Thomas H. Cook

Lucas Page, a once ambitious historian now resigned to mediocrity, 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 vastly different...

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year: After years of grief and rage, a man finds new purpose in investigating a woman's unsolved disappearance. George Gates's little boy was killed seven years ago and he has yet to find the cold comfort of seeing someone pay for the crime. Once a world-traveling writer, he now toils away at a local newspaper, quietly seething and plotting imaginary vengeance against the unknown murderer. Then, during a...

A renowned true-crime writer's suicide opens up a continent-crossing mystery in this Edgar Award–winning author's "spellbinding thriller" (Publishers Weekly). When the body of true-crime writer Julian Wells is found in a boat drifting on a Montauk pond, the question is not how he died, but why? Philip Anders, Wells's best friend and literary executor, vows to find out what drove the enigmatic author to take his own life. The first clue is...

At the height of the Civil Rights movement, a young girl's murder stirs racial tensions in Birmingham, Alabama The grave on the football field is shallow, and easy to spot from a distance. It would have been found sooner, had most of the residents in the black half of Birmingham not been downtown, marching, singing, and being arrested alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. Police detective Ben Wellman is among them when he gets the call about the fresh...

A gut-wrenching true-crime account of a couple on a twisted killing spree in the American South Evil has a way of finding itself. How else could you explain the bond between Alvin and Judith Ann Neelley, who consecrated their marriage in blood? Before the killings started, they restricted themselves to simple mischief: prank calls, vandalism, firing guns at strangers' houses. Gradually their ambition grew, until one day at the Riverbend Mall in Rome,...

Now living in New York, ex-cop Frank Clemons investigates a brutal slashing The sleek high-rises of Park Avenue make Frank Clemons uneasy. The former Atlanta homicide detective came to New York after a sickening murder case soured him on the South, but despite the glitz of his new surroundings and the beauty of the woman he shares them with, the city makes his skin crawl. Now a private eye, he is only at ease in the city's darker corners, among the...

In Thomas H. Cook's first novel, a weary detective tracks a blood-crazed psychopath Blood seeps into the gutters at the children's zoo in Central Park. Two deer have been slaughtered, one stabbed fifty-seven times and the other slashed across the neck. Normally it would be a case for the Parks Department, but these are no ordinary deer. The pride of the small menagerie, they were given to the zoo by a prominent socialite who cannot afford bloody headlines....

Thomas H. Cook offers one of his most compelling novels ever in Sandrine's Case, in which a college professor falls in love with his wife all over again… while on trial for her murder. Samuel Madison always wondered what Sandrine saw in him. He was a meek, stuffy doctorate student, and she a brilliant, beautiful, bohemian with limitless talents and imagination. On the surface their relationship and marriage seemed perfectly tranquil: jobs at the...

Will the truth bring peace-or pain? A "once-in-a-lifetime masterpiece" by the Edgar Award–winning author (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Mystery writer Paul Graves, a man with a painful past, has come to an artists' retreat in New York's quiet, picturesque Hudson Valley. But his purpose for being there is not a pleasant escape. He's been tasked with something more unusual. Long ago, when Riverwood was a private estate, a teenage girl was...