1) I am currently reading The Alienist by Caleb Carr. This is an excellent book so far which, deals with a horrendous crime in the late 19th century in New York. The main characters are Dr. Laszlo Kriezler, the Alienist, or what we would now call a Psychologist, Mr. Moore, a journalist, Sara Howard, a secretary at the local police department, attempting to become the first female police officer and Rosevelt, the chief of police. This book is a very leisurely read, with very detailed character development. If you are at all interested in crime drama, I would strongly recommend this book as it has some interesting ideas, such as the origin of fingerprinting.

2) Previous to The Alienist I was reading books by Patterson, author of the recent hollywood movie Along Came a Spider. I was thouroughly unimpressed with his writing style in the series involving Dr. Cross (the one I read was Jack and Jill and it is the same series as the movie). I found the plot fascinating, however I found the development of both the characters and the above mentioned plot boring, slow and not always reaching a satisfactory point. As well, I found it quite annoying that Dr. Cross would mention, every other chapter or so, a previous criminal, Dr. Soneji. Maybe if I had been able to find that story first then the references would have made sense, however it was simply an unneccessary addition in my opinion. As well, the constant use of the grammatically incorrect "try and" was enough to make me crazy. However in almost all current fiction I have found this mistake to be rampant.
However, I did decide to read one other of his books, one not linked to Dr. Cross whatsoever. I chose to read Hide and Seek which I enjoyed thouroughly. It was very entertaining and thought provoking. In this story, the main character is a single mother who was abused by her first husband and ends up shooting him. The story continues with her story about the death of her fiance (to be second husband) and the death of a third man, her second husband. It truly is a fascinating story and very readable.