Thomas H Cook

"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...

When a famous true-crime writer is found dead in a boat on a Montauk pond, his best friend begins a quest to determine if the author committed suicide and uncovers darkness amidst a life filled with adventure and achievement.

In 1954 Mississippi, Jack Branch returns to his father $1 (Bs 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 $1 (Bs crime and using his own good name to...

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...

For years Paul Graves has tried to escape his past and forget about his sister's murder, but when he is called to Riverwood to write a story about a young girl who was killed more than forty years earlier, he is forced to face the demons that have always tormented him.

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...

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...

A mobster sends his bagman to track down his runaway daughter-in-law in this novel by "one of the most accomplished writers in the crime/thriller genre" (Financial Times). Sara Labriola is certain that if she stays in her marriage, someone is going to wind up dead-and it'll probably be her. So she flees her coastal Long Island home for New York City, where she changes her identity and finds work singing at a bar. Her husband is upset, of course....

Into the Web stars Roy Slater, a young man who 25 years ago ran away from his hometown to escape the consequences of an unspeakable crime. Now with his father dying, Roy returns, only to get caught up in another scandal. Murder rocks the small town, and for Roy it draws him into the same web of deceit and treachery he tried so hard to leave behind. Tom Stechschulte's intense narration will have listeners on the edges of their seats.

Drawn to dark places, an award-winning crime novelist, in this deeply personal memoir, travels to some of the earth's most tragic locales where he finds the light that can illuminate the darkness within each one of us. --wordery.com.