Interview with best-selling author james patterson - aarp members only access

There aren’t many authors who can say they have sold 100 million books. In fact, there’s only one. In April 2023, thriller extraordinaire James Patterson, 76, became the first author to sell

more than 100 million books, according to _Publishers Weekly._ What’s more, if you also count ebooks and audiobooks, Patterson is estimated to have sold more than 400 million copies, making

him the best-selling author of all time. In collaboration with Patterson, AARP is offering the chance for members to read his novella_ The Trial_ free on Members Only Access. _The Trial _is

one of the 23 books (and counting) that are part of the Women’s Murder Club, Patterson’s most popular series. The books in the Women’s Murder Club series are numbered chronologically — _1st

To Die_, _2nd Chance_, _3rd Degree_, etc. The series also includes a few shorter, single-sitting reads, like _The Trial_, which is considered Book Number 15.5. It’s sandwiched between _15th

Affair _and _16th Seduction_. Courtesy: BookShots Women’s Murder Club centers around the friendships among four accomplished women: Lindsay Boxer, a San Francisco Police Department homicide

detective; Dr. Claire Washburn, chief medical examiner for San Francisco; Yuki Castellano, a San Francisco district attorney; and Cindy Thomas, a crime desk reporter for the _San Francisco

Chronicle_. “The four of them get together and will occasionally work on or help one another on a case,” Patterson tells AARP. He adds that the 24th Women’s Murder Club book has been

completed and the 25th book is nearly done. “I like the series, and every once in a while, I’ll write a shorter one like _The Trial_,” Patterson says. “I’m probably going to write another

shorter one next year. The hope is if people aren’t familiar with the series, they’ll go, ‘Oh, I like those characters. I’d like to know more about those characters.’” Although Patterson is

well known for male protagonists — like Alex Cross, the Washington, D.C., homicide detective who entered the zeitgeist back in 1993 with the novel _Along Came a Spider_; and Michael Bennett,

the Irish American New York City detective who solves crimes as he raises his family — writing women as main characters came easily to him. “I grew up in a house full of women — a mother,

grandmother, three sisters, two female cats — and the buzz and purr is still in my head, and it really has affected me,” he says. “The dialogue, the whole thing. … I don’t believe that you

have to be a woman to write about a woman, and you don’t have to be a man to write about a man. I’ve never bought into that. There’s so much art that you’d have to throw out if you wanted to

go that way.”