Books by Thomas H. Cook
The Best American Crime Writing 2005
by James Ellroy, Otto Penzler, Thomas H. Cook
The 2005 edition of The Best American Crime Writing offers the year's most shocking, compelling, and gripping writing about real-life crime, including Peter Landesman's article about female sex slaves (the most requested and widely read New York Times story of 2004), a piece from The New Yorker by Stephen J. Dubner (the coauthor of Freakanomics) about a high-society silver thief, and an extraordinarily memorable "ode to bar fights" written by Jonathan Miles for Men's Journal after he punched an editor at a staff party. But this year's edition includes a bonus - an original essay by James Ellroy detailing his fascination with Joseph Wambaugh and how it fed his obsession with crime - even to the point of selling his own blood to buy Wambaugh's books. Smart, entertaining, and controversial, The Best American Crime Writing is an essential edition to any crime enthusiast's bookshelf.
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Moon Over Manhattan
When Allison, the glamorous but none-too-bright daughter of wealthy political commentator Arthur Vandameer, runs off to elope with her boyfriend, all kinds of colorful characters get into the act of tracking down the young lovers. Reprint.
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The Best American Crime Reporting 2007
by Otto Penzler, Thomas H. Cook, Linda Fairstein
Thieves, liars, killers, and conspirators—it's a criminal world out there, and someone has got to write about it. An eclectic collection of the year's best reportage, The Best American Crime Reporting 2007 brings together the murderers and muscle men, the masterminds, and the mysteries and missteps that make for brilliant stories, told by the aces of the true crime genre. This latest addition to the highly acclaimed series features guest editor Linda Fairstein, the bestselling crime novelist and former chief prosecutor of the Manhattan District Attorney's Office's pioneering Special Victims' Unit.
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The Best American Crime Writing 2006
by Mark Bowden, Otto Penzler, Thomas H. Cook
A sterling collection of the year's most shocking, compelling, and gripping writing about real-life crime, the 2006 edition of The Best American Crime Writing offers fascinating vicarious journeys into a world of felons and their felonious acts. This thrilling compendium includes:
Jeffrey Toobin's eye-opening exposé in The New Yorker about a famous prosecutor who may have put the wrong man on death row
Skip Hollandsworth's amazing but true tale of an old cowboy bank robber who turned out to be a "classic good-hearted Texas woman"
Jimmy Breslin's stellar piece about the end of the Mob as we know it
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The Best American Crime Reporting 2008
by Otto Penzler, Thomas H. Cook, Jonathan Kellerman
Thieves, liars, killers, and conspirators—it's a criminal world out there, and someone has got to write about it. An eclectic collection of the year's best reportage, The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 brings together the murderers and the masterminds, the mysteries and missteps that make for brilliant stories, told by the aces of the true-crime genre. This latest addition to the highly acclaimed series features guest editor Jonathan Kellerman, bestselling author of more than twenty crime novels, most recently Compulsion and the forthcoming Bones.
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Red Leaves
by Thomas H. Cook, Belva Plain
No one explores the rich tapestry of the human heart as Belva Plain does. Her more than twenty New York Times bestsellers have captivated readers and garnered legions of devoted fans. Now Plain dazzles us once again with a new novel of rare eloquence and raw emotion…a powerful tale about the consequences of greed—and the acts of love and forgiveness that can heal the heart.
Cassie Wright never saw it coming. As owner of Wright Glassworks, the foremost company in a thriving New England town, Cassie’s life was quiet, focused on her work and home…until a tragic accident turns her carefully ordered world upside down. For there is a surviving child to think about—and Cassie must take in one-year-old Gwen, who has no one else to care for her. As the years pass, Cassie will raise Gwen as her own, and a little girl who lost everything will flourish in a world of privilege and opportunity.
Enter Jewel Fairbanks. Beautiful and conniving, Jewel will touch the lives of both Cassie and Gwen in powerful ways. From the moment they meet, Jewel envies Gwen, who seems to have everything Jewel wants. The two couldn’t be more different, but their lives will soon become inextricably intertwined. Both will marry—but to profoundly different men. For Gwen, it is honest, hardworking Stan who steals her heart; Jewel will set her sights on Jeff, a shrewd businessman who owns the company where Stan works.
But when Stan makes a shocking discovery on the job, relationships begin to shift and change...and soon a tangled drama of greed, jealousy, and betrayal will encircle both couples, as a chain reaction of unexpected events changes four lives forever—in ways they never could have foreseen….
