Hannibal Lecter influenced Alex Cross

Red Dragon built the profiler thriller and Alex Cross is written inside it. Harris established the whole apparatus in 1981: an investigator whose method is to think like the killer, behavioural science treated as a real discipline with procedure and jargon, a serial offender given a full interior life, and the professional cost of the work as the actual subject. Patterson's series takes the parts and speeds them up. Cross is a psychologist working homicide, the villains are theatrical, and the short chapters are the innovation. Filed MEDIUM: this is a form being worked in rather than a specific debt Patterson has described.