Description:

Amazon.com Review

A child killer is stalking the inner city of Washington, D.C., his latest victim Shanelle Green, an adorable first grader from Sojourner Truth School. This killing is especially unsettling to Detective Alex Cross. Sojourner Truth is the school his son Damon attends, just four blocks from his home.

While the death of an inner-city black child doesn't garner much media attention, another murder is making big headlines. The same day that Shanelle was beaten to death, Senator Daniel Fitzpatrick was found handcuffed to a bed and shot execution style. The only clue the police have to go on is a bizarre rhyme, signed "Jack and Jill," promising more high-profile executions, ultimately targeting the president of the United States. When Cross is called in to help protect the president, he begins to suspect that the two cases are somehow related. As he races to put all the pieces together, the killers continue their bloody rampage, paralyzing the city.

Like Jack & Jill is a rapid-fire thriller from start to finish, with enough plot twists to satisfy even the most jaded mystery fan.

From Publishers Weekly

Patterson's most recent thriller, Hide and Seek, lacked his customary hero, Alex Cross, and didn't catch fire with readers. Here, Patterson brings back the black psychiatrist and Washington, D.C., homicide cop (Kiss the Girls, etc.) for a gripping game of death that will have fans flocking. Two simultaneous investigations bear down on Cross: the first concerns the killings perpetrated by a duo known as "Jack and Jill," who are murdering famous people (beginning with a U.S. senator) in Washington, taunting the police and "practicing for the big one"; the second involves the brutal slayings of young black children in Cross's own Southeast D.C. neighborhood. The Washington P.D. makes Cross its liaison with a frantic Secret Service, FBI and CIA while he sets up his own off-duty team to track the child-killer. Through crisp cross-cutting of multiple points of view, first-person and third, Patterson grabs readers right from the beginning and sweeps them along toward riveting dual climaxes. He adds texture by devoting space to Cross's concern about his own motherless son and daughter (the first murdered child attended the same grammar school as Alex's boy), his growing interest in the school's attractive principal, his dealings with his octogenarian grandmother, Nana Mama (think of an acerbic Dilsey from The Sound and the Fury) and life in the largely black Southeast district. It's fine, full-blooded entertainment from start to finish, with a last-page surprise from an earlier Cross nemesis promising at least one more Cross installment to come. Literary Guild main selection; simultaneous Time Warner AudioBook.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.