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Red Leaves
by Thomas H. Cook, Belva Plain
Eric Moore has reason to be happy. He has a prosperous business, a comfortable home, a stable family life in a quiet town. Then, on an ordinary night, his teenage son Keith is asked to babysit Amy Giordano, the eight-year-old daughter of a neighboring family. The next morning Amy is missing.
Suddenly Eric is one of the stricken parents he has seen on television, professing faith in his child's innocence. As the police investigation increasingly focuses on Keith, Eric must counsel his son, find him a lawyer, protect him from the community's steadily growing suspicion. Except that Eric is not so sure his son is innocent. And if Keith is not . . . and might do the same thing again . . . what then should a father do?
Red Leaves is a story of broken trust and one man's heroic effort to hold fast the ties that bind him to everything he loves.
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Red Leaves
by Thomas H. Cook, Belva Plain
Eric Moore has a prosperous business, a comfortable home, a stable family life in a quiet town. Then, on an ordinary night, his teenage son Keith babysits Amy Giordano, the eight-year-old daughter of a neighboring family. The next morning Amy is missing, and Eric isn't sure his son is innocent.
In his desperate attempt to hold his family together by proving his-and the community's-suspicions wrong, Eric finds himself in a vortex of doubt and broken trust. What should he make of Keith's strange behavior? Of his wife's furtive phone calls to a colleague? Of his brother's hints that he knows things he's afraid to say?
In a "heart-wrenching and gut-wrenching" (New York Daily News) race against time and mistrust, Eric must discover what has happened to Amy Giordano and face the long-buried family secrets he has so carefully ignored.
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Master Of The Delta
In 1954 Mississippi, Jack Branch returns to his father’s Delta estate, Great Oaks, to perform an act of noblesse oblige: teaching at the local high school. Conducting a class on historical evil, Jack is shocked to discover that his unassuming student Eddie is the son of the Coed Killer, a notorious local murderer. Jack feels compelled to mentor the boy, encouraging Eddie to examine his father’s crime and using his own good name to open the doors that Eddie’s lineage can’t. But when Eddie’s investigation leads him to Great Oaks and to Jack’s own father, Jack finds himself questioning Eddie’s motives—and his own.
As the deadly consequences of Jack’s actions fall inescapably into place, Thomas H. Cook masterfully reveals the darker truths that lurk in the recesses of small-town lives and in the hearts of even well-intentioned men.
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The Cloud of Unknowing
David Sears grew up in the shadow of his brilliant sister, Diana, convinced by their father that she would accomplish great things. Instead, she married and had a son, Jason, who―like David and Diana’s father―is schizophrenic. Her husband, Mark, a geneticist, never made peace with Jason’s condition. Perhaps this is why Diana will not accept the authorities’ conclusion that Jason’s drowning death was accidental. Or perhaps Diana is going mad. As she builds a case against her husband and the seductive qualities of her manic energy become impossible to ignore, David finds himself afraid for his own family’s safety. In The Cloud of Unknowing, Cook explores the power of blood and family mythology.
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The Cloud of Unknowing
David Sears grew up in the shadow of his brilliant younger sister, Diana, convinced by their father that she would accomplish great things. Instead, she married and had a son, Jason, who—like David and Diana’s father—is schizophrenic. Her husband, Mark, a geneticist, never made peace with Jason’s condition.
Perhaps this is why, when Jason drowns, Diana will not accept the authorities’ conclusion that his death was accidental. Or perhaps Diana is going mad. She begins to send David faxes and e-mails about ancient murders, driven by her growing belief that the earth is Gaia, a living witness to her son’s murder who could give evidence in the case she is building against her husband. David soon fears for his own family’s safety as the seductive qualities of Diana’s manic energy become impossible to ignore.
In The Cloud of Unknowing, Cook explores the power of blood and family mythology.
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Master of the Delta
In 1954 Mississippi, Jack Branch returns to his fathers Delta estate, Great Oaks, to perform an act of noblesse oblige: teaching at the local high school. Conducting a class on historical evil, Jack is shocked to discover that his unassuming student Eddie is the son of the Coed Killer, a notorious local murderer. Jack feels compelled to mentor the boy, encouraging Eddie to examine his fathers crime and using his own good name to open the doors that Eddies lineage cant. But when Eddies investigation leads him to Great Oaks and to Jacks own father, Jack finds himself questioning Eddies motivesand his own.
