(publ. Little, Brown)
Worst Case is the third book in the Michael Bennett series by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge. It was published on February 1, 2010, by Little, Brown and Company. [1] [2] [3]
Worst Case is the third book in the Michael Bennett series by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge. It was published on February 1, 2010, by Little, Brown and Company. [1] [2] [3]
NYPD Detective Mike Bennett and his new partner FBI Special Agent Emily Parker are on the trail of Francis Mooney, a Manhattan trusts and estates lawyer with terminal lung cancer. Faced with his mortality, he realizes he has spent his life and career helping the rich pass along monetary possessions to children who have neither the intelligence nor maturity to use those possessions in a way that helps society at large.
To remedy this, Mooney begins kidnapping the teenage children of the rich and putting the children through a test in which he asks them questions to test their social awareness. For example, he asks one teen what his childhood nanny's first and last name and what country she was from. When the teenager doesn't answer correctly, Mooney kills him. However, when Mooney kidnaps another teen who does answer her questions correctly, he lets her go unharmed. Mooney had expected to have to kill the teen as well and did not wear a mask over his face. He also left a fingerprint on the teen's forehead.
From that fingerprint and the teen's description, Bennett and Parker are able to identify Mooney. By that time, Mooney has returned to his old high school where he has taken several male students hostage in an auditorium. Bennett and Parker respond, but Mooney is able to escape in a stolen taxicab with 2 male students as hostages. After leaving the school, Mooney also takes the teenage doorman from a nearby swanky hotel hostage as well. Mooney wires his hostages and himself with explosives so that any attempt to kill him would kill the hostages as well.
Mooney takes his hostages to the place he feels epitomizes all the greed and monetary obsession that troubles him: the New York Stock Exchange. The police have the Exchange surrounded and the Exchange's Chief of Security attempts to apprehend Mooney. Mooney's teenage doorman hostage happens to be the son of the Exchange's chief of security and rather than shoot his own son, the chief lets Mooney by.
Once inside, Mooney reveals that the fathers of each of the two student hostages from the high school are very wealthy. He demands that the fathers both come to the Exchange and swap places with their sons. Bennett and Parker arrive and hatch a plan. Parker engages Mooney in a discussion where she belittles and trivializes all of the factors motivating Mooney. While she has Mooney distracted, Bennett engages Mooney in another discussion from the opposite side. Bennett convinces Mooney that the fathers of his hostages have arrived and are coming up the stairs as they speak. Mooney moves towards the stairway to verify this and is shot in the wrists by an FBI sniper stationed across the street. Unable to detonate his explosives with his hands, Mooney tries to do so with his chin and is shot in the head by the sniper.
A review from Publishers Weekly praised the character Emily as having "an appealing gentleness", but criticised the other female characters as clichéd. [4] The Journal Gazette described the book as a "fast read" with superior plot compared to other books by Patterson. [5]
The D.C. sniper attacks were a series of coordinated shootings that occurred during three weeks in October 2002 throughout the Washington metropolitan area, consisting of the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia, and preliminary shootings, that consisted of murders and robberies in several states, and lasted for six months starting in February 2002. Seven people were killed, and seven others were injured in the preliminary shootings, and ten people were killed and three others were critically wounded in the October shootings. In total, the snipers killed 17 people and wounded 10 others in a 10-month span.
The Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) is the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) elite tactical unit. The HRT was formed to provide a full-time federal law enforcement tactical capability to respond to major terrorist incidents throughout the United States. Today, the HRT performs a number of tactical law enforcement and national security functions in high-risk environments and conditions and has deployed overseas, including with military Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) units. In an article to mark its 40th anniversary, it was reported that since its formation in 1983 the HRT had deployed more than 900 times.
Rainbow Six is a techno-thriller novel written by Tom Clancy and released on August 3, 1998. It is the second book to primarily focus on John Clark, one of the recurring characters in the Ryanverse, after Without Remorse (1993); it also features his son-in-law, Domingo "Ding" Chavez. Rainbow Six follows "Rainbow", a secret international counterterrorist organization headed by Clark, and the complex apocalyptic conspiracy they unravel after handling multiple seemingly random terrorist attacks.
On March 1, 1932, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., the 20-month-old son of colonel Charles Lindbergh and his wife, aviatrix and author Anne Morrow Lindbergh, was murdered after being abducted from his crib in the upper floor of the Lindberghs' home, Highfields, in East Amwell, New Jersey, United States. On May 12, the child's corpse was discovered by a truck driver by the side of a nearby road.
