High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Along Came a Spider is a 2001 American mystery film directed by Lee Tamahori. The screenplay by Marc Moss was adapted from the 1993 novel of the same title by James Patterson, but many of the key plot elements of the book were eliminated. Along Came a Spider was the first book in Patterson`s Alex Cross series, although the second one to be filmed, following Kiss the Girls in 1997.