Gina Hamby

Just when Alex Cross thought his life was calming down into a routine of patients and therapy sessions, he finds himself back in the game - this time to catch a criminal mastermind like no other. A spate of elaborate murders in Washington, D.C., have the whole East Coast on edge. They are like nothing Alex Cross and his new girlfriend, Detective Brianna Stone, have ever seen.

FBI agent Alex Cross is on vacation with his family at Disneyland when he gets a call from the Director. A well-known actress was shot outside her home in Beverly Hills. Shortly afterward, an editor for the Los Angeles Times receives an e-mail describing the murder in vivid detail.

In broad desert daylight, a mysterious platoon of soldiers evacuates the entire population of Sunrise Valley, Nevada. Minutes later, a huge bomb detonates a hundred feet above the ground and lays waste to homes, cars, and playgrounds: a town annihilated in an instant.

Alex Cross' first case since joining the FBI has his new colleagues stymied. Across the country, men and women are being kidnapped in broad daylight and then disappearing completely. These people are not being taken for ransom, Alex realizes. They are being bought and sold. And it looks like a shadowy figure known as the Wolf, a master criminal who has brought a new reign of terror to organized crime, is behind this business in which ordinary men and women are sold as slaves.

A leader has fallen, and Alex Cross joins the procession of mourners from Capitol Hill to the White House. Then a sniper's bullet strikes a target in the heart of DC. Alex Cross' wife, Bree Stone, newly elevated chief of DC detectives, must solve the case or lose her position. The Secret Service and the FBI deploy as well in the race to find the shooter. Alex is tasked by the new president to lead an investigation unprecedented in scale and scope. But is the sniper's strike only the beginning of a larger attack on the nation?