23 1/2 Lies

23 1/2 Lies is a 2023 collection of short thrillers from James Patterson, co written with Maxine Paetro and including contributions from various Patterson collaborators across the wider catalogue. The book continues a Patterson short fiction tradition that has produced multiple collections of short thrillers across his career, including the BookShots imprint that ran for several years and produced dozens of short novellas in the various genres Patterson works in.

The collection brings together several short pieces, each working in the brisk thriller mode that Patterson’s brand has perfected across decades. The 23 1/2 lies of the title points to the central conceit of the collection, with each story involving deception, betrayal, or the kind of dishonesty that thriller fiction has always built around. The half lie suggests the kind of partial truth or strategic concealment that the most interesting forms of deception involve, where the lie is technically true in some narrow sense but actively misleading in the wider context.

The stories cover the kind of range that Patterson’s wider catalogue has explored across many years. Suburban suspense in the Mary Higgins Clark adjacent territory. International thriller plotting that draws on the Sigma Force adjacent material. Domestic crime stories that fit the Alex Cross procedural tradition. Various other thriller subgenres that the wider Patterson brand has touched. The short format allows the collaborators to deliver complete narrative experiences without the longer development that the full novel format requires, which has been one of the strengths of the BookShots and similar Patterson short fiction projects.

What distinguishes Patterson’s short thriller collections from a lot of similar volumes is the brand consistency. The reader knows what they are getting in any Patterson short story collection. Brisk pacing. Short chapters. Frequent twists. Resolution that arrives without dragging the reader through extended subplots. The various collaborators each bring their own voices to the project but the overall packaging and the structural conventions remain recognizably Patterson across the entire collection.

For longtime James Patterson fans, 23 1/2 Lies is a satisfying late career entry that delivers the brand pleasures in the short fiction format. For new readers, the collection is a low commitment way to sample the Patterson approach across multiple short pieces before committing to one of the longer novels in any of his various series. The short story format also makes the collection particularly suitable for travel reading, where the ability to finish a complete narrative in a single sitting on a long flight or train ride has its own particular value.

The Patterson short fiction tradition has been one of the more interesting commercial publishing experiments of the past decade.