Book Review: The Murder Trial

Title: The Murder Trial

Author: James Patterson and Nancy Allen

Publisher: Little Brown and Company

Publication Date: November 23, 2026

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

James Patterson's latest thriller pairs two timelines—the night of the murders and the trial eleven months later—and the structure is the strongest thing going for it. Watching the two threads close in on each other kept me engaged in a way a straight, linear telling wouldn't have; it's a smart choice for a story built around what Janelle Thompson did or didn't do to her adoptive parents.

Where it lost me was the courtroom itself. The public defender's sloppiness, the way Janelle is treated by the people meant to be on her side, the judge's conduct—none of it read as plausible to me, and once I started questioning the trial's realism I couldn't fully buy into it for the rest of the book. 

It's still a fast read—Patterson's rapid-fire chapters do what they always do, and I moved through this one quickly. But the realism issues kept it from being the kind of Patterson thriller I fully sink into, and that's really what brings this down to 3 out of 5. A quick, competent read that fell a little short of what I expect from him.

A big thank you to Little Brown and Company and NetGalley for providing an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review. 

#LittleBrownCompany #NetGalley

Book Review: The Dead Sister

Title: The Dead Sister

Author: Andrew Barrett

Publisher: TBD

Publication Date: September 24, 2026

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

This eighth installment in the Eddie Collins series took a little while to pull him fully into the fray — but once it did, it took off. Barrett drops us into a Major Crime Unit fraying at the seams, and that internal friction turns out to be just as gripping as the case itself. A woman found in a pool of blood looks like a straightforward, burglary gone wrong killing, until Eddie's forensic eye starts snagging on details that don't add up: old abuse, buried money, loyalties that run dangerously deep. When a second body turns up behind another door, the case cracks wide open.

What elevates this book is Kenny's retirement. It throws Eddie completely off balance — he doesn't know how to manage people or lead a team, so he retreats into the sarcasm and prickliness that have always been his armor. But Barrett doesn't let him hide there. The staffing crisis and the strain on his personal relationships become the pressure that finally forces some real growth in Eddie, and watching that unfold over the course of the book was genuinely satisfying. The family at the center of the case — a nest of siblings and a woman caught between two brothers — gave the story a nasty, morally bankrupt core; nobody in that family is remotely good, and that made the unraveling of their secrets all the more compulsive to read.

It was also a pleasure to see Regan and other familiar faces drift through, threads connecting this book to both the earlier Eddie Collins novels and the DS Regan Carter series. And the drastic reveal at the end managed to feel both sudden and, looking back, inevitable, which is exactly the kind of twist I want from this series.

"The Dead Sister" isn't the best in the series — the slow burn into Eddie's part of the story cost it a little momentum early on — but the character work with Eddie and Kenny, combined with a genuinely twisty case, made this one of the more emotionally resonant books in the series. I'm already looking forward to seeing where Eddie's growth takes him next.

A big thank you to the author for providing an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review. 

Book Review: Scream City

Title: Scream City 

Author: Hannah Morrissey

Publisher: St Martin's Press

Publication Date: January 26, 2027

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Hannah Morrissey delivers a quirky, atmospheric thriller that trades on Milwaukee's Walker's Point neighborhood as much as it does on its central mystery. The setup is a good one: a serial killer's granddaughter and the disgraced cop-turned-process-server whose father put that killer away, forced together when a copycat starts working through Rex's paper route. It's a premise built for tension, and Morrissey mostly delivers.

The real draw here is the pairing. Alice—rollerblading, haunted-bookstore-owning, living in the long shadow of her grandfather's infamy—and Rex, a Harley-riding ex-cop with a pet turtle and a marriage he's still not over, are odd enough together that their chemistry feels earned rather than manufactured. Morrissey isn't afraid to let the tension between them do double duty: is it romantic, or is it suspicion? "Kill him or kiss him" is basically the book's thesis for their whole dynamic, and it works.

Morrissey's prose has some genuine flourishes—I hadn't run into "palimpsest" (look it up) in a thriller before, and there's a genuinely unsettling passage where Alice imagines her grandfather's victims watching her from across the street, close enough to hear them breathe if they were still alive. The city itself functions almost like a character; the claustrophobia of Scream City comes through even in scene-setting.

The plot has plenty of twists; this is a fast read that knows exactly what kind of book it is. It's not going to redefine the genre, but as a moody, well-paced small-town-secrets thriller with a strong sense of place and a couple of leads worth rooting for, it earns its four stars.

A big thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for providing an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review. 

#StMartinsPress #NetGalley

Book Review: Hanging and Burning

Title: Hanging and Burning 

Author: Walter Mosley

Publisher: Little Brown and Company

Publication Date: October 20, 2026

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Walter Mosley returns with the latest Joe King Oliver novel, and once again he's raised the bar on a series I keep insisting has peaked—only to be proven wrong. This is old-school LA noir done right: a PI with his own tangled code, bent cops circling the edges, and a client whose lies burn hotter than his sins.

The case starts simple enough. His grandmother, still in LA, still fighting cancer, still the moral center pulling King into other people's messes, urges King to take on a job. The case is for Arman Babylon, a dying gangster desperate to find his long-missing granddaughter, Twyla Mann, before he passes. What looks like a straightforward missing-persons search quickly curdles into something far uglier: a cold case involving a vanished jazz singer, decades of violence against the women in Babylon's orbit, and a client who's been lying to King from the start. The trail runs from LA to New York and back, and by the time it's done, King's had to call in his old frenemy Mel—the serial killer squatting in a deconsecrated church—just to keep his footing.

What makes this one sing is how Mosley refuses to let King's moral code sit still. He's not Reacher with better tailoring; he's a man who keeps discovering that righteousness and violence live closer together than he'd like. Mosley's prose has the same cold clarity it's always had—there's a line about the lights of Los Angeles as ignorant and hopeless that stuck with me long after I put the book down, and a piece of advice King's handed early on, that a person "should be like a chandelier, hanging and burning," which ends up haunting the whole book.

Fourth in the series, and somehow still the best one yet. Five stars, no hesitation.

A big thank you to Little Brown and Company and NetGalley for providing an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review. 

#LittleBrown&Company #NetGalley