Finished Fr 11/24/17
This was a brand-spanking new paperback that Janny loaned to me, although I'd bet the farm that she didn't pay retail for it.
This is the most awful novel I've read in years. There is almost no writing skill and the characters bear little resemblance to real people. Alex Comfort is no more a black man than I am! The story is the only thing slightly positive thing about the book, but in the end, it was just too far fetched to be believed. And, although the twin stories are vaguely connected, The Palm Beach Serial Killer seems 'tacked on' and hastily linked to the main action in Starksville, North Carolina.
Alex Cross, his wife and two children travel to his hometown (he hasn't been back in decades) to help his cousin defend a relative who has been accused of a grisly rape and murder. This murder was a setup to conceal a major drug operation that used the railroad system to smuggle narcotics up and down the east coast (if you are over five years old you might have a bit of a problem accepting this). The entire police force and judicial system is bent, yet Cross overcomes.
A twisted transvestite in Palm Beach, Florida is killing old women because his mother was mean to him, and the local police are baffled. This 'man/woman killer' owns an art gallery and has painted portraits of his victims, and this clue and dubious connections between the victims lead police to the truth.
Alex Cross gets dragged into this investigation (totally randomly; he goes to Florida after he learns that his father didn't die in North Carolina, but fled to The Sunshine State) and later it's revealed that the lead detective on this case is actually Alex's long-lost father. Too crazy to relate.
Two or three lines from any Michael Connelly book are far superior to Patterson's entire genre.
The plot copied from Wikipedia-
"Alex Cross and his family, who live in Washington, D.C., travel to Starksville, North Carolina, so Alex and his wife Bree can help clear Alex's cousin Stefan Tate of a murder they suspect he did not commit. Stefan, a school teacher, is on trial for supposedly murdering Rashawn Turnbull, a boy in his class, and almost everyone in town is convinced he's guilty and wants him to hang. Alex has not been to Starksville since leaving as a child thirty-five years ago. The Cross family has not found the town to be welcoming to them, partly because they are there to help clear Stefan.
Alex travels to Belle Glade, Florida, to get information on his father, who was said to have committed suicide near there. He meets a veteran Palm Beach County, Florida, sergeant, who is convinced Alex can help him catch a brutal serial killer in Palm Beach County. It turns out that the sergeant is Alex's long-lost father Jason. Meanwhile, Alex looks into Marvin Bell, a local businessman who has had dubious influence on the Cross family during Alex's childhood and is said to have orchestrated Jason Cross's fake death.
After investigation, it turns out that Bell teamed up with Rashawn's maternal grandparents to ship a highly potent addictive drug across the South and were making large profits off of this drug. Rashawn's grandfather had killed Rashawn due to feeling shameful about the child's mixed heritage, then pinned it on Stefan since the latter had been investigating into the Starksville drug trade. It is also discovered that the entire judicial system of Starksville had been under FBI investigation for corruption. Following the incident, the FBI moves in and arrests all the judges in Starksville, with Stefan's case being dropped."
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