Along Came a Spider
This is a neat little thriller that pulls some fast ones, there are three killers, but one of the works alone. You’ll never know how Alex Cross solves this one.
Yes, I mean this literally. It’s left vague, there’s no big backstory, for any of them. The hero almost stumbles into things, it’s like Sherlock Holmes without the final bit where the mystery is explained.
The story seems convoluted, but it makes sense, the best way to hide an elephant is inside an elephant herd. A lone wolf kidnaps the daughter of a random senator, all done professionally, probably not for money. He does it by pretending to be an history teacher at one of those blue blood boarding schools, see The Holdovers.
He is a teacher, but goes there wearing a crazy disguise, Big Momma’s House-style. After a Lindbergh lecture, he kidnaps the girl by stuffing her into a fake computer case. The Secret Service is worthless, this is actual realistic.
Our protagonist is still moping since his last partner was killed, but opens an exception for the female lead. They don’t have much to do other than follow a bunch of easy leads, and a trail of bodies.
This kidnapping just a ruse, the real target is her crush friend, Putin’s son. But eventually this is abandoned after a near miss, at the embassy. The kidnapper is pretending to be the girl and sends messages to his crush, making him wriggle away from the bumbling Russian guards.
After this fuck up, he asks for 10 millions in diamonds, and they deliver it, no questions asked. What finally resolves it is the killer trying to kill the actual Secret Service lady, and gets murderized by our hero.
But wait, it’s not the end just yet: the lone wolf doesn’t know anything about the money, there are unwilling accomplices. The other Secret Service dude is in on it, but the true mastermind is the female lead. She kills the other dude, and is about to get away with the whole thing, when the protagonist arrives and saves the day.
It gets stupider the more you think about it. This is the guy who wrote those stupid books with Bill Clinton, from what I remember. The lone wolf if Michael Wincott, of Nope fame.
It’s no The Pelican Brief.
All the kids have a Kinesis keyboard, of The Matrix fame, what a criminal waste.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.