The Patient: A DS George Cross Mystery by Tim Sullivan Format: eARC
Source: supplied free by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, thriller
Series: DS George Cross #3
Pages: 416
Published by Atlantic Crime on February 3, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Bristol detective DS George Cross investigates the suspicious suicide of a young woman.
DS George Cross can be rude, difficult, and awkward with people. But his unfailing logic and dogged pursuit of the truth means his conviction rate is the best on the force. An outsider himself, having been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, DS Cross is especially drawn to cases concerning the voiceless and the dispossessed.
Now, Cross is untangling the truth about a young woman who died three days ago. With no fingerprints, no weapon and no witnesses, the Bristol Crime Unit are ready to close the case. The coroner rules the woman had a long history of drug abuse. But her mother is convinced it was her daughter has been clean and sober for over two years.
DS Cross is determined to defy his bosses and re-open the case, even if it costs him his career. Soon he is mired in a labyrinth of potential suspects – but can he solve the case before his superiors shut it down for good?
My Review:
This is my third read in the DS George Cross series, after The Dentist and The Cyclist, and so far I am enjoying the whole thing very much. So much so that I have zero plans to stop until the current, or for that matter any future, end.
The series so far, and the stories within, are all mysteries with a bit of a thriller edge. Not that Cross and his colleagues get themselves in physical danger, as they usually don’t deal with those kinds of cases. Cross generally picks up cold cases or, as occurs in this case, recent cases that the original investigating officer decided were closed where Cross sees that something does NOT add up.
Or, as it turns out in this particular case, adds up to a LOT of dead bodies that no one else noticed.
It’s the pacing of the story that picks up that thriller edge. At first, Cross often has very little to go on, but is doggedly going at it anyway, over and over again. Where a previous inspector saw little worth bothering with, Cross sees details that are either missing or contradictory. And, as usual, he’s right.
Which doesn’t ever mean that it’s easy for him to determine precisely what is wrong no matter how certain he is that something is. The case itself unravels slowly – at least up until the desperate race at the end. The tension early on often comes from either within Cross himself as he refuses to settle for less than the truth, or from the actions of his superiors who press him to either charge a suspect he’s not certain of or drop a case altogether even as a clock dimly ticks somewhere in the background.
At the same time, there’s usually a personal element to the events surrounding the mystery. In this particular case there are two. Cross has a difficult time dealing with change, and also with clutter and untidiness. A combination that comes to a head when his father, a hoarder, takes a tumble inside his own, extremely cluttered apartment, and needs physical therapy AND a safe and uncluttered home to return to. Navigating their separate needs and responsibilities pushes Cross to reach out to his colleagues for help, a HUGE undertaking for the extremely private Cross.
That the temporary care facility in which his dad is placed causes the entire police department to reconnect with an old, respected colleague during her final days AND provides Cross with the breakthrough in his case manages a kind of trifecta as it affords Cross the rare opportunity to open himself up a bit, gives a former officer the recognition she deserved along with a beautiful, heartfelt sendoff AND presents Cross with the final puzzle piece he needed to get the full measure of justice for a victim who finally had everything to live for but made the grave mistake of placing her trust in someone who should have been worthy of it but absolutely was not.
Escape Rating A+: I was originally intending to read this a couple of weeks ago, but I put it off for a bit. Not because I wasn’t looking forward to it, but because I was listening to Inside Man by John McMahon, which is a really, really close readalike for this series. So close, in fact, that I was a bit worried about conflating the two which wouldn’t do either of them the justice they each deserve. Books absolutely do deserve separate consideration because both series are terrific. However, just because both protagonists are on the spectrum doesn’t mean that their stories or their characters are exactly alike.
Far from it. Gardner Camden seems to be a bit more aware that the world is not set up to suit him and that he needs to suit it to get ahead. That he has a young daughter who loves him, relies on him and has more than a few of the same traits helps him to fit into the world a bit more smoothly than George Cross does. (Notice I said more smoothly, not that Camden is actually smooth at fitting in. But he’s more consciously trying and a bit more successful at it – or at least a bit less abrupt about it. It’s a matter of degree.)
One of the interesting personal aspects of this entry in Cross’ series is that we get a much clearer picture of the probable cause of that difference. Camden’s mother did her best to help him understand how he did and didn’t fit into the world and gave him tools for figuring that out for himself. Cross’ mother abandoned her son and her husband when George was five because she couldn’t cope with either her husband’s gentle parenting of their son or her own inability to deal with the boy’s many differences.
It’s turned these two detectives, both with similar jobs and similar approaches to those jobs, into much different people in ways that mostly do not reflect the differences between the US and the UK.
This particular entry in the Cross series, in addition to a fascinating and convoluted case – as Cross prefers – tells the reader quite a bit more about Cross as a person, not just how he moves in the world but how he sees himself. That the backdrop of the story includes a complaint against Cross by a senior officer who bullied Cross when he was a junior and now resents every single time Cross investigates one of his cases and discovers yet again that he didn’t investigate much at all does a terrific job of showing how Cross thinks of his work as well as the various ways in which his colleagues, superiors and rivals think of him.
At the same time, the way that Cross enlists the aid of his colleagues to help him with his dad’s apartment opens the character up in many ways AND shows how his work environment is, well, working on him on a more personal level. So the investigations in his first three cases so far have had a lot of similar aspects, but the protagonist himself is definitely changing.
I’m certainly looking forward to more of both, more twisty cases and more of Cross reaching out beyond his own boundaries, in the books ahead in this series. Next up is The Politician. As the titles of this series represent something about the victim of the case, I might just be looking forward to that one even more than usual!
