“I love you,” he whispered.

“I know,” I returned, and we both started laughing uncontrollably.

Are you a fan of James Patterson’s stand-alone thrillers?

If so, you’ll love …

THE INN

Bill Robinson is starting over. The former Boston detective has moved to a secluded coastal town where he runs the local inn. Yet all too soon he discovers that his past won’t let him go, and that leaving the city is no escape from dangers he left behind.

A new crew of criminals move into the small town, bringing drugs and violence to the front door of the inn. Robinson feels the weight of responsibility on his shoulders. Can he save himself, and his residents, before time runs out?

Read on for an extract of this gripping new thriller

Available in hardback from August 2019

SOMETHING VERY BAD was about to go down.

There are things you know as a cop in Boston. You know how the city feels, because its streets are your veins and the voices of its people come through your lips when you talk. You know the smell of the salt in the harbor like the scent of the back of your wife’s neck, and it’s just as precious, reassuring. The hammering of footsteps out of Back Bay Station for the morning rat race wakes you up, and the wail of sirens in the old Combat Zone at night puts you to sleep. Every Christmas, you gather up some young wide-eyed uniforms to take poor kids from East Boston and Hyde Park into the toy stores, try to show the new cops and the kids that they can get along. You know that in a few years, some of those cops and some of those kids will end up killing each other. But that’s how the city works. It’s like a living thing. It sheds, and it hurts, and it bleeds.

I could feel what was about to happen in the air. It was an unexpected and dizzying heat, surreal against the snow on the ground outside the car.

When my partner Malone and I got a call to go to the commissioner’s office downtown, I knew we were in for it. A Boston cop knows that being called to the commissioner’s office is a bad, bad thing.

Malone always made fun of me for thinking I had Boston’s pulse, a sense about approaching trouble in the city. On the morning of the marathon bombing, we’d been a mile up Boylston Street doing crowd control and I told Malone I felt hot and weird, like I had a fever. We felt the thump of the first blast under our feet a second or two later.

We were in the back of the cruiser, Malone looking out the window, joggling his knee and picking his teeth.

“Wait. I know what this is,” he said suddenly. “This is about that baby. We’re getting a medal for the baby last week.”