Lon Tomohisa Horiuchi is an American former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) sniper and former United States Army officer who was involved in the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff and 1993 Waco siege. In 1997, Horiuchi was charged with manslaughter for killing Vicki Weaver at Ruby Ridge; the charges were later dropped due to Constitutional supremacy, granting federal officers immunity from actions taken in the scope of their practice.
Hostage is a 2005 action thriller film directed by Florent Siri from the screenplay by Doug Richardson. It is based on the 2001 novel of the same name by Robert Crais. The film stars Bruce Willis, Kevin Pollak, Ben Foster, and Jonathan Tucker and follows the police chief who takes place as the negotiator when the family of a wealthy accountant is held hostage by three teenagers. The film earned negative reviews from critics and grossed $77 million.
Along Came a Spider is a crime thriller novel, and the first novel in James Patterson's series about forensic psychologist Alex Cross. First published in 1993, its success has led to twenty-six sequels as of 2021.
Passenger 57 is a 1992 American action thriller film directed by Kevin Hooks. The film stars Wesley Snipes and Bruce Payne, with Snipes portraying a security consultant who finds himself forced to foil a plot to free a captive terrorist during a commercial airline flight. Critical reviews were mixed, but the film was a box-office success, and made Snipes a popular action hero icon.
A shootout, also called a firefight, gunfight, or gun battle, is an armed confrontation entailing firearms between armed parties using guns, always entailing intense disagreement(s) between the fighting parties. The term can be used to describe any such fight, though it is typically used in a non-military context or to describe combat situations primarily using firearms.
Step on a Crack is the first novel in the Michael Bennett series by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge featuring Detective Michael Bennett and his 10 children. It was released on February 6, 2007.
Seeley Joseph Booth is a fictional character in the American television series Bones (2005–2017), portrayed by David Boreanaz. Agent Booth is the male protagonist of the series. The character made an appearance in the Sleepy Hollow episode "Dead Men Tell No Tales" as part of a two-part Halloween cross-over with Bones.
The Golden Gate is a novel written by the Scottish author Alistair MacLean. It was first released in the United Kingdom by Collins in 1976 and later in the same year by Doubleday in the United States.
Kyle Craig is a fictional character and antagonist in James Patterson's series of novels featuring Washington, D.C. detective Alex Cross.
Toy Soldiers is a 1991 American action thriller film directed by Daniel Petrie Jr., with a screenplay by Petrie and David Koepp. It stars Sean Astin, Wil Wheaton, Louis Gossett Jr., Andrew Divoff, Mason Adams and Denholm Elliott.
James Patterson has written or co-written many "Bookshots" or novellas, and has co-written books with many authors. The list below separates the works into four main categories: fiction written for adults, for young adults and for children, and non-fiction.
Cross Fire is the 17th book of James Patterson's Alex Cross series. In the novel, Kyle Craig has come back for one final scare to finally kill Alex Cross, but Alex has a special day ahead of him, one that concerns Bree and his relationship. The novel was released in hardcover, paperback, and audio book on November 15, 2010. It was preceded by I, Alex Cross and was followed by Kill Alex Cross. The book sees Alex marrying Bree after proposing to her in the previous book; the book also sees the final appearance of Kyle Craig, who dies by shooting an oxygen tank, killing him and two cops before he can be sent to prison again by Alex.
Kill Alex Cross is the 18th novel in the Alex Cross series by James Patterson, following fictional detective Alex Cross as he tries to solve two crimes – one involving the president's kidnapped children and the other a case of someone poisoning the water supply.
On January 29, 2013, a hostage crisis, lasting almost seven days, began in the Wiregrass Region near U.S. Highway 231 in Midland City, Alabama. Jimmy Lee Dykes, a 65-year-old Vietnam War-era veteran, boarded a Dale County school bus, killed the driver, and took a five-year-old boy hostage. On the afternoon of February 4, law enforcement agents entered the bunker, killed Dykes, and rescued the child.
On or about the afternoon of August 3, 2013, 16-year-old Hannah Marie Anderson was abducted after cheerleading practice from Sweetwater High School in National City, California. The suspect was later identified by authorities as 40-year-old Jim Lee DiMaggio, owner of a home in Boulevard, California, about an hour away, where Anderson, her mother Christina and brother Ethan had been overnight guests the previous evening.