James Patterson

James Patterson, born in 1947, was a PhD candidate at Vanderbilt when he took a job as an advertising executive at J. Walter Thompson, and he stayed in advertising until 1996. His first novel, The Thomas Berryman Number, came out in 1976. Along Came a Spider (1993) introduced Alex Cross, a forensic psychologist and detective with the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., and the character has since carried more than thirty novels and a 2001 film of Along Came a Spider.

Patterson works with a variety of co-authors and runs many series at once: Alex Cross, Michael Bennett, the Women's Murder Club (from 1st to Die, 2001), Maximum Ride (from The Angel Experiment, 2005), Daniel X, NYPD Red, Witch & Wizard, Private and Middle School. He co-wrote The President Is Missing (2018) with Bill Clinton and Run, Rose, Run (2022) with Dolly Parton. He was the first person to sell one million e-books, topped Forbes's list of highest-paid authors in 2016 for the third year running, and received the National Book Foundation's Literarian Award in 2015 for his literacy work, which includes grants to school libraries, teachers' colleges and independent bookstores.

Start with Along Came a Spider (1993), the first entry on BookList4u's 34-book Alex Cross list. It sets up Cross as a detective and a father raising his children with his grandmother, Nana Mama, and the early books feature Gary Soneji, a killer who wants Cross dead for putting him in prison. Read the Cross novels in order: each case wraps up within its book, but his family, his eventual marriage to Bree Stone and antagonists like Soneji carry across the series.

If 34 books is more than you want to take on, Patterson's other series start cleanly. 1st to Die (2001) opens the Women's Murder Club, and The Angel Experiment (2005) begins Maximum Ride for younger readers. The President Is Missing needs no background at all.