Billy Harney

About the Billy Harney series

Billy Harney was born into Chicago law enforcement -- his father is the city's chief of detectives, his twin sister is also on the force -- and he plays every case strictly by the book, teamed with his adrenaline-junkie partner Detective Kate Fenton. James Patterson co-writes the series with David Ellis, a practicing attorney and novelist whose legal background shows in plots that lean on political corruption, courtroom stakes and the kind of institutional rot that goes all the way to the top of a major city's power structure.

The series opens with The Black Book (2017), where three bodies and a missing black book of Chicago's most powerful clients throw Harney's own integrity into question, and continues through The Red Book (2021) and Escape (2022), tightening the focus on political murders and a manhunt for an escaped billionaire crime boss whose reach extends deep into city government. A fourth entry, Blackball, is scheduled for 2027.

While it shares its Chicago-detective-family premise loosely with Patterson's other big-city procedurals, Billy Harney's world of political corruption and institutional conspiracy gives the series a distinct identity from Alex Cross's D.C. or Michael Bennett's New York.

How to read this series

Read in publication order starting with The Black Book (2017) -- Harney's family relationships, his standing within the department, and the political corruption thread all build directly across the sequence, making this one of Patterson's more continuity-dependent series rather than a set of standalone cases.

The Coldest Case (2021) is a companion work published alongside the main series but is not required reading to follow Harney's core story across The Black Book, The Red Book and Escape.