Jack & Jill

Jack and Jill is a thriller by the American writer James Patterson, published in 1996. It is one of his novels about Alex Cross, a homicide detective and psychologist working in Washington, D.C.

The book has two strands running at once. One is a series of killings aimed at the city's most prominent people, announced in advance and carried out by a pair who sign themselves with the names of a nursery rhyme. The other is the death of a child in Cross's own neighbourhood, which is far away from the corridors of power he spends his working days in and which he takes personally because of where the body was left.

Cross is a police psychologist as well as a detective, so much of the novel is him working out what kind of person commits each crime rather than pursuing a single line of physical evidence. The two investigations converge as the killers go on striking and the people protecting the targets become more desperate, and the book's structure keeps the reader moving between Cross's household, his colleagues in the department and the people doing the killing.