Thriller: Stories To Keep You Up All Night

Thriller: Stories to Keep You Up All Night is the 2006 anthology edited by James Patterson with thirty thriller writers contributing original short fiction, including Lee Child, Lisa Scottoline, David Morrell, Heather Graham, and Steve Berry. The Lee Child piece, James Penney’s New Identity, is a small mean classic about a fired man and a stolen car that probably belongs in any short list of Reacher-adjacent shorts.

Anthologies like this live or die on the floor, not the ceiling, and the floor here is higher than most. M. J. Rose’s contribution is creepier than her novels usually go. David Morrell delivers a tightly engineered piece of misdirection. The David Dun and Gayle Lynds entries are weaker, but at thirty stories you can skip and still come out ahead. The collection moves quickly, which matters because the editorial premise ("keep you up all night") would feel like a broken promise if any single story dragged.

Best for readers who want a sampler of mid-2000s thriller talent before committing to a novelist’s backlist. If you have already read everyone on the table of contents, Thriller is less essential. If you are between series and want quick reads that show range, this is one of the better anthology pickups of the last twenty years. Pair it with Best American Mystery Stories from the same era for a fuller picture of the field.