This is the first book that I have read by James Patterson and it will not be the last.

The protagonist, Alex Cross, has just been recruited by the FBI to investigate the kidnapping of a judge's wife. What makes the case more bizarre is that the kidnapper does not demand a ransome. When Cross discovers that this kidnapping is related to a few other recent unsolved ones, a Russian Mafya head that goes by the alias, The Wolf, becomes the main suspect. To complicate matters, the mother of his son makes a surprise visit and uses Cross's dangerous profession as an excuse to gain full custody. As Cross gets closer to discovering The Wolf's identity, more kidnappings occur and the lives of his own family are threatened. The pressure mounts on Cross to locate all of the kidnapped victims in a hurry before they're killed while trying to keep his ex from tearing his family apart.

For a first-time reader of James Patterson, I was hooked from beginning to the end. The story had all of the elements of a mystery thriller--it was faced paced and had chapters that ended in cliff-hangers. It also had an interesting protagonist that readers could love, and most importantly, a great villain that readers could hate.

Patterson's writing style is different from what I have read in other novels. Namely because the chapters are very short and were straight to the point. The story rhythm was on cue and never dragged. It almost read like a screenplay.

My only criticism, although not a major one, is about Cross's first assignment that involved a hostage situation in Baltimore. Although the scene was well written, by the end of the book I was left wondering why Patterson included that scene in the book since it did nothing to advance the storyline. I was expecting that somehow it would've been connected to rest of the story.

The subplot, although a good one, came a bit late in the story. With Patterson's talent of having excellent plot twists throughout the story which gave me several WTF momments, I'm convinced that he could have begun the subplot earlier in the story which would've added another WTF moment by the time that Cross's ex maked her surprise visit.

This book is about a man who goes by the name the wolf. He would hire men to go and kidnape women because he has a websit were men could purchase women for a high amount of money. These men kidnapp these weman and brings them to the owner. The wolf is very famouse but no one knows or has ever seen what he looks like hes a very smart ghostly man. Alex cross was on the investigation case and started trying to figure out to see if there was a patter in the kidnappings. He found out that there all rich and married wemon when a sudden twist happened in a case a young male was kidnapped from school. A young 14 year old girl acsidently hacked into the wolfs then and found out that the men where not good they talked about women in horrible ways. She went to the FBI and Alex cross went to her house to talk to her and get her to hack in one last time to hopefuly find a break in the case. The wolf found out the little girl had hacked into the Den so they made a more secreative code in which involved a scaning of an eye. Alex cross found one of the men who was involved with the purchase of the kidnaping qwhich turned out to be a college proffersor. Thats all am going to say because thats the best part of the story read the book its extremly good to find out what happens next