NYPD Red

About the NYPD Red series

NYPD Red is the small, elite squad that protects New York's rich and famous -- politicians, movie stars, visiting royalty -- funded jointly by the city and the businesses that need its discretion. Detectives Zach Jordan and his ex-girlfriend-turned-partner Kylie MacDonald work its highest-profile cases: a killer targeting celebrities at a film festival, a serial bomber with a grudge against the city, murders timed to a papal visit. The premise gives Patterson and Marshall Karp an excuse to stage huge, headline-grabbing set-pieces against Manhattan's glossiest backdrops, while Zach and Kylie's unresolved history supplies the will-they-won't-they thread running underneath the cases.

Patterson and Karp co-created the series and co-wrote its first six novels (2012-2020). Karp then continued it solo from NYPD Red 7: The Murder Sorority (2022) onward, keeping Zach and Kylie's partnership and the squad's celebrity-crime premise intact while writing the later entries independently under the same NYPD Red banner -- a similar handover to how other Patterson-founded series have continued under a single collaborator's byline.

How to read this series

Read in publication/numerical order starting with NYPD Red (2012) -- the number in each later title marks its place in the sequence. Zach and Kylie's personal relationship develops across the series, so following the order pays off even though each book's central case is self-contained.

The handover from Patterson-and-Karp co-written books (1-6) to Karp writing solo (7 onward, beginning with The Murder Sorority) is smooth in tone and premise -- the squad, its two leads and the celebrity-crime formula all carry over unchanged, so there's no need to treat the two halves differently as a reader.