Thomas H. Cook's intricate plots and spellbinding prose won him the coveted Edgar Award. The Quest for Anna Klein begins after the 9/11 attacks, when researcher Paul Crane sits down to interview elderly New York City resident Thomas Danforth. But Thomas' thoughts drift to a different era, when a conspiracy to kill Hitler led him to the beautiful and mysterious linguist Anna Klein.
New York Times best-selling author and Edgar Award winner Thomas H. Cook's atmospheric thrillers cut to the core of humanity's deepest fears. Here, a floundering middle-aged historian reluctantly sits down with the woman he suspects was responsible for his father's murder decades before. As they drink, they open up about this seminal event and he discovers much of what he thought to be true is anything but.
Thomas H. Cook has twice won Edgar Awards for his finely crafted psychological thrillers, and Breakheart Hill (RB# 94616) was named the single best mystery novel of the 1990s by the founder of The Mysterious Press. The Interrogation is a desperate race against time and a gripping journey into the darkest corners of the human soul. One day in 1952, the strangled body of 10-year-old Cathy Lake is discovered in a public park. A homeless suspect, Albert Jay Smalls, is arrested and held for interrogation. Now, Officers Norman Cohen and Jack Pierce have only 24 hours to make the sullen young man talk before he's released. How far are they willing to push him to get a confession? As the two policemen gather the many contradictory pieces of evidence, the boundaries between hunter and prey, guilty and innocent, begin to blur. Thomas H. Cook is a master of the surprise ending, and The Interrogation is sure to leave every listener stunned. Audie Awarda-winning narrator George Guidall's performance captures the dramatic urgency of this deeply disturbing tale.
Edgar Award-winning author Thomas H. Cook spins a riveting tale about one man's struggle to cope
with staggering loss. Until his son was kidnapped and murdered, George Gates was a globe-trotting travel writer. Now he writes boring articles by day and broods at night. But when a retiring cold-case detective piques his interest with details of a missing writer, he feels compelled
to discover her fate.
When the body of famed true-crime writer Julian Wells is found in a boat drifting on a Montauk pond, the question isn't how he died, but why. The death looks like an obvious suicide, but why would Wells take his own life? And was this his only crime? Wells' best friend, Philip Anders, wants to know more. His first clue is an Argentinean crime, which may have been Wells' last book idea. As Anders gathers the missing parts of Wells' life, the man he knew, or thought he knew, becomes increasingly obscured, and the ever-deepening puzzle threatens to consume him entirely.
A mystery of identity, or assumed identity, The Crime of Julian Wells spans four decades and traverses three continents. Richly plotted, brilliantly told, it's a voyage into the depth and darkness of a man's heart.
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.
On a rainy night in New York City's Hell's Kitchen, a woman throws a doll from the fifth-floor window of a gutted tenement, then leaps herself. From his own apartment a few blocks away, freelance photographer David Corman listens to the radio reports as they come over his headset. Corman is a man at the edge, threatened with eviction, besieged by his wife's attempt to regain custody of their daughter, yet reluctant to give up the life that permits him to roam the night. In the woman's dying fall, he sees the chance to sell a story and perhaps buy some time. So he starts to probe deeper. Nothing prepares him for the odyssey he is about to undertake. As the path leads, dark and twisted, from the meanest streets of New York to the homes of the rich, he struggles to uncover the life of the woman who leaped into the rain. The more layers he strips away, however, the more puzzles confront him, until ultimately, the search turns back onto himself: the dead woman's true tale reveals shocking truths about his own life. At last, what began as a simple search for a story becomes a fight for his own soul.
Rich in character, complex in plot, The City When It Rains is a haunting, suspenseful novel of uncommon force. Written with the stark beauty of the city it describes-passionate, resonant, a mystery in the deepest sense of the word.
Nominated three times for the Edgar Award, Thomas H. Cook continues to mesmerize readers with novels that combine tales of passion and intrigue with the best in page-turning suspense. Listeners find his pensive, lyrical style irresistible. As lawyer Henry Griswald draws up an aging client's will, he reflects on a series of events in 1926-1927 that shattered the peace of his boyhood community. Griswald, then a student at the school where his father was headmaster, witnessed a passion that would change him forever. At the heart of Griswald's reverie lies a mystery only he can solve. What really happened at Black Pond-a tragedy that eventually destroyed five lives? Seeing his boyhood memories through the eyes of experience and age, Griswald relives the emotion-charged chain of events. As he pieces the tantalizing puzzle together, he also pulls the listener into a growing awareness of the terrible consequences of his childish vision.
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 grave.
Under the loosely packed dirt, he finds a young black girl, her innocence taken and her life along with it. His sergeant orders Wellman to investigate, but instructs him not to try too hard. In the summer of 1963, Birmingham is tense enough without a manhunt for the killers of a black child. Wellman digs for the truth in spite of skepticism from the black community and scorn from his fellow officers. What he finds is a secret that men from both sides of town would prefer stayed buried.
It is May 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama. As Martin Luther King, Jr.'s civil rights demonstrations begin to fill the streets, prejudices awaken and tempers flare. Amid the violence and confusion, a deaf black girl is found raped and murdered. Veteran homicide detective Ben Wellman pursues the murderer through the throngs of protesters, the pool halls of the black district of Bearmatch, the white mansions of Mountain Brook, and finally, even in his own department. As he did in Sacrificial Ground, Cook has created a novel of uncommon force and resonance.
Samuel Madison always wondered what Sandrine saw in him, he a meek, stuffy doctorate student and she a brilliant, beautiful bohemian with limitless talent and imagination. Yet on the surface their marriage seemed perfectly tranquil: jobs at a small liberal arts college, a precocious young daughter, a home filled with art and literature, and trips to some of the world’s most beautiful places. Then one night Sandrine is found dead in their bed from a deadly overdose of pain medication and alcohol, and Samuel is accused of poisoning her.
As the truth of their turbulent marriage comes to light, Samuel must face a town convinced of his guilt, a daughter whose faith in her father has been shaken to it's core, and the truth about his brilliant wife whose shattering secrets could set him free-or condemn him to death.
The young girl lies in a ditch without a scratch on her-a white high school student stretched out dead in the black part of Atlanta. She was a rich girl from a cold family, too genteel for the neighborhood where she died, and only the baby in her belly suggests how she might have gotten there.
For Detective Frank Clemons, the scene is far too familiar. Too close to how it was when he found his own daughter, dead in the woods by her own hand, her youthful beauty cruelly ravaged by depression. Her suicide ended his marriage and sent him on a downward spiral that has nearly claimed his own life. To hang on to sanity, he must do everything he can to find justice for the dead.
