Kiss the Girls

Patterson's second Alex Cross novel pairs a personal stake, a missing niece, with a dual-killer structure that keeps two investigations running at once. It moves fast, thinks about what makes predators cooperate, and gives Cross a worthy adversary in Kate McTiernan, a victim who refuses to stay one. Read it if you like procedurals with real dread, or if you want to know where the Cross series earned its following.

1. 1

   Act 1

   A Note Signed Casanova

   Boca Raton, Florida, 1975. A teenage boy murders four women, his first victims, and walks away clean. Six years later, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, another young man kills a couple on a lake. Two killers, decades apart, both still learning what they are. Years on, Casanova leaves a young woman to die in the woods, and the pattern begins again. In Washington, D.C., Detective Alex Cross comes home to find relatives waiting in his house. His niece Naomi, called Scootchie, a Duke University student, is missing in Durham. Cross drives south with his partner Sampson, where Durham detectives Nick Ruskin and Davey Sikes lay out the scope: the FBI and DEA are involved, eight to ten women from different states have vanished, and each received notes from someone calling himself Casanova. In Los Angeles, reporter Beth Lieberman is working a story on The Gentleman Caller, who has just raped and murdered a 14-year-old girl. He threatens 'bonus kills' if his letters go unpublished. FBI agent Kyle Craig meets her there. Then Casanova takes a new prize: Dr. Kate McTiernan, young and exceptional, locked into his harem of beautiful, accomplished women.

2. 2

   Act 2

   The Woman Who Jumped

   Casanova decides Kate McTiernan has broken his rules and must die. She fights him instead, runs into a forest, and leaps off a cliff into a river. She survives. Cross, meanwhile, finds a note from The Gentleman Caller printed in the Los Angeles Times that mentions Naomi, and learns the two killers have been writing to each other, an East Coast predator and a West Coast one trading secrets. At the hospital, McTiernan tells Cross she was drugged with Marinol, which suggests Casanova is a doctor or a pharmacist. Then Craig brings the worst news: Lieberman has been murdered by The Gentleman Caller, and her files point to Dr. William Rudolph of Los Angeles. Cross and McTiernan fly out with Craig. McTiernan rules Rudolph out as Casanova, which makes him The Gentleman Caller. A manhunt begins; Rudolph slips away again and again. Searching his apartment, investigators find a photograph of Rudolph with Dr. Wick Sachs, and notes on the back naming Sachs as Casanova. Cross and Sampson build a theory: the women are held in an underground house, built where the Underground Railroad once ran. Sachs is a Duke professor, nicknamed the campus skeleton, and a suspect in two student murders in the early 1980s.

3. 3

   Act 3

   Two Killers, One Target

   Rudolph remembers meeting Casanova, who knew about the couple he killed on the lake in 1981. They traded their histories and formed a bond. Reunited now, they agree to work together to eliminate Cross. Their first move is brutal: they attack McTiernan at her home and leave her seriously wounded. Cross studies the scene and sees the attack is different from the first one, which tells him both men were there. Sachs is brought in for questioning. Cross physically attacks him, feels how weak he is, and knows this man is not Casanova. The FBI arrests Sachs anyway, evidence pointing his way. Sampson and Cross go back to the forest with a hand-written map from an Underground Railroad historian, and in a previously unsearched area they find the underground house, the captive women inside. The killers have been watching. They assault the two men, seriously injuring Sampson; Cross shoots one in the shoulder before the pair steal a truck and flee. Cross pursues them, forces them apart, and kills Rudolph in a gunfight. The surviving women, Naomi among them, are reunited with their families.

4. 4

   Act 4

   The Partner Next Door

   Cross works the clues alone and deduces Casanova's true identity, keeping it from Craig and running his own stakeout. He tails Detective Davey Sikes, certain Sikes is Casanova hunting a new victim. Sikes enters a house; Cross snoops outside; Sikes catches him and they fight. The woman inside is Sikes' mistress, an affair the FBI already knew about. Wrong man, wrong house, and Cross has burned his credibility. Later, while Cross and McTiernan are on vacation, he jogs and finds a dead FBI agent. He sprints back to the house, where Casanova hits him with a stun gun. The killer is Ruskin, Sikes' partner. With Cross down, Ruskin heads for Kate. She fights him and beats him, and as he aims his gun at her, Cross recovers in time to shoot him dead. Cross and McTiernan part as close friends. Back in Washington, Cross and Sampson take a new case, and the Casanova file closes.

