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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Nov 2003, 400 pages
Paperback:
Oct 2004, 432 pages
Alex Cross battles the most ruthless and powerful killer he has ever encountered--a predator known only as the Wolf.
WHO'S AFRAID?
Alex Cross battles the most ruthless and powerful killer he has ever encountered--a predator known only as the Wolf.
Alex Cross's first case since joining the FBI has his new colleagues stymied. Across the country, men and women are being kidnapped in broad daylight and then disappearing completely. These people are not being taken for ransom, Alex realizes. They are being bought and sold. And it looks like a shadowy figure known as the Wolf--a master criminal who has brought a new reign of terror to organized crime--is behind this business in which ordinary men and women are sold as slaves.
YOU'RE AFRAID.
Even as he admires the FBI's vast resources, Alex grows impatient with the Bureau's clumsiness and caution when it is time to move. A lone wolf himself, he has to go out on his own in order to track the Wolf and try to rescue some of the victims while they are still alive.
As the case boils over, Alex is in hot water at home too. His ex-fiancée, Christine Johnson, comes back into his life--and not for the reasons Alex might have hoped.
Chapter 1
THE PHIPPS PLAZA shopping mall in Atlanta was a showy montage of pink-granite floors, sweeping bronze-trimmed staircases, gilded Napoleonic design, lighting that sparkled like halogen spotlights. A man and a woman watched the target - "Mom" - as she left Niketown with sneakers and whatnot for her three daughters packed under one arm.
"She is very pretty. I see why the Wolf likes her. She reminds me of Claudia Schiffer," said the male observer. "You see the resemblance?"
"Everybody reminds you of Claudia Schiffer, Slava. Don't lose her. Don't lose your pretty little Claudia or the Wolf will have you for breakfast."
The abduction team, the Couple, was dressed expensively, and that made it easy for them to blend in at Phipps Plaza, in the Buckhead section of Atlanta. At eleven in the morning, Phipps wasn't very crowded, and that could be a problem.
It helped that their target was rushing about in a world of her own, a tight little cocoon of ...
The plot is a little too heavy on torture, rape and murder in general for some tastes, but one can't help liking Alex Cross, despite the fact that there is this ridiculous ongoing dichotomy between Patterson's depiction of Cross as the ultimate family man and the fact that book after book he puts his family in mortal danger.
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