19th Christmas by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro (Women's Murder Club #19)

Nothing says Christmas spirit quite like a police department drowning in fake crime tips.

I just finished reading 19th Christmas by James Patterson, and it landed squarely at four out of five stars on my highly scientific and occasionally snarky rating scale. This book has two storylines. One of them is excellent. The other feels like an after-school special that accidentally got stapled to the front of the novel. Let us begin with the stapled portion.

Cindy decides to do a Christmas story about undocumented immigrants celebrating the holidays. During this process, she interviews a woman whose husband has been sitting in jail for two years without trial for a crime he did not commit. Cindy gets Yuki involved, justice is served fairly quickly, and then the storyline basically vanishes into the mist.

I kept waiting for this plot to connect to the larger story in some meaningful way. It never really did. It wasn’t terrible. It just felt oddly dropped into the middle of a thriller that was doing something entirely different. The whole thing had the energy of:

    “We should probably include an Important Social Issue.”

    “Great. Put it… somewhere near the beginning.”

Now. The actual story.

A mysterious man known only as Loman is planning a massive Christmas Day heist, and this storyline was a blast. Instead of simply hiding from police, Loman manipulates the entire San Francisco Police Department by flooding them with rumors, anonymous tips, gossip, distractions, false leads, and enough nonsense to make everyone collectively lose their minds. The police are forced to chase every possibility because the one lead they ignore could be the real threat.

That’s what made the story so entertaining to me. Loman doesn’t overpower the police with brute force or cinematic mastermind nonsense. He weaponizes procedure. The department has to respond. They are trapped by their own responsibility, and the result is complete institutional chaos. It turns into this giant maze of dead ends and misdirection, with everyone exhausted, overworked, frustrated, and scrambling to figure out what is real before Christmas Day arrives.

The heist storyline fits the holiday setting perfectly. Christmas already comes with crowds, stress, overloaded systems, emotional people, and general chaos. A criminal exploiting all that noise feels believable in a way the first subplot never quite did.

This is one of those books where you can absolutely see the uneven seams, but you keep reading anyway because the main storyline is genuinely fun. And that is very classic Patterson. Sometimes the books are messy. Sometimes random subplots wander in from another universe. But when he locks into a fast-moving cat-and-mouse thriller, he still knows exactly how to keep the pages turning.