James Patterson doesn't call them novels. He calls them roller coasters.

        With good reason, given the way his books take readers up and down, sending them racing toward resolution, then jerking them around the corner for a whole new set of hills, thrills, twists and turns.

        That's pretty much the case with Roses Are Red, sixth of Mr. Patterson's Alex Cross novels. Overall, it's his 19th novel.

        Er, roller coaster.

        “That's what I'm trying to do. Build the perfect roller coaster,” he said before a recent book signing. “Roller coasters aren't reality, and neither are my books. But they both can be fun.”
       

Find The Mastermind

               In this one, Dr. Cross, the Washington detective and psychologist, goes up against The Mastermind, a particularly vicious killer who devises the plan, then hires petty thugs to carry it out.

        The plan is simple: Two thugs kidnap the families of bank execs; two others go to the bank and inform the manager that if he or she doesn't cooperate, the family will be killed.

        The manager cooperates, and the thugs get the money. Then they kill the family anyway.

        For insurance purposes, just in case the thugs figured out his identity, The Mastermind kills them and hires a new crew for each robbery.

        Poor Dr. Cross. It's his job to find The Mastermind. Problem is, somebody on the inside — cop? FBI? — is feeding The Mastermind info and planting bogus clues in high places.

        And that turns Roses into a roller coaster. At least twice, Dr. Cross and the FBI team he's working with finger a perp because they have tons of evidence. Irrefutable stuff. But the evidence crashes both times.

        Give Mr. Patterson some credit here: He's so convincing and his clue-planting so clever that the reader absolutely believes the bad guy's a goner and never stops to wonder what the heck's going to happen for the next 200 pages.
       

More than a manhunt

               The manhunt for The Mastermind is what drives the book, but it's not all Roses is about.

        • Alex is in love. Christine Johnson, principal of the Sojourner Truth School his kids attend and love interest from an earlier novel (that relationship got her kidnapped and held hostage for a year by a lunatic Alex was chasing), is back. On her arm we find Alex Jr., the baby Alex fathered but didn't know about because Christine delivered while a hostage.

        He's in love, she's in love but so skittish — being held hostage does that to you — you just know true love won't run smoothly.

        • Alex's daughter Jannie is seriously ill. Seizures land her in the hospital. Even with medication, seizures keep coming. Some particularly nasty brain surgery is required.

        “There is a lot of the Cross family in there,” Mr. Patterson says, “because they're the moral center of that universe.

        “Critics say they're unrealistic, that families like the Crosses couldn't exist. Let me tell you something. I grew up in a river town in upstate New York. My grandparents owned a small restaurant and their cook was a black woman named Laura.

        “At one point,” he says, “she had some trouble so she and her kids moved in with us. I spent an incredible amount of time with her and her family — kids, aunts, uncles — and loved the responsiveness, the closeness, the incredibly deep feelings.

        “That's the Cross family, and they do exist, and they are my favorite recurring characters.”
       

Four females

               But not his only ones. Come March, 2001, 1st to Die will introduce four San Francisco females known as the Women's Murder Club, a police detective, assistant district attorney, a reporter and a medical examiner who team up to track a serial killer. It's the first of a series. (It's also a four-hour mini-series airing on NBC in May).

        Or, fans can catch the Cross family in the flesh in spring 2001 when Paramount releases Along Came a Spider, with Morgan Freeman reprising his Dr. Cross from Kiss the Girls.

        “Oh, and I have a book out in July. It's a non-Cross, I only do one of those a year, called Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas.”

        So, does he ever sleep, this former ad agency CEO turned author who divides his life between homes in Palm Beach (“I voted, I wasn't confused) and upstate New York?

        “I have a wife and a 2 1/2-year-old I like to spend time with, so I limit myself to three books and maybe a screenplay a year.”

        Even with that, what's he hear most at book signings?

        “ “Write faster.”

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