Thomas 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...

Thomas H. Cook's mesmerizing novels have attracted many Edgar Award nominations, and his Chatham School Affair won the Edgar Award for Best Novel. Filled with the haunting characters that have become Cook's trademark, Instruments of Night creates a fusion between past and present that is unique and chilling. Author Paul Graves has achieved modest popularity for a crime series that pits a perceptive detective against his nemesis, a mastermind of evil....

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

A true-crime account of a vicious massacre and the legal battles that followed It was not a clever killing. On May 5, 1973, three men escaped from a Maryland prison and disappeared. Joined by a fifteen-year-old brother, they surfaced in Georgia, where they were spotted joyriding in a stolen car. Within a week, the four young men were arrested on suspicion of committing one of the most horrific murders in American history.   Jerry Alday and his family...

It's 1939 and the world is on the brink of war, but Thomas Danforth is in New York City living a fortunate life. The well-traveled son of a wealthy importer, he's in his twenties and running the family business, looking forward to a bright future. Then, during a snowy evening walk along Gramercy Park, a friend makes a fateful request-and involves Thomas in a dangerous idea that could change the fates of millions. Thomas is to provide access to his...