Howard Roughan

Howard Roughan is an American novelist and one of James Patterson's most frequent co-authors, having partnered on numerous bestselling thrillers including the Instinct series (also adapted for television as the CBS show Instinct) and Honeymoon. Roughan began his own career with the psychological thriller The Up and Comer, published in the late 1990s, which established him as a writer skilled at blending domestic suspense with twisty, high-concept plotting. His long-running partnership with Patterson has made him one of the more prolific co-authors in Patterson's collaborative fiction operation, working across different series and standalone titles that combine Patterson's brand of rapid, cliff-hanger-driven plotting with Roughan's own facility for character-driven suspense. The Instinct novels follow Dylan Reinhart, a former CIA operative turned academic who consults with the NYPD, a premise that gave Roughan and Patterson room to combine psychological insight with procedural thriller mechanics. Roughan continues to write both under his own name and in collaboration, remaining a consistent presence on bestseller lists through the commercial thriller partnership model that has defined much of his career.