• DDr. Alex CrossA Black forensic psychologist and detective, 'Doctor Detective' to colleagues, devoted father of two. He hunts his niece's abductor across two coasts and must trust his own instincts over the FBI's to end it.
• DDr. Kate McTiernanA young physician abducted into Casanova's harem who escapes with her martial-arts training. She joins the hunt for her captor and grows close to Cross.
• CCasanova / Nick RuskinA Durham detective who 'collects' beautiful, exceptional young women in an underground harem. He is the killer all along, and Kate and Cross bring him down.
• TThe Gentleman Caller / Dr. William RudolphA brutal Los Angeles killer who keeps body parts as trophies and murdered a couple on a lake in the early 80s. He partners with Casanova and dies in a gunfight with Cross.
• KKyle CraigThe FBI agent on the case, supplying federal resources and information, and kept in the dark when Cross goes off-book.
• NNaomi 'Scootchie' CrossCross's niece, a Duke student whose disappearance pulls him into the case. She survives captivity and comes home.
• JJohn SampsonCross's partner, who helps crack the underground house and pays for it with serious injury.

The underground house

Built where the Underground Railroad once ran, Casanova's hidden harem inverts a site of escape into a prison. The same history that once guided people to freedom now conceals their captivity, and the hand-written map from an Underground Railroad historian is what finally finds them. The house's discovery mirrors the case: the truth buried where no one thought to search.

Marinol

The drug used to sedate Kate McTiernan is a small clue with a large reach: it suggests Casanova is a doctor or pharmacist, someone with medical access and calm authority. It stands for the killer's disguise as a healer, and it is McTiernan's own memory of it, told from her hospital bed, that gives Cross his first real handle on who he is hunting.

The notes

Letters signed Casanova arrive before the abductions, and The Gentleman Caller threatens 'bonus kills' to force his into print. The notes stand for the killers' need for audience and for each other: the correspondence between East Coast and West Coast is what lets Cross link the cases. When the letters surface in a newspaper, the killers' vanity becomes the investigation's first crack.

The ending is a double correction. First the book lets Cross be wrong, spectacularly, following Sikes into a fight over a mistress the FBI already knew about, so that the real answer, Ruskin, lands as a genuine surprise rather than a cheat. Then it hands the kill to McTiernan: she defeats Ruskin, and only when he aims his gun at her does Cross recover enough to shoot. The victim finishes the fight; the detective just arrives in time. Read one way, it is a vindication of instinct over institution, Cross withholding his deduction from Craig and being right. Read another, it is darker: the killer wore a badge, worked the case from inside, and the FBI's evidence against Sachs was wrong. The parting with McTiernan as close friends, then a new case in Washington, closes the loop on a series that will keep running. It lands because the rescue is earned twice, by the map and by the woman who refused to die.

1. 1.The novel asks whether Casanova and The Gentleman Caller's partnership makes them more or less dangerous: does their bond validate each man's worst impulses, and what does their joint attack on McTiernan reveal about how collaboration changes a killer's method?
2. 2.Kate McTiernan escapes, investigates, and helps finish the killer, yet the story is still framed as Cross's. Is she a fully realized partner or a device for the hero's arc, and what would the book look like told from her hospital bed forward?
3. 3.Every institution fails: the FBI arrests the wrong man, knew about Sikes' affair, and loses an agent. What is Patterson saying about expertise versus instinct, and does Cross withholding his deduction from Craig make him admirable or reckless?

Thriller readers who want a procedural with a personal stake and a genuinely surprising killer. Also anyone deciding whether to start the Alex Cross series, since this second entry shows the formula at full speed.

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