The Invisible Woman

by James Patterson, Susan DiLallo

Genres: Crime Fiction; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

No one sees her but she sees everything. 
 
Elinor Gilbert was once a young woman with a thriving career at the FBI.
           Now decades past solving crimes with the bureau, she is personally and professionally forgettable. 
           Which is exactly what her former FBI boss needs. He disguises Elinor as a middle-aged nanny, and casts her as an agent on the inside of his investigation into a New York art dealer suspected of ties to organized crime.   
           But as Elinor pushes toward the truth, her superpower—anonymity—risks doubling as a fatal flaw. 
           The more the invisible woman integrates into her “host” family, the more dangerously memorable she becomes.

 

Release date: January 5, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 352

Sample

THE GRIDDLER IS TECHNICALLY a coffee shop. But the staff lets you sit for hours, even if you’re not working on a screenplay.

Another plus: They make a great Cobb salad. Huge homemade croutons, chunks of free-range roast chicken, and a giant crispy X of bacon across the top.

My waiter today, Desmond, takes my order as if he’s doing me a favor. My guess is, he’s an actor wannabe, hoping to be noticed by all the screenwriter wannabes nearby. He’s sized me up and decided I can do nothing to further his career.

But a simple snub won’t spoil this glorious Sunday in early October.

As I nurse my last glass of summer rosé, something Eleanor Roosevelt once said pops into my head: No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. That Eleanor. What a trouper. She had a mother-in-law who hated her and a skirt-chasing husband who humiliated her with a gaggle of willing women and one in particular: Missy LeHand. His tall, beautiful, very public private secretary who, according to rumor, made FDR’s Warm Springs summer cottage quite a bit warmer.

But Eleanor was not one for pity parties. I raise my glass and silently toast her and her dignity as Desmond shows up with my salad and a bowl of blue cheese dressing on the side.

I look around. Except for the usual handful of scruffy writers typing away on laptops, I have the place pretty much to myself. So it surprises me to see an older man swivel from the cash register, bypass all the empty tables, and head in my direction with a cup of coffee. I don’t have my distance glasses on, but he seems to be smiling. At me? The Invisible Woman? Maybe he didn’t get the memo.

But as he gets closer, I see it’s not a smile at all. It’s a smirk.

I’d know that smirk anywhere.

It’s Alan Metcalf. Somebody I used to work with. Somebody from my days at the FBI. Somebody who—

Well, rather than use some really ugly expletives here, I’ll just say this: He’s the guy who threw me under the bus.

“Elinor dear,” he says, drawing it out in that slow Southern drawl he affects to sound sexy. (Now it’s my turn to smirk. I know he grew up in New Jersey.) I’m delighted to see that the years have not been kind to him. What he’s lost in hair, he’s more than made up for in belly fat. But Metcalf is still pretty much as I remember him: a small man who has convinced himself that arrogance makes him look taller.

“It’s been a while,” he says.

Not long enough, I think. He eyes the empty seat at my table, hoping I’ll ask him to join me. I don’t.

“May I?” he finally says. Before I can reply, he pulls the chair out to sit and spills coffee on his sleeve. I try not to laugh.

“You’re looking well,” he says. He doesn’t mean it. He’d say the same thing to a leper. “This is quite the coincidence,” he adds. Lie number two.

“No, Metcalf,” I say. “Thomas Jefferson and John Adams dying within hours of each other on the Fourth of July? That’s a coincidence. You being here is not.”

“You know me too well,” he says. Wrong. I know the FBI too well. I know that when they want something, nothing will stand in their way.

“So—to what do I owe this honor?” I ask.

He looks around cautiously to make sure none of the scruffy writers are eavesdropping on what an even scruffier middle-management government guy in a cheap suit has to say.

“We need you,” he says. “We have a surveillance assignment. And you’re the perfect person to help us out.”

Is he kidding?

“Love to help you out,” I say. “But I gotta go home and shampoo a rug.”

