James Patteson won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1977, but it was some years later that the Alex Cross series put him on the map and opened the door to his being a global sensation. It has been the best-selling crime series of the past 25 years, and it all started with ALONG CAME A SPIDER.

Now, decades later, Patterson returns to Alex Cross’ rookie year as a detective in what amounts to a companion piece to the series opener. We get to see Cross and his longtime partner and best friend, John Sampson, take on both the Spider case, featuring serial killer Gary Soneji, and a gangland war that has taken several lives. We learn that a series of mistakes by Cross back then may have played to the serial killer’s benefit.

"RETURN OF THE SPIDER takes us right back to where it all began for Cross, humanizing him and giving him the opportunity to shut the door on this case once and for all."

The book starts in the present day, with Cross recalling the death of his old adversary, Gary Murphy, who had inhabited the same body as the infamous Soneji. This brief opening leads to a trip down memory lane to Cross’ first day as a detective, a role he freely admits he may have gotten too soon. This also causes some dissention among his peers on the force, and he is convinced that the only way to correct it is to prove himself. He also possesses a PhD in Psychology and is in the process of authoring a book on profiling that later will become a textbook for all those in the field of criminology.

Cross gets his chance to stand or fall once the first murder that would later be attributed to Soneji takes place. A popular college couple is shot at close range while parked in their car. The young man, Conrad Talbot, dies immediately. The bullet that passes through his brain also catches his girlfriend, Abigial Howard, but she survives and attempts to assist in identifying the killer. The murder is extremely reminiscent of the Son of Sam killings, a connection that Cross recognizes. The mistake he makes here is assuming that Soneji will follow the same path as David Berkowitz. When he veers away from that and strangles an individual in the same manner as Albert DeSalvo, the famed Boston Strangler, Cross’ critics on the force are quick to point out that his mistake may have prevented them from stopping this latest homicide.

Readers of ALONG CAME A SPIDER will remember how Soneji played and toyed with Cross, singling him out in a taunting manner with his crimes. We get to see how that developed in RETURN OF THE SPIDER, and it fills in all the gaps nicely. That Cross and Sampson are also involved in the case with the gangs takes some of the heat away from the Soneji case and allows the suspense to rise and fester as we wait for the killer’s next move. When Soneji begins taking trophies as gruesome as human scalps, his modus operandi becomes completely unpredictable and that much more dangerous.

RETURN OF THE SPIDER takes us right back to where it all began for Cross, humanizing him and giving him the opportunity to shut the door on this case once and for all.