Invisible

Invisible is the 2014 James Patterson / David Ellis novel and the start of the Emmy Dockery thread. Emmy is an FBI research analyst, recently put on administrative leave after a personal tragedy, who has spent her months off compulsively cataloging house fires across the country. She has found a pattern: a serial arsonist working slowly, picking single-occupant residences, and burning the victims alive in their beds. The Bureau does not see it. The fires keep happening. Emmy has to drag her former Bureau partner Books Bookman back into the field with her.

Ellis is doing the heavy structural work, and the Emmy Dockery character is the kind of obsessive-detail protagonist David Fincher would film if Patterson would let her keep her interior monologue. The fire-investigation procedural (accelerant residue patterns, the limits of post-fire forensics, the way arsonists almost never reuse a venue) is the most carefully sourced section. The villain’s POV chapters are some of the best Patterson-brand writing of the 2010s, mostly because Ellis writes the interiority with a coldness the genre rarely permits. The pacing keeps the short Patterson chapters but earns them.

Recommended for fans of serial-arson thrillers (John Sandford’s Storm Prey, Karin Slaughter’s Faithless) and for readers looking for books like Invisible at the intersection of investigative-analyst protagonist and active-killer plot. Four stars, and the start of a series worth following.