Thomas H Cook

"When famed true-crime writer Julian Wells' body is 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's first clue is an Argentinean...

Frank Clemons, an ex-cop turned private detective, faces a pair of perplexing cases on the mean streets of New York City The first case is simple. A wealthy man's wife has grown distant, and he asks Frank Clemons, a private eye hardened by his past work on Atlanta's homicide beat, to find out why. There are a number of simple reasons why a young woman might withdraw from her older husband, but the spurned spouse rejects them all. Her jewelry is disappearing,...

Historian Lucas Page visits St. Louis to give a reading. Among the attendees is someone he does not expect: Lola Faye Gilroy, the "other woman" he has long blamed for his father's murder decades earlier. Now he must discover why Lola Faye has come and what she is after--before it is too late.

A withdrawn architect revisits the darkest moment of his childhood Steve Farris was nine years old in 1959, the youngest child in a family that was about to be snuffed out. Around four o'clock on an ordinary November afternoon, Steve's father loaded his shotgun. With calm precision he killed his teenaged son and daughter, and then turned the weapon on his wife. For two hours he waited for his youngest son to come home from school. When Steve did not...

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...

"When a friend from his time in Africa is found murdered in a New York alley, Ray Campbell returns to the African homeland of the only woman he ever loved in pursuit of answers--still haunted by her murder twenty years ago and believing there is a connection between the two murders"--

A troubled cop obsessively searches for a young girl's killer 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...

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 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...