Along Came a Spider

Jezzie Flanagan is both a protagonist and antagonist in Along Came a Spider. Jezzie is a Secret Service supervisor in charge of assigning agents to protect government officials and their families. She is intelligent, with a law degree from the University of Virginia, and has worked hard to achieve her position within the Secret Service—especially as a woman in a male-dominated space.

Jezzie’s parents struggled with alcohol when she was a child and inadvertently pressured her to be the best. She recalls her father only giving her positive attention when she was getting good grades or winning awards. Still, like Alex, Jezzie struggles with the death of her father, who died by suicide; since college, she’s lied that he died of a heart attack. This shows not only the depth of her grief, grounded in her need for her father’s love and acceptance, but her need to be seen as someone with human emotions.

Jezzie’s relationship with Alex allows him to show a softer side. He slowly falls in love with Jezzie, who comes off as a hardworking woman carrying the burden of two children’s disappearance on her watch. But in the end, Jezzie proves to be the opposite: She is an accomplished liar who fooled even Alex, a trained psychologist. While Jezzie claims to have reciprocated Alex’s love, her complicated childhood and greed led her down a path of corruption.

Gary Soneji/Murphy is the antagonist of the novel. When Gary is first introduced, it is as Gary Soneji, a math teacher at Washington Day School. However, it is later revealed that “Gary Soneji” is a pseudonym for a door-to-door salesman named Gary Murphy. Gary is an intelligent man obsessed with true crime, especially serial killers and the Lindbergh kidnapping. His lifelong dream has been to commit a crime as notorious and impossible to solve as the Lindbergh kidnapping, a crime many believe resulted in the wrongful conviction of Bruno Hauptmann.

When Gary is arrested, he claims to have multiple personality disorder, which is now known as dissociative identity disorder (DID). While Gary is on trial, officials, lawyers, psychiatrists, and psychologists debate his diagnosis. Alex attempts to hypnotize Gary on several occasions and appears to draw out Gary Soneji, the aggressive alter of mild-mannered Gary Murphy, but after Gary is convicted of kidnapping and murder, he more or less reveals he never had DID. Still, Alex continues to seek the truth in later books.

Gary’s main motivation is to be a star. He wants to be the type of criminal that people write and talk about years after his crimes. His desire to pull off the perfect crime, however, is at odds with his desire to receive credit for his wrongdoings. This leads Gary to confess to Alex that someone took Maggie from his original hiding place. If not for his confession, the kidnapping might not have been solved. Yet Gary didn’t get the fame he wanted, so he targets Alex and his family.

Maggie Rose Dunne is the daughter of actress Katherine Rose and Red Cross head Thomas Dunne. Maggie is a typical preteen, rebellious in small ways such as wearing old, worn clothing to school despite her parents providing her with newer clothing. However, she is also well behaved and gets along with her parents and other children.

Maggie is one of the victims Gary Soneji kidnaps from Washington Day School, the other being her best friend, Michael Goldberg. Maggie’s fate is recounted through her own chapters, in which she is transported from place to place until she is left in the care of a family in Uyuni, Bolivia. She proves resilient in her desire to survive, providing hope to an otherwise grim story.