Paranoia is the seventeenth book in the Michael Bennett series by James Patterson and James O. Born and was published in 2025. The continuing saga of New York’s best homicide detective, his ever-growing Irish Catholic family, his team and the a few murders scattered throughout the book. Bennett is attending the funeral of another ex-cop who seems to have gone far too soon, but he has been given the full honours due. He takes his young detective protégé, Rob Trilling, with him so that he may make a few more NYPD contacts. It was here that NYPD inspector Celeste Cantor asks him to solve a little problem that she needs to keep quiet. Some one is going around possibly murdering members of her old team and making it look like suicide. At home, his wife, Mary Catherine is in the final stages of pregnancy and not feeling too good when Bennett rushes her to hospital. Where she has been assigned to total bed rest for at least two weeks. Good job that his family of ten are around to help and the eldest are there to marshal the youngest into school. Ricky is ready to audition for a teenage TV cooking show, so he is doing all the cooking, one job less for Bennett to worry about. As with many of Patterson’s thrillers you can predict how the story ends and who the bad guys are and what they want. It is still readable even if it is predictable. It is like a thriller comfort blanket, nothing scary, nothing to make you get scared the bad guys are going to put one over the good guys. As with all American thrillers there is the usual happy ending, well as happy as anyone can be in New York.