Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
With hands held tightly in a sort of nervous anticipation for the next page to slowly crawl your way, finding that the last few chapters of what has been one long chase in Cross My Heart and its 2015 sequel Hope To Die, has left you feeling exasperated, slightly jaded, jarred and dejected, is enough to feel slightly cheated at what has otherwise been a great return to form for James Patterson and his erstwhile detective hero Alex Cross.
Hope To Die pits Alex Cross against arguably one of the most sadistic and evil men he has ever come across in his career and where Cross My Heart made the battle between ideological boundaries between them very personal, Hope To Die sees those margins, blurred and artificial as they are in the scheme of things, taken to a precipice in which the outcome, whilst perhaps predictable, is for the most part a great insight into the mind of a serial killer and the man he wants to destroy.
Where Hope to Die becomes estranged from the previous book and for the vast majority of its sequel, is in the aftermath of the climatic car crash. James Patterson has gone to great pains to show the monstrosity of both beast and man in earlier chapters and then from out of nowhere takes a turn into a world that is odds, completely against type over the course of 20 years worth of writing of the D.C. Detective, into a world in which the mystical becomes par for the course. When this type of sideswipe in a tale takes place, it can either be for good or unfortunately taken as having been written into a corner and with no possible way out unless something out of the ordinary happens to bring the story to a conclusion. In this case, it is possible to leave the reader both dumfounded, perhaps even agitated and with a sense of being robbed of an ending robbed of logic and truth.
Alex Cross remains a late 20th and early 21st Century icon, a hero for Black Americans to aspire to and in which perhaps more hope can be derived than any of the countries senior politicians can ever expect to achieve in the same demographic.
A very good two part story, slightly ruined by delving into an area perhaps left for one his many and intrinsic collaborations!
Ian D. Hall