Warning: Spoilers in this, but the story sucks so bad I'm doing you a favor!!  
 
I finished reading Jack & Jill about two months ago, the reason I'm writing this review is that the sour taste in my mouth that I received reading this book is still there.  
 
I wouldn't recommend this book at all, it is garbage.  
 
I enjoyed reading Along Came a Spider, another James Patterson novel about Detective Alex Cross. Kiss the Girls was OK, but there were too many unbelievable points about it that made it a bad story all together.  
 
Jack & Jill though, shows how desparate James Patterson must be to keep churning out cheap thrills in order to make a buck. It also shows how repetitive his ideas are.  
 
From one Alex Cross novel to another, the same theme revolves, but within different circumstances:  
Alex Cross is still bemoaning his fate that he is a smart accomplished Black detective in Washington D.C., working around a bunch of stupid white people. He distrusts them and dislikes them. If this was the other way around I think they would have fired him by now.  
He still mourns the death of his wife Maria (who was killed in a drive-by-shooting), yet he falls in love with a female character that he meets (just like in Along Came a Spider & Kiss the Girls)-- luckily for him in this novel, the husband of the woman he falls for gets offed. (Read future Alex Cross novels!)  
Last, he is torn between his dedication to the job, and his devotion to his children and his "Nana Mama" (his grandmother)  
 
In Jack & Jill, a mysterious murderer is out to kill President Thomas Byrnes; but for no obvious reason except that Byrnes is an outsider to politics and to Washington (he is a former CEO of Ford or GM or something); and he's shaking up the town with his brand of politics.  
Yet, no good reason exists at all, even at the end of the story, as to why someone was going out of their way to murder him.  
 
On the other hand, in the "black" part of town, someone is killing little kids near the school where Cross' children attend. No one gives a darn it seems except for Detective Cross and his friend John Sampson.  
 
So in the book Cross also bemoans the fact that he has to protect the President, when in fact he would rather be searching for the killer of the children.... it sounds throughout the novel that He blames the white guys who are his bosses for this.  
 
Now is it just me, or are these two stories completely unrelated?  
If you read the book's back cover it says something like,  
"Only Detective Alex Cross realizes that the two different murderers wear the same face".... doesn't this mean that the same person is stalking/VBG|NN the President and then murdering these kids????  
 
That's not the case at all, if you read the book.  
Turns out that Some Washington insiders wanted the President dead. Ooooh... big conspiracy... it would be nice if James Patterson explain why.  
 
And the child murderer is some nerdy kid who stopped taking his anti-depressant.  
This second storyline seems to have been added just to add extra pages to the weak first storyline.  
 
One last thing that bothered me is that the book was written around 1996-97, during President Clinton's term in office, yet Thomas Byrnes is supposedly President in the novel (the novel takes place in the present)......  
..........While talking about conspiracies involving the Whitehouse, James Patterson mentions the Whitewater Scandal. How can that be if Clinton was never the President in Patterson's story??  
 
It is garbage.  
