August 7, 2025, 1:48pm
Is James Patterson writing his own stuff these days? He’s seems to have a very full dance card as a collaborator/brand/the head of a Renaissance-style artist’s guild. He’s co-bylined books with the likes of Bill Clinton, Dolly Parton, and Mr. Beast, and now he’s back working with journalist Vicky Ward for a new book on Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
It’s hard to know what this book will be like from just a press release, but Patterson doesn’t seem like the kind of person who’s out there spray-painting “Deny Defend Depose” on walls. Patterson describes Mangione’s story as “the American Dream Gone Wrong” (the capitalization is his) and as a “descent from Ivy League graduate to notorious accused killer to so-called political martyr.” The assumption being that the Ivy League only graduates good and morally uncomplicated people, which, okay.
Ward seems more interested in the nuance, noting that the murder “goes to the heart of the social, cultural and political issues dividing the US right now.” She also correctly identifies one of those issues as the insurance industry: “Nothing is more of a reviled black box than the health insurance industry, and it’s time to open it up, through a crime that has caught the attention of the country.” Ward’s no stranger to digging into big money and its predators too, having worked on projects on Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell and Jared Kushner.
The planned book will be based on interviews and reporting, though with Mangione’s trial set to begin later this year, there isn’t an ending to this saga just yet. Mangione, is in the meantime, is busy with all of his mail which apparently includes a lot of books.
Ward and Patterson’s previous book moved quickly too, written nearly at the same pace that the news was happening. The Idaho Four is a true crime book about four college students who were murdered in 2022. The book was similarly based on a lot of interviews and research, but came out just a couple weeks after the murderer was sentenced.
Why rush to get this book out? Neither of these authors seem to be struggling for work, but there’s obviously tons of interest from the general public and, crucially, from media. The press release notes that, “Early discussions are in progress with major interest for both scripted and unscripted adaptations of the book.” Netflix’s a-calling!
Get ready for a lot of Luigi books, movies, documentaries, and more, as this project joins four documentaries already in the works and a musical that just debuted in San Francisco.