“Now, listen—”

“No. You listen,” I say. “I’m sure several of the ten thousand FBI agents out there would jump at the chance to work for someone with your level of integrity.”

Metcalf’s so vain, he probably considers that a compliment.

I return to my salad and spear a particularly crisp piece of bacon, hoping he’ll leave me alone. Or die. Whichever comes sooner.

“At least hear me out,” he says. “This is something you’d be great at.”

Am I curious? Of course. But I’ll be damned if I’ll let him see that.

“Whatever it is, Metcalf, I’m all wrong for it now. Fact is, I’ve got a new career I love.”

He laughs. “I’d hardly call what you have now a career,” he says. “You’ve been teaching music to a bunch of overprivileged private-school kids you can’t stand. The only thing you love about it is getting summers off.”

“Look, I’m really not—”

“Which means you can get a job at a music camp every July, then pop over to Europe every August. You’ve got a friend from college living in Paris and an ex-beau in Rome.”

“Very good,” I say. “Now, for your ten-point bonus question: What was my mother’s maiden name?”

I can’t believe this guy. Does he really expect me to jump all over him with gratitude?

As Metcalf shakes his head, pondering his next move, his jowls sway like drapes. “Okay. You win,” he says at last. “Go back to your lunch. But let me just say: If you can see your way clear to letting bygones be bygones, this assignment is very important to us. Do this, and we’ll make it worth your while. And as far as your reputation goes…”

I put my fork down with a clunk. There it is. The magic word. My reputation.

“Okay. Tell me about it.”

“Not here,” he says. “This job is way too under-the-radar, and there’s a lot of backstory. Come by my office tomorrow, and I’ll tell you everything. Around ten?”

“And what if I say no?”

“You won’t,” he says. He crushes his cardboard coffee cup and leaves it on my table. One final smirk, and he’s gone.

And once again, just like the old days, I’m the one who has to clean up his garbage.

CLEANING UP ALAN METCALF’S GARBAGE. That’s what ruined my life.

I entered the New York City job market with a BA in medieval literature and a minor in music theory. Absolutely nothing of any use to any human resources director anywhere. I might as well have majored in Ping-Pong.

So when I saw an opening for a management assistant at the local FBI office, I jumped at the chance. True, management assistant was just FBI-speak for secretary. But still. I’d seen all the movies. I was sure it was going to be exciting, being assigned to a real live FBI special agent GS-5 who worked in domestic terrorism.

Even back then, Alan Metcalf was gruff and aggressive, overly ambitious, and out for blood. But so were the Knights of the Round Table. I felt right at home.

Eventually, I applied to be an agent myself. It took a few years and several months at Quantico. But then I was promoted, assigned to white-collar crime. Metcalf always bragged that he was the one who first saw my potential. In truth, he was annoyed about losing me as his assistant. He was pissed the day I told him my promotion had come through.

Many years later, Metcalf came to me for a favor. A big one. He wanted me to share the name of a certain confidential informant I had worked with.

Both of us knew he shouldn’t be asking for this. You don’t just swap out informants like playing cards. There’s a whole legal protocol involved. Still, when I said no, he was furious.

Through court records, Metcalf found the guy’s name and accidentally disclosed it to the wrong people. A massive security breach. The poor informant had to be whisked away to witness protection. The FBI lost a cherished source. And to save his own ass, Metcalf accused me of outing the guy.

Oh, well. Ancient history.

Today, I’ve got an important decision to make. What do I wear to an interview for a job I don’t think I want?

In the back of my closet is an old Halloween costume from my salad days, a sexy nun outfit with a convertible butt-flap. That could be fun if I were absolutely sure I didn’t want the job.

Am I?

I settle on jeans, a well-worn sweatshirt, and simple gold hoop earrings I know will be way too small to set off the FBI metal detector. It’s the perfect outfit for an undercover surveillance assignment if I want the job.

Do I?

