Criss Cross

A killer who calls himself M has been leaving notes on murder scenes addressed to Alex Cross, suggesting that Cross made a catastrophic error years ago that put an innocent man to death. The taunting trail leads Cross away from Washington to Florida sugarcane country, where a series of socialite murders with increasingly grotesque signatures pulls him in multiple directions at once. Cross's personal history surfaces alongside the case, and the question of whether M is delivering justice or pursuing something darker remains genuinely ambiguous until the end.

Andre Blake narrates this twenty-seventh Alex Cross novel with the gravity the character and situation require. His reading of Cross is authoritative without being self-important, and he handles the novel's shifts between domestic life and violent investigation without losing emotional continuity. At just over eight hours, Criss Cross is a lean, fast-moving entry in the series that works particularly well in audio.