The Big Bad Wolf (Unknown Binding)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In a recent column in Entertainment Weekly, Stephen King cited Patterson's thrillers as the example of "dopey" bestsellers. We hope that doesn't mean that those who enjoy them are dopes, because this new one is vastly entertaining. Alex Cross, Patterson's black lawman hero, has left the D.C. police force for the FBI. But Cross was a star cop, so when the Bureau becomes aware that attractive white women are disappearing at an unusually high rate in the nation's capital, Cross, despite still being in training at Quantico, is brought onto the case and is personally mentored by the Bureau's director, earning the ire of some Feds but the support of others. Behind the disappearances is a sexual slavery operation run as a sideline by one of the more believable and most compellingly evil villains in the Patterson universe, the Wolf, a mysterious former KGB man who's now the world's top mobster. The narrative throughout is swift and varied, as Patterson cuts among the diabolical schemes of a Russian magnate who may be the Wolf, the plight of several kidnap victims, the dogged pursuit by Cross and company of the Wolf, and the hideous designs of the members of an encrypted computer chat room who pay the Wolf fortunes to snatch women who fit their fantasies. And there's domestic drama, too, as the mother of Cross's young son, Alex, decides that she wants her boy back. Full of plot surprises and featuring a balanced mix of intrigue, hard action and angst, the novel, on which Patterson notably does not share cover credit, grips from start to finish. The Alex Cross series remains Patterson's finest, and this is the finest Cross in years. Maybe we're dopes, but we're smiling ones.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Alex Cross finally took the plunge at the end of Four Blind Mice (2002) and joined the FBI. The training is a little beneath Cross, who has spent years working with the FBI on the toughest cases, but he dutifully attends classes until he's pulled out to consult on a case. Wealthy women have been disappearing around the country. The latest, a judge's wife, was snatched at a shopping mall. It appears these women (and soon several young men as well) are being abducted and sold to people who have "selected" them and paid a hefty sum. The man behind it all is a Russian known only as the Wolf. Cross gets a break when one of the buyers releases the woman he paid to have abducted, but when they track him down, they find he's committed suicide. Then a major bombshell in his personal life distracts Cross from the case: his ex-girlfriend Christine, the mother of his youngest son, has reappeared, and she wants custody. Cross' first major case with the FBI will have readers on the edge of their seats, swiftly turning the pages to the exciting showdown. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Unknown Binding: 390 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1st edition (November 17, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316602906
• ISBN-13: 978-0316602907
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (287 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #442,672 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

• This is item 9 in The Alex Cross Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars I must be a masochist ... (Warning - Some Spoilers), January 22, 2005

By	Andrea "antiquegirl5" (Toronto) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Big Bad Wolf (Alex Cross) (Mass Market Paperback)

to keep listening to Patterson's audio books. I have despised his books for years, but unfortunately, my library resources for audio books are very limited and I travel a lot.

"The Big Bad Wolf" is about as bad as it gets. At the risk of repeating previous reviews, I must say that we'd be hard put to find a more amateurish, unsophisticated, boooooring writer of best-selling fiction. The only thing Patterson has going is a pretty good imagination for a general plot. It's all downhill from there.

You will not find one original sentence or phrase in any of this guy's books. The descriptions are hackneyed and bring to mind 5th grade schoolwork. All characters are one dimensional and stereotypical.

The protagonist, Alex Cross, is the most perfect human being to have ever lived. We know this because we're hit over the head with it over and over again, especially at the beginning of the story. Everyone throws compliments at him like confetti and superlatives abound. Of course, he takes it in stride because Cross is also modest. Perfect cop, perfect father, perfect son, perfect boyfriend. He must also be extremely lucky, since in this book he is able to bypass FBI prerequisites to get hired, skip most of his training, work on a major case, and get promoted all within a week or two. Wow!

Not only is the hero a saint, but his children are well-behaved, beautiful and brilliant and his mother is the grouchy grandma with the heart of gold.

Now, the victims are duly frightened and the villains truly villainous. "The Wolf" manages to murder his ex-wife at a large crowded party and escape without trouble or detection. For some reason, no one in the police or FBI is able to guess the identity of the killer. Huh?

The holes in the plot (and I use the word generously) are too numerous to count. Some of the backstories are hinted at, but never followed through properly. But some things are just blatantly silly and unintentionally funny.

"The Wolf" holds a kidnapped sex-slave in a closet, while living in a multi-million dollar mansion. What, he couldn't afford a whole room? The victim knows him as "The Wolf". I guess he must have introduced himself before he raped her. But at least we know that there must lights in the closet because the victim has seen The Wolf's very private tattoos.

The dialogue is amateurish and ridiculous. The scenes between Cross and his family are nauseatingly saccharine. Listening to the cliched "thoughts" of the victim (and others) is worse than any soap opera on TV. I wish I could remember an example from the tape, but I found myself laughing out loud when I was supposed to by sympathetic. Patterson has no clue about how women think.

I could go on and on with the faults of this book (and this writer, in general), but it would require reading or listening again and I don't have the stomach for it. Let it be said that Patterson would not know a lyrical, originally-phrased sentence if it bit him on the nose. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

There are hundreds of writers out there in this genre who could write rings around Patterson. Unfortunately, the average reader can't tell the difference. May I recommend Dennis Lehane, Robert B. Parker, Lee Child, James Lee Burke, Eric Handler, and the list goes on.