I keep coming back to one simple question: Do I want to go back to work for a man who refers to the most harrowing event in my life as a bygone?

Before I can begin to wrestle with that Talmudic question, my phone rings. I assume it’s Metcalf’s current assistant calling to confirm my appointment with her boss. I can picture her now—a young woman (it’s always a woman) Metcalf hired using the same criteria as he did with all the others before and after me: a solid liberal arts background, a tendency toward hero worship, and a minimum bra size of 34C.

But it’s not Metcalf’s assistant du jour calling. It’s my friend Vicky. We met when we were kids. Of all my friends, Vicky’s the one I’ve known and loved the longest.

“Still on for dinner Wednesday?” she asks.

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

“Great. What do you feel like having?”

It always amuses me when people ask this. How do I know what I’m going to be in the mood for on Wednesday? I’m still wrestling with what to defrost tonight.

“Anything. Your call.”

“Maybe that Italian place again?” she suggests. She means Luciano’s, an elegant little spot in the West Village with lobster ravioli to die for.

“Perfect,” I say. And everything would have been perfect if I hadn’t added, “Hey, you’ll never guess who I saw yesterday when I was—”

I stop mid-sentence.

“Who?” Vicky asks.

What was I thinking?

Vicky was privy to the whole Metcalf saga ten years ago. She hates him almost as much as I do. This is not the time to open that can of worms. Thinking fast, I pull a name out of our collective past. “Uh, Liza Zurndorfer.”

“Liza?”

“Remember her, from elementary school? We used to call her ZZ? She looked great.”

“Really? I heard she died.”

“Oh.” Busted! “Well, I guess it wasn’t her, then.”

“Gotta run. Editorial meeting in five. Six thirty Wednesday okay?” she says. Vicky, a high-powered editorial director in a small publishing house, is constantly running to or from a meeting. Our conversations are always short. This time I’m grateful.

She hangs up before I can say something else stupid.

AS I EXIT THE SUBWAY at the City Hall station, I’m still conflicted. The FBI’s New York field office is at 26 Federal Plaza, two blocks away. I start walking, and my phone beeps. It’s a text from Metcalf. Could I meet him at a coffee shop on the corner of Warren Street and Broadway, a couple of blocks in the other direction?

Really?

It’s unusual to meet off campus, but I don’t question it. Maybe this gig is more undercover than I realized. I head north, wending my way past hundreds of men and women in charcoal suits—lawyers, judges, and government workers, all rushing off to jobs that must seem important. Just as mine once did.

I spot Metcalf at a booth way in the back. He’s frowning at a corn muffin. Who could be annoyed at a corn muffin? It doesn’t take much to set this guy off. Years ago, when I worked for him, someone taped a hand-lettered sign to his door: EASILY IRRITATED. We all thought the guy who did it would be fired. He wasn’t. Turned out, Metcalf enjoyed being known as a dick.

I slide in opposite him.

“What do you know about the art world?” he asks.

“And good morning to you too,” I say. The art world? I’ve got a couple of Happy Birthday, Miss Gilbert finger paintings from my music students taped to my refrigerator. That’s about it.

“We got an anonymous tip,” he says. “Some guy who runs an art gallery in Mamaroneck may be laundering money for a Mexican cartel. Las Serpientes,” he says. “You look surprised,” he adds.

I am. “A small art gallery? In a small Westchester County suburb? Hardly sounds like it would be worth a cartel’s time.”

Metcalf sneers just a bit.

Uh-oh. My first demerit. I backpedal. “What I mean is, if it was one of those established New York galleries—”

“Then it wouldn’t be under-the-radar, would it?” he says. He breaks off a piece of corn muffin and butters it. “C’mon, Elinor. You should know how these things work. You’ve been to the rodeo before.”

Now I’m the one who’s EASILY IRRITATED. True, I worked in fraud for a while, but never in money laundering. Still, I know how huge a problem it is. At one point, the Medellín Cartel had so much cash, they spent two thousand a month just on rubber bands.

