Fast reading author James Patterson has lost it. His tenth Alex Cross mystery is a shell of what the series was when it started out. It's hollow and barely engaging. It's as though the author is capitalizing on what his readers know about his central character without bothering to convince us of the amazing behavioral understanding that mades him a valuable and very special FBI profiler. Here, Cross is little more than a distant, helpless observer, and so are we.

As though to stack the deck in terms of developing a sense of threat, Patterson includes not just one of his former villains, but two. It seems that his ex-KGB, highly secretive and lethal Wolf knows about the Weasel and his operations against Cross and the FBI. To prove his mastery and secure his position of dominance, he captures The Weasel, tortures him, then frees him to perform assignments.

The first of these is to film The Wolf's decimation of a Nevada town while The Wolf himself enjoys the show from the comforts of home. The object of the exercise is to demonstrate what he can do to Washington, DC, New York, Tel Aviv, Paris and London in order to extort 2 billion dollars from the governments of those cities, and the freeing of terrorists from their jails.

The Wolf is a sociopathic killer on the grand scale, and his threats are taken seriously but without much evidence on the part of Cross, his superiors, fellow agents or government leaders of using their vast resources to outsmart the foxy Wolf or even come up with a plan of operation. The resolution of all the fears, anxieties, horrors and destruction that this demon produces is simply at the convenience of the author who puts it all into a classic structure with rather distant involvement.

One example of the book's inorganic development is exemplified in how the author stages the end of The Weasel (Warning: this is a spoiler). After cropping up throughout the story, adding his violence and trademark viciousness with a prostitute, Cross hasn't a clue about how to track down his arch nemesis. But, one day (about 2/3 of the book in), Cross is conveniently walking on a London street when The Weasel emerges from a darkened doorway and confronts him. There's a brief struggle and an elimination, having nothing to do with anything but an author thinking he needs a little cleanup before the last act.

In Chapter 87, Cross is thinking... "We seemed to have run out of options to stop the Wolf." I'm thinking Patterson has run out of creative insight into one of his best creations.