Second in the Alex Cross thriller series and revolving around a black psychologist-detective in Washington D.C.My TakeI'm all the way up to page 7, and all I can think of is GROSS. How do people think like this! It's disgusting. And they seriously think this is okay???!He wants to feel real romance. He wants to fall in love. He wants to experience intimacy with someone. He doesn't think he's much different from anyone else except that he acts. Excuse me. He wants the romance and intimacy and thinks he's gonna get it by kidnapping women and holding them prisoner??It is soo creepy that Casanova has a wife. He talks about loving her, but that her brown hair isn't as long as one of his victims. Gag. Then his sexual delights. The snake and milk? Gross, disgusting, ick.Geez, I never thought of that little glitch. That he's done nothing wrong if a woman makes the choice to go with him. There's a comment made by Casanova early on that makes me shudder now that I've finished reading the story:"It was all her fault. He would have to change personas now. He needed to stop being Casanova. He needed to be 'himself'. His pitiful other self." I am so impressed by how Alex held himself together. I'd'a gone down there screaming and needing to whale on somebody. It's been four days since Scootchie went missing and the cops are just now getting around to telling the family? On top of all the other crap they've been not doing?And here we go again. It's too important for the various agencies to keep their information to themselves. God forbid they should share anything and get further along in this investigation of too many women going missing. Alex has hardly anything and he's already skipped ahead of most of the cops and FBI. So, do they bring him in from the cold and give him everything they have? *Snicker, snort, guffaw*…*maybe some rolling around on the floor*…*caught between laughing and crying…* What is with these people? Yeah, I know. It's a book, a story, and you wanna tell me this doesn't go on in real life?Then there's that stupid reporter in LA. She's more concerned with her bloody book about the case than she is in helping one of its victims or the cops. I am not sorry about what happens to her. Okay, I lie. I do feel bad, but I'm still not sorry. Stupid bint.The James Bond move was funny.Patterson's writing ticks me off. For the most part, he has good flow and his show is okay in this. But how many times must he tell me that Nana Mama has to have the last word? The romance that develops with Alex and Kate is not believable; it's just suddenly there. Reminds me of Alex and Jezzie in Along Came a Spider, 1.Oh, please, Alex and Kate are leaping to the conclusions they want to draw from that poster about women and children. And Patterson is throwing in all sorts of extraneous stuff. I don't know if he needs to pad the story out or what. What was the point of mentioning "No-Heart" Hart if you're not going to use it?Then there's Kate. How incredibly stupid can she be? Sure, I get that she wants to be independent, to not let this keep her from living, but playing it safe until this jerk is caught is not a stupid move. It does not mean that you're not living. If she intended to live this way the rest of her life, yeah, I'd say she's wrong. But it's only until they get these guys. Hasn't she read the books?Patterson keeps giving out misleading information. He tells us that the guy is Casanova, no he's not, he's a front, he's a… Fine, I can understand wanting to play out the drama, the tension, but at least use words consistently.The StoryHe only takes extraordinary women. And all they have to do is obey the rules of the house. And accept any attentions he chooses to pay them."He was never going to be caught. He had the perfect mask."The Characters Washington D.C.Dr. Detective Alex Cross is holding up mostly because of his kids, Jannie and Damon. He adores them. Nana Mama is Alex's grandmother, the children's great-grandmother. John Sampson is his best friend since childhood and is his partner today. Cilla Cross is Scootchie's mother and the widow of Alex's brother Aaron. Charles and Aunt Tia are more concerned relatives.St. Anthony's Hospital is……a.k.a., St. Tony's Spaghetti House. Alex has been there too often and knows the nurses including Annie Bell Waters and Tanya Heywood. Rita Washington is a smart but weak pipehead screaming for Marcus Daniels. A little boy his parents used as a "runner". A little boy who had "adopted" Dr. Alex in his search for help. Duke University in Durham, North Carolina is……where Naomi "Scootchie" Cross is a college law student. She's Alex's niece, and she's missing. Mary Ellen Klouk is a law-school friend who reported her missing. Florence Campbell is another law-school classmate. Seth Samuel Taylor is Florence's cousin, a social worker in the Durham projects, with a chip on his shoulder about being black and downtrodden; he's also Naomi's boyfriend. Keesha Bowie is a postal worker Seth and Naomi talked into going back to school. Verda is a waitress-philosopher at Spanky's. Dr. Louis Freed is a mentor and a former teacher of Seth's. He's also a noted expert on the Civil War period, particularly the Underground Railroad.Dr. Kate McTiernan is beautiful, incredibly smart, and very focused on her medical career. Once she graduates, she