Alex Cross (Reimagined)

Alex Cross is a Washington, D.C. police detective and a man struggling with his own personal demons. Both brilliant and emotionally impulsive, he has made his reputation shining a light where others fear to tread, into the hearts and minds of psychopaths and killers, and the shadowy spaces of his own soul.

Cross was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His mother died of lung cancer when he was nine; his father, a heavy drinker, the year after. He and his two younger brothers, Charlie and Blake, were sent to Washington, D.C. to live with their grandmother, Regina Cross Hope, an English teacher and assistant principal. Cross subsequently grew up in the Anacostia neighborhood in the southeastern quadrant of the District of Columbia. After he graduated from Ballou High School, he went on to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Cross graduated from Johns Hopkins summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology. Afterwards, he moved back to Washington, D.C. and then applied to join the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia.

After completing the entire application process, Cross went on to the Metropolitan Police Academy. Upon graduating from the Police Academy, he was assigned as a patrol officer to the Second District Station. Three years into his career as a police officer, Cross was assigned to the Second District Detectives Office as an Investigator after he completed the necessary training and evaluation phase. A year after that, he was promoted to Detective II and assigned to the Homicide Branch. As a homicide detective, Cross investigates recent murders, suspicious deaths, suicides and natural deaths.

Within the Homicide Branch, he has an extraordinary clearance rate. Cross commands outstanding loyalty from friends and colleagues. Nobody who ever stood at his side has a bad word to say about him. And yet there are rumours that Cross is bad – not corrupt, not on the take, but tormented by the darker side of humanity. He is an inspired maker of connections and a whirlwind genius. Cross is also dazzling, obsessive, possessed - and sometimes dangerous in the violence of his fixations. He has paid a heavy price for his obsessive dedication; he has never been able to prevent himself from becoming emotionally involved in his cases and therefore consumed by the darkness of the crimes he deals with.

Cross seethes with a hidden fury that at times he can barely control. Sometimes it sends him to the brink of madness, making him do things he shouldn't; things way beyond the limits of the law. Cross serves his own idea of a moral order as much as rules and codes of criminal law. For him, his profession is a vocation rather than a job. However as the intensity of his convictions combine with the violence of his passions, they often provoke the question of whether Cross is a force for good or a man hell bent on self-destruction. As the stakes get ever higher and more personal, his lonely path has threatened to pull him towards the very edge of temptation. Cross's confidante is his arch-enemy Brianna Stone, a beautiful multiple-murderess who evaded his grasp on one of his first cases with the Homicide Branch, and with whom he has become locked in a lethal battle of wits.

A brilliant mind. A violent passion. Detective Alex Cross might just be as dangerous as the depraved criminals he hunts.