20 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Damn! Patterson just misses..., January 31, 2004

By	R. Shaff "Velocipede" (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Will the real James Patterson please stand up? Most Patterson loyalists have been waiting for this moment. When will the real Patterson emerge again? We've had glimpses of the greatness and BIG BAD WOLF ("BBW") is no exception however, Patterson seems to just fall short time and again. It always seems worth the read just to determine if the magic has returned. Regardless and like most Patterson fans, I'll continue to buy and read his books until I tire of waiting for the real Patterson to stand up.

Early in BBW, the Wolf, a renegade Russian mafiya soldier, is introduced to the reader. In something of urban myth fashion, the Wolf has gained underground notoriety as a ruthlessly cold killer without face or name. One particularly telling tale revolves around the Wolf's encounter with a jailed U.S. mob boss. As the story goes, the Wolf is able to walk into a 'super-maximum' security prison in Colorado to speak with jailed mob boss, don Augustino "Little Gus Palumbo." Ostensibly, the Wolf has a proposition for Little Gus. The Wolf completes his business and walks out off prison grounds undeterred. The next day, Little Gus's body is found in his cell with virtually every bone in his body broken. Those familiar with Russian mafiya tactics know this as "Zamochit." The urban tale became reality and the universal underground came to know that the Wolf's reputation was well deserved.

At the end of the previous Cross iteration, Alex had just joined the FBI. As BBW opens, Alex is in the early stages of training at FBI headquarters. Given his impressive law enforcement background and experience, Alex is finding much of the "newbie" work and training quite rote however, ever the good trooper, Alex presses on and doesn't complain openly. Alex's theoretical training soon becomes on the job training. Alex is called in when the wife of a prominent judge is kidnapped in the parking lot of an Atlanta shopping mall. Unbeknownst to Alex, an underground, internet-based cabal of twisted individuals "places orders" for human slaves. This woman seems to have become the next victim of this perverse group.

Alex is whisked from newbie orientation and flown to Atlanta. The Director of the FBI wants Alex on this case. Alex soon learns of the case and the fact that this isn't the first unsolved disappearance; to the contrary, the FBI has recent unsolved disappearances in several other states. The puzzling and troubling aspect of each of these disappearances is the total lack of contact, no ransom demand and no reappearance of the missing person. After a tip, the FBI is able to track down the two-person team responsible for the Atlanta kidnapping. The two turn out to be low-level associates in the Russian mafiya, Slava and Zoya. But, neither can shed any light on the whereabouts of the judge's wife as they are both found dead...Zoya, by means of Zamochit.

The plot thickens when Alex and his FBI team run on to 14-year-old computer hacker Lili Olsen. It seems Lili, a modern-day Kevin Mitnick, has hacked her way into a secure chat room called "The Wolf's Den." Lili clandestinely observes the dialogue between such aliases as Sterling, Mr. Potter, Sphinx, Marvel, and, of course, The Wolf. The dialogue centers on buying individuals with certain characteristics and attributes. However, the talk quickly descends to the depths of sickness when the discussion turns to disposal of these "slaves" and their willingness to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for their next minion.

BBW has all the makings of a great Patterson offering. The storyline is brilliant however, where BBW falls short is character development and ultimately, climax. The reader has peripheral glimpses of the characters in this book, other than Alex, his kids, and Nana Mama. If Patterson had taken the time to truly allow the reader to see inside the characters, to know them, this novel would have been fabulous. Instead, it became a middle-of-the-road novel written by an author who used to write great novels. And, one of my great pet peeves of Patterson in his Cross novels, Alex always seems to find some personal tragedy in the midst of an intense investigation. It gets old. You want to scream, "When does Alex ever win

Overall, this is a very readable and worth reading book. It is still not the Patterson of old but it is a reasonable offering.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Painfully disappointing and written DOWN to the reader., February 13, 2004

By	B. Banks "WildWiseWoman" (Marietta, GA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

James Patterson has gotten lazy, and worse, disrespectful of his readers. Stephen King - infamous for treating his own readers like undeserving children - described the Alex Cross series as "dopey" and after choking down "Big Bad Wolf" I have to concur; it continues the downward spiral of the last few additions. It's almost as though Patterson is coming up with titles to match his nursery rhyme-themed series and then feels trapped into writing a story that will - sort of - match it. As a bedtime reader not looking for deep spiritual fulfillment or intellectual stimulation, I appreciate Patterson's one-and-a-half page chapters, but I can't support the fact that he no longer writes in complete sentences, only in staggering bursts of phrase which wear one down and reverberate in a "buh-buh-BUMP" pattern in one's head.

A couple of books back when Christine gave birth while held prisoner in an island cave, I rolled my eyes. When she conveniently left the baby behind to "find herself" and because Alex's job was too dangerous (huh??), I snorted derisively. Now she sweeps back in and reclaims the child as though she'd never left, and the courts says, Yeah, that sounds right. Alex is no longer - as far as this book is concerned, a psychologist, and his new status as an FBI agent has him alternately treated like a newbie grunt and then suddenly he's in charge of every operation without finishing his orientation. The "Wolf" is described so inconsistently and with such comic book immortality that he is surely one of those escaped villains from Krypton in the "Superman" movie. If you are able to finish this novel - it'll only take a couple of hours - you'll be astounded with all the loose ends and the unabashed corruption of Alex Cross's once-high morality. He doesn't get laid in this book. Maybe he'd behave better if he did.