As the deadly consequences of Jacks actions fall inescapably into place, Thomas H. Cook masterfully reveals the darker truths that lurk in the recesses of small-town lives and in the hearts of even well-intentioned men.
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The Fate of Katherine Carr
Shattered by the unsolved murder of his eight-year-old son, travel writer George Gates is approached by a retired missing-persons detective and given a mysterious story left behind by a woman who disappeared twenty years earlier. By the author of Master of the Delta.
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The Last Talk with Lola Faye
Middling historian Lucas Paige visits St. Louis to give a sparsely attended readingnothing out of the ordinary. Except among the yawning attendees is someone he did not expect: Lola Faye Gilroy, the other woman he has long blamed for his fathers murder decades earlier.Reluctantly, Luke joins Lola Faye for a drink. As one drink turns into several, these two battered souls relive, from their different perspectives, the most searing experience of their lives. Slowly but surely, the hotel bar dissolves around them and they are transported back to the tiny southern town where this defining momenta violent crime of passionis turned in the light once more to reveal flaws in the old answers. As it turns out, there is much Luke doesnt know. And what he doesnt know can hurt him. Trapped in an increasingly intense emotional exchange, and with no place to go save back into his own dark past, Luke struggles to gain control of an ever more threatening conversation, to discover why Lola Faye has come and what she is afterbefore it is too late.A taut literary thriller in the gothic tradition of Master of the Delta.
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The Last Talk with Lola Faye: An Otto Penzler Book (Otto Penzler Books)
Middling historian Lucas Paige visits St. Louis to give a sparsely attended reading—nothing out of the ordinary. Except among the yawning attendees is someone he did not expect: Lola Faye Gilroy, the “other woman” he has long blamed for his father’s murder decades earlier.
Reluctantly, Luke joins Lola Faye for a drink. As one drink turns into several, these two battered souls relive, from their different perspectives, the most searing experience of their lives. Slowly but surely, the hotel bar dissolves around them and they are transported back to the tiny southern town where this defining moment—a violent crime of passion—is turned in the light once more to reveal flaws in the old answers. As it turns out, there is much Luke doesn’t know. And what he doesn’t know can hurt him. Trapped in an increasingly intense emotional exchange, and with no place to go save back into his own dark past, Luke struggles to gain control of an ever more threatening conversation, to discover why Lola Faye has come and what she is after—before it is too late.
A taut literary thriller in the gothic tradition of Master of the Delta.
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The Fate of Katherine Carr (Otto Penzler Books)
George Gates used to be a travel writer who specialized in places where people disappeared—Judge Crater, the Lost Colony.Then his eight-year-old son was murdered, the killer never found, and Gates gave up disappearance. Now he writes stories of redemptive triviality about flower festivals and local celebrities for the town paper, and spends his evenings haunted by the image of his son’s last day.
Enter Arlo MacBride, a retired missing-persons detective still obsessed with the unsolved case of Katherine Carr. When he gives Gates the story she left behind—a story of a man stalking a woman named Katherine Carr—Gates too is drawn inexorably into a search for the missing author’s brief life and uncertain fate. And as he goes deeper, he begins to suspect that her tale holds the key not only to her fate, but to his own.
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The Quest for Anna Klein: An Otto Penzler Book
Thomas Danforth has lived a fortunate life. The son of a wealthy importer, he traveled the world in his youth, and now, in his twenties, he lives in New York City and runs the family business. It is 1939, and the world is on the brink of war, but Danforth’s life is untroubled, his future assured. Then, on a snowy evening walk along Gramercy Park, a friend poses a fateful question.
As it turns out, this friend has a dangerous idea that can change the world. Danforth is to provide a place where a “brilliant woman” can receive training in firearms and explosives. This is to be the beginning of an international plot carried out by the mysterious Anna Klein—a plot that will ensnare Danforth in more ways than one. When the plan goes wrong and Klein disappears, Danforth’s quest begins: it is a journey of ever-shifting alliances and betrayals that will lead him across a war-torn world in search of answers. Now in his ninety-first year, at the dawn of a troubled new era, he sits in luxury at the Century Club and tells his tale to the young man from Washington he has summoned, for reasons of his own, to hear it.
