Content Warning: The source text includes depictions of physical and sexual abuse against a child, insensitive depictions of mental illness, racism, death by suicide, and violence.

Along Came a Spider opens in New Jersey in March 1932. A 12-year-old boy stands outside the home of pilot Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, watching them eat dinner as he considers their fame. The boy craves fame, too, so he’s conceived a plan that he believes will make him infamous. He takes a ladder beside the garage and climbs up into the bedroom of 20-month-old Charles Jr. The boy places a rubber ball in the baby’s mouth to silence him and carries him down the ladder. He takes the baby to a farmhouse less than two miles away and buries him alive.

Alex Cross, a Black psychologist and police detective, is playing the piano on his front porch early in the morning on December 21, 1992. The phone rings, and his grandmother, Regina Hope, a retired school principal nicknamed Nana Mama by 10-year-old Alex, refuses to answer it for him. Alex answers the phone, speaking to his partner and childhood friend, John Sampson, who informs Alex that there has been a murder in Langley Terrace, a neighborhood in