James Patterson (David Ellis) Books in Order

Under this heading you’ll find the thrillers James Patterson has written with David Ellis, grouped in one place for easy browsing. It’s less a single storyline than a shared universe of fast, high-impact novels where Ellis’s courtroom experience meshes with Patterson’s love of cliffhangers.

Some of these books are standalones that can be read in any order. Guilty Wives strands four friends in a foreign prison after a glittering Monte Carlo weekend turns into a nightmare. Mistress follows Ben Casper, a news junkie whose fixation on a woman leads him into a chase involving global politics, shadowy intelligence work, and a lot of very bad people with something to hide.

The Murder House offers a different flavor, mixing small-town secrets with a genuinely creepy setting: an oceanfront mansion on Long Island with a history of unsolved murders. When a Hollywood power player and his lover are found dead there, detective Jenna Murphy has to untangle the house’s past as much as the present-day case.

Other collaborations spin out into connected series. The Emmy Dockery novels start with Invisible, where an FBI analyst sees links between hundreds of so-called accidents, and continue in Unsolved, which raises the stakes by suggesting the killer may be hiding in plain sight inside the Bureau itself. The Black Book line introduces Billy Harney, a Chicago detective whose investigations into brothel ledgers, political scandals, and an audacious prison break unfold across The Black Book, The Red Book, and Escape.

Across all of these stories, expect short, punchy chapters, big reversals, and characters who are never quite as safe—or as honest—as they first appear.