Thomas H Cook

Thomas H. Cook's novels, including Instruments of Night and Breakheart Hill, pull readers deep into their webs of obsession, passion, and fear. A best-selling author, Cook won the Edgar Award for The Chatham School Affair. In 1937, a slender young woman arrived in a small Maine town. Dora March was lovely, quiet, and mysterious. Soon the tragedies began: a house fire, a murder, a suicide. Within a year, Dora vanished, leaving behind dark, unanswered...

"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...

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,...

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.

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.

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...

Twenty years ago, Ray Campbell, now a cautious risk- management consultant, was a well-intentioned aid worker dedicated to improving conditions in Lubanda, a newly independent African country. He is forced to reconsider that year of living dangerously when a friend from his time in Lubanda is found murdered in a New York alley. Signs suggest that this most recent tragedy is rooted in the far more distant one of Martine Aubert, the only woman Ray ever...

Five decades after war's end, a rare-books dealer receives a strange visitor. The guns went silent on November 11, 1918, never to fire again. Throughout the 1920s, unrest seethed across Europe, and Fascists battled Communists in the streets of Berlin, but democracy won out. For years, peace has prevailed around the world. But there is a part of Franklin Altman that misses the war. A rare-books dealer living in New York City, Altman has devoted his...

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 "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...

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...