull while he was sitting in his Maserati.

Veena Lion and Cooper Lamb are two high profile private investigators in Philadelphia. They compete against each other for business but occasionally sleep together. When Archie is murdered, the DA hires Lamb to help make its case against the prime suspect, Archie’s wife Vanessa. Naturally, Vanessa’s lawyer hires Lion to make a case for her innocence. And naturally, Lion and Lamb both insist they will go wherever the evidence takes them in their quest for the truth. For that reason, they decide to keep no secrets from each other. I’m not sure it’s quite ethical for a defense attorney’s investigator to share information with the prosecution’s investigator, but ethical or not, that’s the story.

The plot builds little suspense but it does offer the traditional elements of a murder mystery, including misdirection and an abundance of suspects. The obvious clues point to Vanessa, apart from the automatic assumption that a murder victim must have been killed by his or her spouse. Most damaging is the murder weapon that a gardener digs up in Vanessa’s yard.

Archie and Vanessa had two kids who are often in the care of their hot nanny. She’s a suspect, as is the police detective who is canoodling with the nanny while investigating the murder. He's also investigating a second murder that might or might not be related. A gambling subplot brings in the team owners as suspects. A tight end might also be a suspect, if only because he often seems to be lurking. Perhaps the killing was a random robbery, as Archie's Superbowl ring is missing.

The solution to the mystery is unconvincing, but farfetched attempts to surprise the reader have become commonplace in modern mysteries. Occasional action scenes, complete with gunplay, are a bit too casual (if not downright silly) to allow the novel to be categorized as a thriller. It’s almost a middle-aged version of a cozy mystery, given its strict avoidance of naughty words and its suggestions of sexual encounters that are far from explicit.

My only serious gripe about Lion & Lamb is the authors’ writing style. Most of the novel consists of dialog, often in transcript form, a style attributed to the habit that both protagonists have adopted a habit of recording all their conversations. Unlike a narrative, dialog is easy to write. Some readers will happily embrace the novel as a “page turner,” but it’s easy to turn pages rapidly when there is so little content on each page.

The dialog doesn’t seem genuine, but placing that concern aside, the novel makes no attempt to establish an atmosphere through the story’s setting. Philadelphia might as well be Kansas City or Phoenix. Nor does it build the story’s background beyond the most basic facts. Characterization is nearly nonexistent. Lamb’s kids and puppy are props; they add no flesh to the cardboard from which the protagonist is constructed.

In a mystery, plots are generally more important than characterization, setting, or atmosphere. Lion & Lamb would have been a better book if the authors had made a greater effort to include all the elements that make a novel memorable. Still, they did enough to earn a guarded recommendation for mystery fans seeking a breezy, PG-rated novel.

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The Ninth Month by James Patterson and Richard DiLallo

Published by Grand Central Publishing on August 23, 2022

James Patterson tells The Ninth Month in alternating sections devoted to the past and present until the two stories converge. The past unfolds over the months of a woman’s pregnancy. The present follows the woman’s friends and a couple of police officers who look for clues to the pregnant woman’s disappearance.

Emily Atkinson, an attractive woman of 32, parties hard, screws up her marketing job, and has multiple heart attacks caused by mixing drugs with booze. When she realizes she is pregnant by one of a few possible men, she wonders whether she should stop drinking and give birth, slow down her drinking and terminate the pregnancy, or postpone any decision until her brain cells are fueled by more martinis. A pregnant nurse named Betsey befriends her and tries to help her make responsible choices.

Betsey becomes concerned when Emily suddenly disappears. Betsey’s concern is heightened by two facts. First, another pregnant woman in Emily’s neighborhood, who is about the same age and worked in the same industry, was murdered. Second, Emily thought she was being followed before she disappeared. At the same time, Emily’s perceptions are clouded by alcohol. Perhaps her stalker is a product of her drunken imagination.

The story in the present centers on Betsey’s attempt to motivate two police detectives to look for Emily. The male detectives has a history with Emily, which makes him a suspect. A number of other men have a history with Emily or intersect with her life, including a drug dealer, a bartender, a television writer, and her former boss.

Plot development is deliberate, but the novel is not slow moving. The chapters set in the past grow Emily’s character. Stories about a struggle with sobriety are common and familiar, but this one is more effective than most. Emily is great at her marketing job but being fired because she’s a drunk doesn’t change her life because she comes from money and doesn’t need to work. Whether her pregnancy will motivate her to stop drinking — whether anything make her change her identity as a party girl — is more suspenseful than the threat she might face from her stalker.

The theme of a pregnant woman who contemplates an abortion before she bonds with her fetus has been done to death. Emily’s detailed characterization is wasted on the trite notion that women always turn themselves into responsible mothers if they choose not to end a pregnancy. Frankly, Emily has probably done so much damage to her fetus that giving birth is a questionable decision.

Parts of the plot come across as contrived. The stalker's reveal is not entirely surprising, although it does incorporate a moderately clever twist. The ending seems like the product of lazy writing. The Ninth Month is not terribly successful at building or sustaining suspense (Patterson didn’t bring his A-game effort in that regard), but its portrait of a woman struggling to get her life together is both engaging and convincing.

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