I am a huge fan of James Patterson, and I typically love all of his books. The first Alex Cross novels were flowing and wonderful, with logic jumps or stops and starts. He made you think that something was amiss even when he "solved" the crime, before the big twist hit. In this book, its almost as if someone else was trying to write in the James Patterson style while trying to create an Alex Cross novel. on a purely enteratinment basis, this book is great, but on a literatry basis, when you read the novel, the action in most parts seems forced, the twists, unreasonable, and the sequence of action, illogical. I enjoyed the book as a fan, I loved the book as an Alex Cross groupie, but the writing overall is not on par with James Patterson's earlier work.