Notice! This article contains spoilers for season 1 of Cross.
Notice! This article contains mentions of murder, abuse and suicide.
After Alex Cross’ wife Maria dies in the opening moments of Amazon CrossFinding the truth behind his murder becomes the titular character’s main motive. Like most television shows, Amazon’s Cross begins on a positive note, where the titular character and his wife go out to lunch with two friends. However, things suddenly take a dark turn when Alex Cross’s wife, Maria, is murdered by someone in broad daylight.
Blinded by his guilt and anger, Alex Cross ends up attacking an innocent man after finding circumstantial evidence against him. However, he soon realizes that he has made a serious mistake and decides to unravel the mystery behind his wife’s death. Near the end of Cross In the first season, the closer he gets to solving the mystery, the more he realizes that his wife’s murder has something to do with his past.
Maria Cross was killed by Nancy and Peter as revenge for Alex’s alleged role in Deirdre’s death
Nancy and Peter blame Alex Cross for Deirdre’s death
Cross Season 1 Episode 4 begins with a flashback that shows how a young woman, Dierdre, was sentenced to life in prison for murdering an innocent man. One of the biggest reasons she was sentenced to life in prison was that Alex Cross testified against her in court and established that she showed all the signs of “psychopathic personality.” After Cross suggested she was unfit to reenter society, the judge gave Dierdre a life sentence for the murder, even though she had never committed any other crimes in the past.
In Cross In the final arc of Season 1, it becomes evident that Nancy and Peter planned Maria’s murder and were targeting Alex Cross and his family because they held him responsible for Diedre’s death.
After being arrested, Diedre was abused by other inmates, which led to her death by suicide. When Alex Cross investigates her case, he discovers that a man named Peter frequently visited her in prison. When he visits Peter’s case manager, he discovers that Peter and Diedre often visited the case manager, their “street mother”. Although Cross initially struggles to figure out who this “street mom” could be on Amazon Prime Video’s gripping detective show, he eventually discovers that his son’s new piano teacher, Miss. Nancy, it’s the woman in question.
In Cross In the final arc of Season 1, it becomes evident that Nancy and Peter planned Maria’s murder and were targeting Alex Cross and his family because they held him responsible for Diedre’s death. They believed that if it weren’t for Alex Cross’s testimony, Dierdre would be alive. However, Alex Cross eventually exposes Nancy by revealing that she manipulated Diedre into taking the blame for a murder Peter had committed. She emotionally blackmailed Diedre and convinced her that she would not be sentenced as aggressively as Peter because she was a white woman with a clean record.
How Mary’s death on the cross is different from James Patterson’s books
The reason for Maria’s death remains even more ambiguous in the source material
Mary is only mentioned in passing in the first eleven books of James Patterson Alex Cruz series. She finally makes a brief appearance in a flashback in the 12th novel, titled Cross. Unlike Maria in the show, the character in the book is shot by a sniper moments before Alex picks her up from her workplace. The books maintain an air of ambiguity about whether the shooter was targeting Alex or Maria and avoid revealing the killer’s identity for a long time. However, like Amazon’s Crossthe books eventually feature a twist that reveals that a mob hitman named Jimmy Hats Galati killed her.