Excerpt from The Big Bad Wolf by James Patterson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I appreciate it," I said. I left it at that. "I just hope it's worth the trouble," Nooney mumbled as he walked off in the direction of Admin. I shook my head and went into class, which was held in a tiered symposium-style room.

Dr. Horowitz's lesson this day was interesting to me. It concentrated on the work of Professor Robert Hare, who'd done original research on psychopaths by using brain scans. According to Hare's studies, when healthy people are shown "neutral" and "emotional" words, they respond acutely to emotional words, such as cancer or death. Psychopaths register the words equally. A sentence like "I love you" means nothing more to a psychopath than "I'll have some coffee." Maybe less. According to Hare's analysis of data, attempts to reform psychopaths only make them more manipulative. It certainly was a point of view.

Even though I was familiar with some of the material, I found myself jotting down Hare's "characteristics" of psychopathic personality and behavior. There were forty of them. As I wrote them down, I found myself agreeing that most rang true.

Glibness and superficial charm
Need for constant stimulation / prone to boredom
Lack of any remorse or guilt
Shallow emotional response
Complete lack of empathy...

I was remembering two psychopaths in particular: Gary Soneji and Kyle Craig. I wondered how many of the forty "characteristics" the two of them shared, and started putting G.S. and K.C. next to the appropriate ones.

Then I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned away from Dr. Horowitz.

"Senior Agent Nooney needs to see you right now in his office," said an executive assistant, who then walked away with the full confidence that I would be right on his heels. I was. I was in the FBI now.

From Big Bad Wolf by James Patterson. Copyright © 2003 by James Patterson. All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reproduced without written permission from the publisher.