The spectacular international bestseller that introduced Washington-based homicide detective Alex Cross and launched James Patterson’s career as one of the fastest-selling thriller writers in the world — now reissued in striking new cover style. He had always wanted to be famous. When he kidnapped two well-known rich kids it was headline news. Then one of them was found — dead — and the whole nation was in uproar. For such a high-profile case they needed the top people — Alex Cross a black detective with a PhD in psychology and Jezzie Flanagan an ambitious young Secret Service agent — yet even they were no match for the killer. He had the unnerving ability to switch from blood-crazed madness to clear-eyed sanity in an instant. But was he the helpless victim of a multiple-personality disorder — or a brilliant cold-blooded manipulator?

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George Hall doesn’t understand the modern obsession with talking about everything. ‘The secret of contentment George felt lay in ignoring many things completely.’ Some things in life however cannot be ignored. At fifty-seven George is settling down to a comfortable retirement building a shed in his garden reading historical novels listening to a bit of light jazz. Then Katie his tempestuous daughter announces that she is getting remarried to Ray. Her family is not pleased – as her brother Jamie observes Ray has ‘strangler’s hands’. Katie can’t decide if she loves Ray or loves the wonderful way he has with her son Jacob and her mother Jean is a bit put out by all the planning and arguing the wedding has occasioned which get in the way of her quite fulfilling late-life affair with one of her husband’s former colleagues. And the tidy and pleasant life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails to invite his lover Tony to the dreaded nuptials. Unnoticed in the uproar George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip and quietly begins to lose his mind.The way these damaged people fall apart – and come together – as a family is the true subject of Mark Haddon’s disturbing yet very funny portrait of a dignified man trying to go insane politely.

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