plans to go back to her hometown in West Virginia to fulfill a promise to her mother?, grandmother?, Beadsie McTiernan. Carole Anne, Susanne, and Marjorie are her sisters. Kristin is Kate's twin. Mary and Martin are her parents. All but Carole Anne and their father have died of cancer. Dr. Peter Grant teaches history and was her boyfriend until Katie dumped him.Bette Anne Ryerson was a mother of two kids and a graduate English student. Kristen Miles. Melissa Stanfield is a student nurse who's been there nine weeks. Maria Jane Capaldi has been there a month. Christa Akers has been there two months. Anna Miller and Chris Chapin have been a couple for a while now. Jason Snyder had once had a farm.Browning Lowell is the dean of women and very concerned about Naomi's disappearance. She considered him a friend and a close advisor. Dr. Wick Sachs, a.k.a., Doctor Dirt, in Durham is a friend of Dr. Rudolph's and notorious at school. He has a wife who works as a registered nurse and two children: Faye Anne and Nathan.Durham PDDetectives Nick Ruskin and Davey Sikes are in charge of Naomi's kidnapping. Robby Hatfield is the idiot chief of police.The hospitalDr. Maria Ruocco treats the patient who got away. Dr. B. Stringer actually thinks he can keep Alex out of the ambulance.The married Casanova fancies himself to be the great lover, because he can hold an erection for a long time. I doubt the girls he kidnaps see him as any great thing. He insists his captives obey the rules of the house. Or else.FBINeither Special Agent-in-Charge Joyce Kinney nor her partner Agent Mark are happy with Cross or Sampson being at their crime scene. Kyle Craig is a friend of Alex's. Ronald Burns is the deputy director of the whole FBI. Agents John Asaro, Raymond Cosgrove, and Phil Becton, a suspect profiler, are in LA. Agent James Heekin is brought in from Virginia to interrogate the suspect.Mike "No-Heart" Hart is a reporter for the National Star. Los AngelesBeth Lieberman is a Los Angeles Times reporter the Gentleman Caller has singled out for his diaries. Dan Hills is the editor-in-chief at the paper. Dr. William Rudolph is a plastic surgeon who works at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. His father had been an Army colonel who liked to hand out discipline. Dr. Wick Sachs in Durham is a friend of his.Sunny Ozawa had been 14. Juliette Montgomery will tide the Gentleman over.The Gentleman Caller is a Jekyll-and-Hyde. Charming until he has you in his power. Then the brutality comes out.1981, Chapel Hill, NCRoe Tierney, UNC's Azalea Queen, and Tom Hutchinson, Duke's football captain, steal off in a rowboat to make love.1975, Boca RatonMichael and Hannah Pierce have two daughters, Coty and Karrie.The Cover and TitleThe cover is extreme with its gold outlined title against a sunrise gradient ranging from a deep red at the top to a deep yellow at the horizon taking up three-fourths of the background and the bottom fourth a dark cluster of trees surrounding a tiny house all lit-up inside, with a lit-up patrol car parked in front.The title is Casanova's dream, his desire to Kiss the Girls and find the romance he wants.
The following has been presented to you spoiler free. (:Let me just start off by saying this is the novel Swimsuit (by the same author) tried to be, but failed miserably. If you really want to hear my rant on that book, check out my review of it.I waited a long time before reading this book. Mainly because I wasn't that impressed with the first book in this series, Along Came a Spider. But I'm so glad I did. This is by far my favorite James Patterson book that I've read so far.It follows two pattern killers, Casanova and The Gentleman (oh, James Patteron and his nicknames for every single one of his antagonists), who abduct young women who are perfect in every way. They torture, rape, kill, and do every other horrific thing to them. And of course, Alex Cross takes the case because his niece, Naomi, was one of the girls that was taken. This book is definitely gruesome. Especially a certain snake scene. If I may relate it to Swimsuit again, it has the same gross-out factor, but the story around Kiss the Girls is much more complex and fleshed out than Swimsuit was. So, if you can get through all the killing and rape scenes, this book is fabulous. The plot is complex and interesting, as well. The storyline is unlike anything I've ever read before. And since it was written a good fifteen years ago, I'm sure it was the first of its kind. But if it wasn't, I don't really care, I loved it anyway.Don't get me wrong, there were some things about this book that irked me. The fact that Kate (one of the victims) could fall for Alex not a week after being raped and tortured is completely unbelievable. Kate, if you're looking for a excuse to swear off men forever, you have one of the best reasons in the world. Also, the scenes with Alex's children are way too sugar-coated. James Patterson wrote two of the most angelic kids ever created. They were really bothersome. Thankfully, these things didn't bother me enough to keep me from enjoying the story completely.Overall, I highly reccommend this book. I would read the first in the series, Along Came a Spider, before reading this one, however. It does reference events in that book quite a lot, especially towards the end.
