Author Richard North Patterson doesn’t give up. While practicing law full time, he wrote a novel, The Lasko Tangent (W. W. Norton & Company, 1979), about a young government lawyer who is thrown into an unfamiliar world of crime. Then he wrote another novel, about another lawyer thrust into a new environment. Patterson, too, stepped out into the unknown when he quit his law practice to write full time, but the income from writing wasn’t enough to provide for his children in the way that he had hoped. So, he put his head down and returned to his law practice. 

He didn’t write a book for another eight years, but the stories were still developing within him. When his law firm gave him several months off, he used it to return to the page. This effort became Degree of Guilt (Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), his breakthrough bestseller. “Suddenly, I had the career that I wanted to have before, but wasn’t quite able to achieve,” he said in a recent interview. All it took was patience and confidence that he had something to say. 

Patterson, who spends part of the year on Martha’s Vineyard, has written about the Island in several of his novels, but he’s recently turned his attention to another project worth not giving up on: our country’s democracy. His latest book is a work of nonfiction titled Tripwires: 15 Twenty-First-Century Events That Undermined American Democracy – and How to Reclaim It (The New Press, September 2026). Patterson spoke with Martha’s Vineyard Magazine about reading, writing, and looking to the past to understand the present.

Martha’s Vineyard Magazine: You’ve been writing for more than five decades now. What was your relationship with books and reading as a child?

Richard North Patterson: It was my leading form of entertainment. I could read at my leisure, and it took me to all sorts of different places. Reading was really fundamental to my experience, and I also think that you’re only as good a writer as you are a reader. Reading really got me to wanting to become a writer, wanting to do what the people I admired did.

MVM: You were working as a lawyer when you started writing your first book, The Lasko Tangent, a legal thriller that won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel. How has your background in law, and specifically in writing persuasive arguments, influenced your work as an author?

RNP: As a lawyer, you know that your first word isn’t your best word. You have to persuade. You have to write very succinctly, very clearly, and in a linear and logical way. So you become a master of organizing facts, a master of narrative, a master of persuasion, a master of trying to capture the attention of others. 

MVM: What motivated you to write that first book?

RNP: I always wanted to write, like a lot of people, and I was traveling a lot and reading on airplanes. I had read about sixteen novels in a row by the same writer, a detective novelist named Ross Macdonald. I realized I’d internalized what he did. He used first person, which simplified things. He had linear plotting. He had a distinct sense of place, and things moved from scene to scene. I realized that I could adapt those things and perhaps actually figure out how to write a novel. And eventually, after thirteen rejections and three rewrites, I was able to get the book published.

MVM: After your political novels, you wrote family dramas set on Martha’s Vineyard. Do you think there’s something about the Island that makes for an especially dramatic setting?

RNP: First of all, it’s beautiful. Second of all, people like to come here. Third, it’s a small society with all the peculiarities of a small society, including secrets, and rivalries, and tradition. So, it just struck me as a great place to set a drama about a complicated family with a long life on the Island.

MVM: Your latest book, Tripwires, is nonfiction. What inspired you to take a look at our democracy in the twenty-first century?

RNP: If we go back to the millennium, we were filled with optimism as the calendar turned to 2000. America was in a good place; we were economically strong. We were in a relatively peaceful interregnum. Lots of Americans were optimistic about where we were. Now, how did we get from 2000 to an angry, divided, vituperative society with so many resentments and so many different ways of looking at the world, and a lot of badly diminished common understanding of fact? What were all the things that happened to us starting in 2000, that brought us to the age of Donald Trump? And it’s very dispiriting for many people – most people, I would say.

We’re in a place where we actually worry about the future of our democracy, the viability of our institutions, in a way that we never have before. So, to me, the big challenge was to try to explain not only the dramatic events, but all the economic, cultural, political, societal, informational forces, racial forces, cultural forces that coalesce to put us in this toxic place, and then to think, “Okay, how do we understand how we got here?” And, “How do we get back to a place where we have a more vibrant, equitable democracy?”

MVM: Which of the events in the book do you imagine readers might be most surprised to see on the list?

RNP: Well, maybe not the most important, but one of the least appreciated has to do with the way that immigration became this horrible racial, cultural football. There was a last effort in 2013 by what was called the Gang of Eight – a group which included prominent Republicans like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, with Democrats as well – who tried to put together a concrete reform plan which fused border security with a reasonable amnesty for undocumented workers. One of the leading sponsors of that was Marco Rubio, who decided he was going to take this ball and run with it. 

He became a big sponsor of it in the Senate. He gave inspired speeches. He was really a main force. And suddenly, because he was a very ambitious man and wanted to run for president, he realized that the racial fears of the Republican base meant that if he embraced this issue, he would lose his chance to be a presidential nominee. So he not only abandoned the issue; he turned on it, denounced it. Marco Rubio’s retreat from immigration reform and betrayal of his own bill not only says a lot about his character, but it also helped break the last chance we had for real immigration reform in this country. And it’s only gotten worse and uglier since then.

MVM: If you could see one change in your readers as a result of them reading this book, what would you hope that might be?

RNP: To question their information sources. Because more and more, people have these little bubbles in which they live. So, I think a better understanding of what news should be, instead of depending on algorithms that channel you to things that make you angry or confirm your pre-existing beliefs. Try to find broader, more reliable sources. 

The other thing that people need to understand is that the news sections of The New York Times have nothing to do with their editorial page. They may have a very liberal editorial page, but the editorial page does not influence what appears in the news section. The Wall Street Journal may have a very conservative editorial page, but that doesn’t influence the very good reporting of the news in The Wall Street Journal. So, you could do far worse than to read The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, or The Washington Post, with the understanding that you’re not reading the quote “liberal news.” Go to the editorial page for that. You’re reading news reported as professionally as people can do it.

MVM: What steps do you think we need to take as a country to reclaim our democracy?

RNP: I graduated from school in 1968. That was a horrible year in which we lost Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. We discovered what a mess the Vietnam War was. We had riots in the city. We had the return of Richard Nixon. We had a really bitterly divided and chaotic place, and yet there was still hope.

Now, we have a society where there is less hope and more anger, and, frankly, the least qualified person to hold the presidency in charge now. How did we get to this point? How did we turn ourselves over to somebody who was obviously emotionally unstable? I really wanted to address that, and then I wanted to say that, however bad this is, there is a way out. 

One thing that happened in this country over the time of my adult life is that the economic divide became greater. I don’t think we can save democracy until we have a more equitable economic arrangement where we really take care of ordinary people and provide broader opportunity for people across the board.

MVM: You split your time between Florida and Martha’s Vineyard and often spend both summer and fall on the Island. What do you appreciate about fall on the Vineyard?

RNP: In the beginning of September, it’s like God threw a switch: the light’s a little milder, it’s a little more slanted to the earth, but still beautiful, and you have the first animation of the coming of fall. And it’s still lovely to be on the beach and to walk. September on the Vineyard is just glorious.