Ali Cross

Ali Cross greatly admires his famous father and wants to follow in his footsteps and become a detective. To do so, he must overcome three major obstacles: impatience, doubt, and ignorance. He succeeds, and his efforts show he is a worthy candidate to become a great investigator.

His father’s upcoming trial and his best friend’s recent disappearance test Ali’s patience. He bursts out angrily at members of the press who hurl challenging and taunting questions at his father. This makes Detective Cross look bad: If the son is impulsive, then maybe so is the father. Meanwhile, a kid at school, Kahlil Weyland, torments Ali about his dad until the boys get into a fistfight. Ali finds himself suspended and grounded; this interferes with his quest to find Gabe Qualls.

The insults are hard to take, but Ali realizes that a good detective knows how to resist the temptation to react angrily. Briefly a suspect in his neighborhood’s burglaries, Ali must go with his father to police headquarters, where reporters again dog Detective Cross. This time, though, Ali holds his tongue: “I’d learned my lesson the hard way, and I knew these people weren’t asking real questions” (207). At school, confronted again by Kahlil, Ali takes a different tack. He tells the bully he’s no longer interested in their conflict: “I could spend my time sweating over Kahlil, or I could focus on something that actually felt worth worrying about” (237).

Late in the story, Ali recognizes Gabe on the street. Tempted to shout out to his friend, Ali instead resists: “The part of my brain that listened to Dad about being a good detective said, wait” (279). Ali’s newfound caution pays off, and he trails Gabe to the storage unit where Gabe and Ramon hide their ill-gotten property.

Frustrated by the police’s lack of progress in finding Gabe, Ali wants to help but at first doesn’t know what to do: “How am I supposed to find Gabe if the police can’t?” (152) Nana asks whether Ali’s detective heroes—Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Olivia Benson, for example—would give up so easily: “How far do you think any of them would have gotten if they worried too much about what was and wasn’t possible?” (152) She reminds him that she and Ali enjoy lives that wouldn’t be available to them except that Black Americans were willing to face down the impossible. Thus encouraged, Ali overcomes his self-doubt, redoubles his efforts, and eventually finds his missing friend.

During his informal investigation, Ally learns many useful facts and skills that detectives use to solve cases. His father teaches him how to observe a scene. He learns that the police tend to be tight-lipped because keeping what they’ve learned away from suspects is important. He also discovers that it’s dangerous to directly confront a suspect, especially if the interviewer is an unarmed child and the suspect is large and has a criminal record. In that respect, Ali realizes that enthusiasm and determination aren’t enough to solve a case.

Ali thus finds that patience, confidence—but not overconfidence—and skill combine to generate successful outcomes for a detective. His appreciation for the difficulties and dangers of detective work will serve him well the next time he needs to solve a mystery.