What do You think about Kiss The Girls (2000)?
I think I'm so upset about how AWFUL this novel was because I really enjoyed Along Came a Spider, and decided to move right into book 2 in the series. The only good thing about this book was that it was so short that I really only wasted a few, precious hours of my life (that I will never get back). OK, so we're back to Alex Cross, still a likeable detective. He gets involved in a missing persons case because his niece is one of the victims. He begins to hunt a man who calls himself "Casanova" who kidnaps, rapes, and holds women against their will in an underground house. Sounds like a good plot (sick, twisted but decent) but maybe Patterson just rushes through the book because when we find out who "Casanova" is, I actually had to Wiki it to find out where this person fit into the novel earlier. Maybe this novel was just so bad that I didn't care to remember any of the characters. And should I continue to read the Alex Cross series if Dr. Cross is going to fall for a different women each time? Where were his kids through this whole novel? Oh man, I just don't even know if I want to continue this series. My advice, just don't even bother with this piece of garbage that was probably written in a day. It was AWFUL!!
—Emily
I thought I'd read this book a long time ago, but someone recently told me she had to stop reading after "the snake scene" and I didn't remember any snake scene (and she told me that I definitely would--and now I do), so I had to see if it was as bad as she made it seem. Didn't strike me as any more graphic than any other Patterson book, and it was definitely Patterson before he became a corporation, so much better than that last awful book of his I read.It was an interesting situation because this is an early book and later books talk about something that I kept remembering all the time I was reading this one, which made me know who the killer, "Casanova" was. I was not fooled once, but twice. And in the end, I was surprised just like everyone else.The plot involves two serial killers, "The Gentleman Caller" on the West coast and "Casanova" on the east. As bodies turn up and methods are compared, they finally decide that the two killers are working together. Alex Cross gets drawn in investigating the abduction of his beloved niece. In the meantime he finds love, sorta. And he works with local law enforcement and the FBI to get the bad guy(s). Plot points include a disappearing house, the underground railroad, and a bunch of other things that all come together, eventually. As they always do in Patterson books.Except for the murder victims, of course!(Oh...and if you're squeamish, you might want to skip any scene that includes a snake.)
—Bev
If it weren't for two scenes in this novel, I'd add two stars. Patterson is no prose stylist, and his novels are formulaic, but until a few novels after this one Alex Cross got unbearably Gary Stu, with supervillain psychopaths making it their life work to take him down, I found Patterson's detective protagonist likable and the books featuring him entertaining page-turning police procedurals.In some ways, this second book book in the series is even stronger than Along Came a Spider, the first Alex Cross novel. In this one, Cross becomes involved when his niece is kidnapped, and he believes it's a case of "twinning" where two serial killers are cooperating and competing on two coasts--"Cassanova" and "The Gentleman Caller." Cross teams up with a victim of Cassanova, Kate McTiernan, who escapes his lair only to find it's seemingly disappeared. The forensic psychology is more to the fore in this novel, the hunt suspenseful, the twists clever. Moreover, Kate in a lot of ways is an appealing, kick-ass heroine--a survivor who does everything to save herself, not just wait passively for rescue.What mars this is that when I think of this novel, I think of two scenes in particular, and it's not a good memory. One is the rape of Kate by Cassanova. The other is the anal rape of another woman by Cassanova--using a live snake. Yes, you read that right. I went back and looked to make sure I was remembering the right novel. There it is in Chapter 54. Three paragraphs burned into my retinas.The thing is I can see the rationale for both scenes. One to show Kate's resilience and bravery, so that we understand what she underwent. The other so we understand just what kind of monster Cross is dealing with in Cassanova. But those scenes are so graphic, so explicit, to me they come across as pornography of the kind the two serial rapists are said to read and relish--The Story of O and School Girls in Paris among others named. The scenes overwhelm the story as well as repel. Rape in fiction is a chancy thing. I'm not saying it should never be used. It's too often part of life, history, crime--but it's rarely done effectively and isn't done well here but comes across as a cheap attempt to titillate and shock.
—Lisa (Harmonybites)