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The Quest for Anna Klein
“Nobody tells a story better than Thomas H. Cook.” —Michael Connelly
ON THE EVE OF WORLD WAR II, A HIGH STAKES INTERNATIONAL PLOT LEADS TO A DEADLY OBSESSION
Thomas Danforth has lived a fortunate life. The son of a wealthy importer, he wandered the globe in his youth, and now, in his twenties, he lives in New York City and runs the family business. It is 1939 and the world is on the brink of war, but his life is untroubled, his future assured. Then, on a snowy evening walk along Gramercy Park, a friend makes a fateful request—and involves Thomas in a dangerous idea that could change the fates of millions.
Danforth is to provide access to his secluded Connecticut mansion, where a mysterious woman will receive training in firearms and explosives. Thus begins an international plot carried out by the strange and alluring Anna Klein—a plot that will ensnare Thomas in more ways than one. When it all goes wrong and Anna disappears, his quest across a war torn world begins…
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Evidence of Blood: A Novel
Edgar Award winner Thomas H. Cook has earned acclaim and a growing legion of fans for his brilliantly styled, intensely evocative thrillers. Now, in his most seductive suspense novel yet, he draws us into a world of love, betrayal, and murder from which one man can find no escape.
"It's better to know, don't you think?... No matter what the cost?"
Forty years ago in Sequoyah, Georgia, Charles Overton was sentenced to die for the murder of a young woman, even though her body was never found. But the prosecution had all the ammunition it needed: a blood-stained dress and a jury out for vengeance....
Now true-crime writer Jackson Kinley is coming home to grieve for an old friend. But Sequoyah sheriff Ray Tindall's death has left many questions: Why had he reopened the Overton case... and then, without explanation, shut it down? What was he looking for? And what did he find that he couldn't bear to reveal? The search for answers leads Kinley into a small-town web of corruption, secrecy, and lies--and finally into the darkest corners of the human heart, where the terrible truth lies...in the Evidence of Blood.
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Instruments of Night
Thomas Cook is one of today's most acclaimed writers of psychological thrillers, penning hypnotic tales of forbidden love and devastating secrets. Now he has written an unforgettable novel that weaves one man's tortured life with a deadly mystery that spans five decades....
Riverwood is an artists' community in the Hudson River valley, a serene place where writers can perfect their craft. But for all its beauty and isolation, it was once touched by a terrible crime--the murder of a teenage girl who lived on the estate fifty years ago. Faye Harrison's killer was never caught--and now her dying mother is desperate to learn the truth about her daughter's murder.
Enter Paul Graves, a writer who draws upon the pain of his own tragic past to write haunting tales of mystery. Graves has been summoned to Riverwood for an unusual assignment: to apply the art of fiction to a crime that was real, and then write a story that will answer the questions that keep Faye's mother from a peaceful death. Just a story. It doesn't have to be true. Or does it?
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Places in the Dark
It is autumn 1937 when a mystery woman appears in Port Alma, a sea village nestled on the chilly coast of Maine. A fragile, green-eyed beauty, the woman arrives with little more than the clothes on her back and a wealth of unspoken secrets.
Before a year goes by, she will flee Port Alma on the same bus that brought her there. But before she goes, she will irrevocably alter the lives of two brothers — leaving one dead, and the other perched on the edge of madness.
There is much that Dora March has hidden.
But in Port Alma, Maine, there are other secrets, too....
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Into the Web: A Novel
“No other suspense writer takes readers as deeply into the heart of darkness as Thomas H. Cook.”—Chicago Tribune
I know you were there. . . .
Roy Slater left Kingdom County forever after the shocking double homicide that rocked his hometown. But the .38-caliber echoes he left behind still haunt the hardscrabble West Virginia community. Now, twenty-five years later, he’s come back to spend one last summer caring for his dying father.
I know what you did. . .
Only Roy knows what really happened that snowy night two decades ago when the world suddenly shattered—only Roy and old Sheriff Wallace Porterfield. And now, maybe, Porterfield’s son, the new sheriff, knows too.
You’ll never get away from it. . . .
And when a body is found in the woods and his first, last, and only love, Lila, is connected to the corpse, it’s Roy who’s sworn in by the sheriff to discover the truth. But what Roy uncovers is that he never escaped the past, that it’s been waiting for his return, that it’s ready, this time, to kill him. . . .
