Double Cross

When I got half way through this book I wasmore concerned with the amount of white space in the book (see below) than with the story. The story was good enough but hardly anywhere close to the blurb on the cover.

I suspect the very short length of the 126 chapters were designed to inject a feeling of pace, but this was at the expense of including detail that would add interest and develop the character , particularly of the Audience Killer.

I really couldn't believe this character, with such amazing expertise I would liked to have be told how this serial killer developed his skills. Perhaps I should read the previous books featuring Alex Cross to understand Alex Cross better, but more about his background would help the reader new to the 'Alex Cross ' series.

For the record: here are my calculations on white space.
Of the 436 pages in the softback version there were 126 chapters. One third of the page was devoted to the chapter heading (eg an informative 'Chapter Thirty-Four') and the last page of the chapter would end on average half way down the page. A rough calculation shows that for each chapter 5/6ths of a page is blank. Multiply this fraction by 126 yields 105 blank pages. So there is plenty of opportunity to reduce the page numbers and perhaps the price of the book. More if the pages omitted James Patterson's name on the even pages, and Alex Cross's on the odd pages.

At least I enjoyed doing the sums!