Confessions of a Murder Suspect

Confessions of a Murder Suspect is a 2012 young adult mystery from James Patterson, co written with Maxine Paetro. The novel is the first book in the Confessions series, the YA franchise that Patterson and Paetro launched together. The protagonist is Tandy Angel, a teenage girl whose immensely wealthy parents have just been found dead in their Manhattan penthouse under circumstances that the police consider deeply suspicious, with Tandy and her three siblings as the obvious suspects.

The Angel family is a strange one. The four siblings, Tandy and her older brother Matty, her older brother Hugo, and her younger brother Harry, have all been raised under the rigid program of mental and physical discipline their parents called the Pressure Method. The pressure has produced four young people with extraordinary capabilities, including Matty’s professional baseball career, Hugo’s prodigious physical strength, Harry’s musical genius, and Tandy’s analytical mind. It has also produced significant psychological damage that the novel slowly reveals across the page count. As Tandy investigates her parents’ deaths, she discovers that the actual circumstances of the family she thought she knew are considerably more complicated than her conscious memory has admitted.

James Patterson and Maxine Paetro deliver the brisk pacing that the YA thriller market expects. The chapters are short, the cliffhangers come at the end of nearly every section, and the central mystery weaves together with the slow developing reveals about the Angel family’s actual history. Tandy as narrator addresses the reader directly throughout, with the kind of confessional voice that the title points to and that becomes one of the strongest elements of the book.

The Confessions series continues across several more novels, with each entry developing the wider Angel family mythology and the various secrets that Tandy and her siblings continue to uncover about their parents and their upbringing. The series sits comfortably in the YA mystery and thriller corner of the market alongside other YA writers working in similar territory.

For longtime James Patterson fans curious about his YA work, Confessions of a Murder Suspect is the natural starting point for the Confessions series. For YA readers new to Patterson, the brisk pacing and the central mystery make this an accessible introduction to his style.