Praise for Into the Web
“Thomas Cook is an artist, a philosopher, and a magician; his story is spellbinding.”—The Drood Review of Mystery
“Hypnotic prose and fresh scenarios set Cook’s suspenseful ficiton apart. . . . If you have not yet been haunted by a Thomas Cook novel, now is a fine time to start.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
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The Chatham School Affair: A Novel
Attorney Henry Griswald has a secret: the truth behind the tragic events the world knew as the Chatham School Affair, the controversial tragedy that destroyed five lives, shattered a quiet community, and forever scarred the young boy. Layer by layer, in The Chatham School Affair, Cook paints a stunning portrait of a woman, a school, and a town in which passionate violence seems impossible...and inevitable. "Thomas Cook's night visions, seen through a lens darkly, are haunting," raved the New York Times Book Review, and The Chatham School Affair will cement this superb writer's position as one of crime fiction's most prodigious talents, a master of the unexpected ending.
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The Interrogation
In his latest novel of unrelenting suspense, Edgar Award—winning author Thomas Cook journeys into the darkest corners of the human heart to tell a mesmerizing story of crime and retribution–and the forces that push even good people to the breaking point.
THE INTERROGATION
Albert Jay Smalls sits in an interrogation room accused of an unspeakable crime. The police have no witnesses, no physical evidence, but they are certain he is hiding the truth. With less than twelve hours before he must be released, Smalls will be put through one final interrogation.
It is a search that leads into the shadowed recesses of one man’s shattered mind–and to the devastating secrets buried in a desolate seaside town. It is a quest that takes three desperate cops down a dark, twisting road as they race against the clock to find out what really happened one rainy autumn afternoon in 1952. The answers will be more shocking than anyone can imagine, blurring the boundaries between pursuers and prey, between the innocent and the guilty, between the truth that sets us free and the tragedies that haunt us to the grave.
Against a gripping backdrop of murder and redemption, master storyteller Thomas Cook probes the uneasy, shifting bonds of family, love, and unbearable loss, proving once again why he is “perhaps the best American writer of crime fiction currently practicing” (Drood Review).
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Sandrine's Case
Title: Sandrine's Case Binding: Hardcover Author: ThomasH.Cook Publisher: MysteriousPress
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The Crime of Julian Wells
With THE CRIME OF JULIAN WELLS, Thomas H. Cook, one of America's most acclaimed suspense writers, has written a novel in the grand tradition of the twisty, cerebral thriller. Like Eric Ambler's A COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS and Graham Greene's THE THIRD MAN, it is a mystery of identity, or assumed identity, a journey into the maze of a mysterious life.
When famed true-crime writer Julian Wells' body if found in a boat drifting on a Montauk pond, the question is not how he died, but why?
The death is obviously a suicide. But why would Julian Wells have taken his own life? And was this his only crime? These are the questions that first intrigue and then obsess Philip Anders, Wells' best friend and the chief defender of both his moral and his literary legacies.
Anders' increasingly passionate and dangerous quest to answer these questions becomes a journey into a haunted life, one marked by travel, learning, achievement and adventure, a life that should have been celebrated, but whose lonely end points to terrors still unknown.
Spanning four decades and traversing three continents, THE CRIME OF JULIAN WELLS is a journey into one man's heart of darkness than ends in a blaze of light.
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Fatherhood
by Thomas H. Cook, John Lewis-Stempel
Collects short works of fiction, personal letters, ancient Greek poetry, excerpts from eighteenth-century childcare manuals, newspaper reports, and selections from popular culture in an anthology that celebrates the joys, responsibilities, and vulnerabilities of fatherhood as evinced by more than four thousand years of writing. Reprint.
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Fatherhood
by Thomas H. Cook, John Lewis-Stempel
Over his acclaimed career, Cook’s novels have haunted, riveted, and spellbound readers across the world, and his short stories are equally acclaimed. They range from the intensely focused world of "Fatherhood," the Herodotus prize-winning title story, to the Edgar nominated "Rain," a dark, kaleidoscopic tale of Manhattan on a single, rain-swept night. "The Fix," the story of a famous boxing fix that was, well, not a fix at all, was selected for inclusion in Best Mystery Stories of the Year. "What She Offered," the gripping tale of a one-night stand, was included in The Best Noir Stories of the Century. Like Cook’s novels, the range of this collection is, itself, astonishing. From a backwoods Appalachian shack during the Depression ("Poor People") to a Midwestern college campus in the throes of Sixties revolt ("The Sun-Gazer") to a midtown Manhattan bookstore on Christmas Eve, "The Lessons of the Season," this collection demonstrates precisely that, in the words of Michael Connolly, "no one tells a story better than Thomas H. Cook."
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