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Return of the Spider is the stunning companion to Along Came a Spider, the New York Times bestselling series debut that introduced Detective Alex Cross, “the real deal, a character who matters” (Rolling Stone).
The suspense classic Along Came a Spider introduced an unsurpassed rivalry: Detective Alex Cross; the “human superhero” (New York Times) versus Gary Soneji; the “most deliciously wicked character since Hannibal Lecter” (Lexington Herald-Leader). But that wasn’t their first meeting…Police discover that Soneji kept a murder book, Profiles in Homicidal Genius, detailing his transformation from substitute teacher to hardened serial killer—including clues that imply missteps that Alex Cross may have made a rookie homicide detective. Now, Alex must retrace the steps of that long-ago investigation and face…the Return of the Spider.
Enter the world of the #1 bestselling detective series behind the #1 streaming show Cross.
I have been a criminal psychologist for the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit and am currently working—for the second time in my life—as a homicide detective with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police.
In my decades of investigative and profiling work, I’ve had to interview many people with vicious and violent minds. The worst of them, the psychopaths and sociopaths, the ones who loved to kill— they all had one thing in common: They lied beautifully. So beautifully that I was always left wondering how much of what they told me was truth and how much was spun out of thin air the way a spider crafts a web on a dewy morning. One sweltering day in May, all that changed. One sweltering day in May, someone put a sledgehammer through rotten drywall and showed me where one of the first spiders I ever encountered had built his secret nest.
There’d been a thunderstorm earlier that afternoon, and despite the lingering heat, an evening breeze had picked up enough to cool the sunporch at our home on Fifth Street in Southeast Washington, DC, where I was trying to play Gershwin after dinner. Caught up in case after case, I had not sat down at the keys for well over a year. The piano was perpetually a bit out of tune, and I was rusty, but I tried to coax the melody of An American in Paris out of it