“The guy is an art dealer named Ben Harrison,” Metcalf says. “We think the cartel is buying art from Harrison, then holding it in storage.”

“In Westchester?”

“Westchester, Geneva, could be anywhere. When they’re ready, they sell it for wildly inflated prices. Harrison gets a cut on both ends, dirty money gets clean, and some rich sucker somewhere owns a piece of art he thinks is valuable because he trusted a sketchy dealer. So everybody’s happy. Well, except the US government.”

“And my job would be…”

“Find proof. We want to know everything about Ben Harrison. Who he meets. Who he talks to. Neighbors he’s suing. Hookers he’s screwing. Habits, hobbies, fetishes. Anything we can use to flip him. Hell,” he says, taking his final bite of the corn muffin and brushing crumbs off his green-and-yellow polyester tie, “if he has an unusual bowel movement, we want to know about it.”

“You’re a classy guy, Metcalf, you know that?” Most people would be insulted by this. But Metcalf is not most people. He smiles.

Surveillance gigs usually mean sitting in a car outside a suspect’s home or digging through phone records and checking credit histories. But there’s only so much you can glean from that.

“And, uh, exactly how close do you want me to get to this guy?” I ask.

“You’ll be living with him.”

“What?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” he says. “He’s married. Second marriage. Trophy wife. New baby.”

“So I’ll be—what? His social secretary?”

“No.”

I hope he doesn’t ask me to be the guy’s personal chef. I use my oven to store sweaters.

“Actually, we’d be putting you in there as a baby nanny.”

I start to laugh. “You gotta be kidding. I don’t know anything about babies.”

“You’ll learn,” he says.

He takes a book out of his briefcase and slides it over to me: What to Expect the First Year. This is my official FBI briefing? I mean, I know the government has a thirty-four-trillion-dollar budget deficit. But still.

“People have been taking care of babies since the cavemen,” he says.

“Cavewomen,” I say. I slide the book back to him.

“Men, women, what’s the difference? Everybody likes babies. You do too, don’t you?”

“Sure I do. Love ’em. In other people’s arms or homes or uteruses. Just not mine.”

“Elinor, you’re being unreasonable.”

“Metcalf, this is nuts. There’s gotta be someone else more suited for this. Some bright-eyed young summer intern who wants to jump-start her career.”

“True,” he says. And is it my imagination, or is he starting to smile? “But at your age, you’ll be able to dig around without being noticed.”

Of course. I’m the Invisible Woman. For a moment I almost forgot.

He pulls a thick envelope from his briefcase. “Here,” he says, handing it to me. “A license plate for your car…”

“I don’t have a car.”

“… plus two new credit cards and the burner phone you’ll use from now on. It has end-to-end encryption.”

“Meaning?”

“Only you and me can read our texts. Hide your old cell someplace. In a shoe, under your vibrator, I don’t care where. Just get rid of it.”

“Listen, Metcalf—”

“You graduated from Penn State in 1985.”

“No, I—”

“It’s already part of your Instagram account.”

“I don’t have an Instagram account.”

“You do now,” he says. “An account on Facebook too. Your new name is Caroline Babulewicz. Feel free to google it.”

“That’s a terrible name. I don’t even know how to spell it.”

“Check your new driver’s license. That’s in here too. Oh, and I already notified the school where you work that you’ve had a family emergency and won’t be coming back for a while. Tomorrow, we’ll fit you for your new uniform. You’ll go for an interview the next day and start the day after that,” he says.

“I’m out of here,” I say.

I start to stand but Metcalf grabs my wrist. He holds it tight. Too tight.

The coffee shop is filling up now. A lot more people. Lots more noise. He leans in a little closer so that when he speaks, I’ll hear every word.

“It’s an FBI-DOJ-approved Group Two undercover operation,” he says. “Do this for us, and we’ll rehire you and pay you what you would have been making now had you stayed at the FBI all these years, including benef. . .