CROSS AND SAMPSON

As Sampson reflects in a pardonable understatement, “Bad things have happened to the Cross family before.” So what’s left to suffer now that Sampson has rescued Cross from a near-fatal bullet wound? Glad you asked. When his son Damon’s academic advisor phones from Chapel Hill to report that nobody’s seen Damon for three days, Cross instantly arranges to fly to North Carolina with his wife, investigator Bree Stone. But she’s called back to Washington almost immediately to work on a series of bombings that’s already prevented Sampson from joining Cross in the search for his son. Both investigations are thoroughly routine—that is, spiked with menace and violence and cast with characters you wouldn’t look at twice in a police lineup—but Patterson’s fondness for bite-sized chapters suits the structure of Cross’ latest adventure to a T, since there’s an opportunity for a cliffhanger of greater or lesser proportions every five pages or so, when the collaborating authors cut away to the other story. Although many of the resulting jolts come across as synthetic, some are rooted in current events. The prime suspect in the bombings is an ex–Special Forces officer who served as an explosives expert in Afghanistan, and the kidnapping of Damon is racially motivated. There’s no escaping today’s headlines, not even if you’re riding along with Alex Cross.