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Summary: Visit the James Patterson
Review: Little, Brown and Company has launched a James Patterson site for Patterson fans on-line. Visit the site soon and be sure to enter the Word of Mouth Contest to be eligible to win a Readers Copy of CAT & MOUSE whose ending is different than the published book's ending -- Patterson re-wrote the ending for final publication after getting feedback from early readers several months ago. Be sure to check out the site to get all of the details!
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Summary: excellent very fast moving twists snd turns in plot
Review: this is defintly one of his best very intriguing great chachter devlopment and great way to tie all of Dr.Alex Cross loose ends together!!
Rating: 
Summary: The book is okay but didnt live up to my expectations
Review: The first book by James Patterson which I read was "Hide and Seek" and I thought it was quite brilliant. After reading Along came a spider and Kiss the girls, I was expecting the fourth installment to be pretty good. In a way I was disappointed because I was expecting a big end of book showdown with Gary Soneji but the introduction of another killer, spoils it a bit. There wasn't much emphasis placed on the new killer and I found that a lot of things that happens, just happens. There is minimal lead up to a lot of the issues explained in the book and thus left me thinking "how the heck did this come about?". However, there are some twists and turns which made me keep on turning the pages despite the need for sleep so he has done a pretty good job despite what i view are the negatives. This book is a darn good read if you just go with the flow of the story and treat it like a mystery thriller rather than a detective story. Those who have read "Kiss the girls" would know what I mean by that (refer to the rather unpredictable ending).
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Summary: Bad title to a good Cross book
Review: After reading the awesome books of Kiss the Girls and Jack and Jill, I thought that Cat & Mouse would be fitting to its own title, but unfortunately, a better title could have been something like The Burning of a Cross. I mean, Cross should have been stressed out after chasing all of these wackos! The love scenes in the latest Patterson novel are unnecessary, but still okay. Soneji was finished off too quickly for someone who was so smart in Along Came a Spider, and Mr. Smith was just too silly of a character. Perhaps Patterson has learned of his mistakes and will think of some way to bring back Soneji, a villain that will be missed, I'm sure.
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Summary: Unfortunately James Patterson is no Ian Fleming!
Review: Alex Cross isn't 007 or even in his league. What a disappointment. No page-turning suspense. No shocker. No fun and games with the reader. Guess that's why Alex Cross never made it to the big screen. Save your money.
Rating: 
Summary: Patterson's new novel is good, but not great
Review: Ever since reading "Kiss The Girls" last year, I've been a fan of James Patterson and his character, Alex Cross. I've now read all the novels involving this character, and unforunately, none live up to "Kiss The Girls". When I heard that he was going back to his original formula(prolouge, primary killer first, then secondary)with "Cat& Mouse", I immediately purchased the book. After finishing it in a matter of days, I have mixed feelings about it. First of all, I would hesitate to call this one novel. It's 400 pages long. The first 200 consist of his old nemesis, Gary Soneji, who I feel has always been a weak villian. These pages were somewhat corny, but like always, very quick to read. Soneji gets taken care of half way through the book, and a new killer, sparsly mentioned earlier on, arises. This serial killer is Mr. Smith, who is one of Patterson's best, for a while. Mr. Smith is killing off innocents in Paris at a franctic pace. Hot his trail is F.B.I. profiler Thomas Pierce, who actually takes over Alex Cross' job as narrator for 100 pages. Patterson, for some reason, decides to reveal Mr. Smith's identity with 80 pages remaining in the book. This takes away the suspense. Also, Mr. Smith eventually overstays his welcome. By the time the book is over, you're tiring of this well developed but overused character. The narrator change was an interesting touch, and Patterson was clever with the plot developements, but I kept expecting more to happen in the finale. I decided that to give this book an extremely high rating, I would have to be thoroughly satsitfied with the ending, which I was not. You may have heard from other reviews that this novel ends with a shameless cliffhanger; I was still looking for the "Shocking" ending when I finished the book. Overall, Patterson did a fairly good job of shaping up his newest novel. If you haven't read "Kiss The Girls", I'd buy that top notch thriller immediately, and put this slightly over average one on hold.
Rating:
Summary: Highly recommended; a real page turner.
Review: Being a true James Patterson fan I was not disappointed with his latest book, Cat & Mouse. It is a well written, enthralling story where the author brings his characters to life and makes them seem real. This was a hard book to put down.
Rating:
Summary: Worth it for Gary Soneji
Review: If you liked the idea of Gary Soneji in the movie Along Came A Spider, then you will probably not mind reading Cat & Mouse, which is mostly about Gary Soneji, developing this character a lot more, but unfortunately doesn't deliver as good a second half with the serial killer of Mr. Smith which although is an interesting read does not really make the Soneji story any better, thus Cat & Mouse would have been a lot better if it skipped on Mr. Smith and did more with Soneji. This is one of the better Alex Cross reads and you could do a lot worse than Cat & Mouse, so in that respect it is one of Patterson's better books.
Rating:
Summary: Good read, some inaccuracies
Review: Overall, there is little that I can add to all the other reviews. The story is has good hooks, and is an entertaining read. I have three criticisms. One, Patterson refers to Lorton Prison as a federal prison. It was not. Lorton was a facility of DC corrections. DC leased the land from the federal government. Second, Patterson confuses schizophrenia with multiple personality disorder when he says, "Schizophrenia is better than eating alone." Finally, the "pattern" of the killer is a bit sophmoric. Totally invented, bearing little resemblance to anything that is actually real. But again, overall it was a pleasing read.
Rating:
Summary: And a half, slighty less than average rating.
Review: Somehow I missed the third book in the series, I don't know, I was just getting into them because they were on the family book shelf, so what do I know?
I gave this one less than three stars because I think it fell short of the first two, which I read and reviewed with ratings of three.
Patterson has some annoying habits, and while the books are fast paced and quick to read, this one included, he has such huge plot holes it's hard sometimes to keep reading with a straight face. I am saying the books are entertaining, but I'm not beating down the door to find the third book in the series, which I jumped over. That should say something I think.
You shouldn't read this one first, by any means, if you like the first three, than you'll probably want to go ahead and read this one too, however, it's much more sloppy than books one and two.
The killers in this book aren't developed well at all, one is from previous works, he makes a comeback, as the editorial reviews point out. There is a new killer and also a minor villain that makes an appearance. The problem is that it's not a very long book, so as you can imagine, nobody, not even the hero and his new love, get a full treatment.
The plot is again filled with stuff that could simply never happen. Now I know, that's part of the magic of fiction, however, if the fiction is set in a real universe that we know and understand, it should at least follow basic logic and generally follow standard practices as we know them. I'll give you a quick example, which actually involves an earlier book and a similar complaint I made in that review.
There is a point in this book where the FBI is staking out the a bunch of places because they are on the track of a horrible killer, they are even staking out a grave site of someone the killer once loved. Okay, now, in Kiss the Girls, a victim, living and breathing, goes home from the hospital to her home in which just a short time earlier she was abducted. The horrible killer is still loose and she's the only one alive that has seen him as the killer/rapist. Now, do you think the FBI would stake out her house, noooooo...
Anyway, maybe in Patterson's world the FBI got smarter between books two and four, but for me, it's just one of many huge plot holes that have nudged me into the opinion that Patterson is more excited about churning out books quickly then telling great stories. But that's just one man's opinion.
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