Synopses & Reviews
Middling historian Lucas Paige visits St. Louis to give a sparsely attended reading—nothing out of the ordinary. Except among the yawning attendees is someone he did not expect: Lola Faye Gilroy, the “other woman” he has long blamed for his fathers murder decades earlier. Reluctantly, Luke joins Lola Faye for a drink. As one drink turns into several, these two battered souls relive, from their different perspectives, the most searing experience of their lives. Slowly but surely, the hotel bar dissolves around them and they are transported back to the tiny southern town where this defining moment—a violent crime of passion—is turned in the light once more to reveal flaws in the old answers. As it turns out, there is much Luke doesnt know. And what he doesnt know can hurt him. Trapped in an increasingly intense emotional exchange, and with no place to go save back into his own dark past, Luke struggles to gain control of an ever more threatening conversation, to discover why Lola Faye has come and what she is after—before it is too late. A taut literary thriller in the gothic tradition of Master of the Delta.
Review
"Edgar-nominee Cook (
The Last Talk with Lola Faye, 2010, etc.) plays the spy game in this mystery adventure. Soon after 9/11, Paul Crane, a young think-tank researcher, interviews Thomas Danforth, an elderly New York City resident who believes he has information relevant to defending America against fanatics. Danforth wants the meeting because Crane wrote an article demanding a revenge-filled response to 9/11. Crane is skeptical, but Danforth unfolds a tale that begins in 1939, when he ran his father's import business. With the war imminent, Danforth was lured into an anti-Nazi conspiracy by his college friend, Robert Clayton. Other characters enter, including Ted Bannion, a disillusioned Spanish Civil War loyalist, and Anna Klein, a mysterious and beautiful young linguist. Captivated by Anna, Danforth accompanies her to Europe, where, with Bannion's help, she intends to organize Spanish Loyalists interned in France into an anti-Nazi force. That scheme fails. The three then decide Danforth will pose as an art dealer seeking Hitler's paintings. The plan is assassination, but the Gestapo intervenes. Bannion takes cyanide. Klein, by now the object of Danforth's passion, is captured. But because of his father's connections, Danforth is simply deported from Nazi Germany. The narrative regularly shifts from the interview to Danforth's adventures in the abattoir that was Europe in the 1940s, where he sought to learn Anna's fate. Clues hint Anna was a double or triple agent, and Danforth is eventually sent to the Soviet Union to determine her identity. There he's taken for a spy and sent to the gulag for 12 years. As the story unfolds, Danforth pushes and prods the callow Crane toward understanding the complexity of moral choices, the shadows that obscure love and loyalty and the perils of cause becoming obsession. Absent one minor point,
Cook's plot is as captivating as his characters. It's rendered in an often ear-pleasing literary style— "the sewer's most pernicious flotsam"— and laced with dozens of intriguing historical anecdotes. A knight errant, a labyrinth of deceit, a sure bestseller." —
Kirkus Reviews "Thomas Cook's work is elegant, philosophical, and literary. This book is to be treasured, and is bound to earn him new readers. Grade A" —Cleveland Plain Dealer
Review
"In this tightly coiled, intellectual drama, Cook (The Chatham School Affair) unwinds a marvelously tense story of belated redemption. While in St. Louis for a book tour, Luke Paige, a middle-aged writer of lackluster histories, agrees to meet with a long-forgotten acquaintance, the "little hayseed tramp" he believes triggered a bloody tragedy that befell his family decades earlier. The story alternates between Luke's recollections of his hometown; the "heady ambition" of the despicably cruel, contemptuous younger Luke, who wants to go to Harvard and gets swept up "in the lethal tide of [his] own grand dream"; and the numb, disillusioned academic who sits down for a drink with Lola Faye Gilroy. A vertiginous precipice eventually materializes in front of Luke, who must finally confront the true nature of his father’s heinous murder and its equally tragic aftermath. The younger Luke is without a doubt one of the more convincing modern villains, a single-minded overachiever devoured by raging oedipal loathing and equally consumed by narcissistic ambition."
—Publishers Weekly, STARRED
Review
PRAISE FOR PERIL
"No other suspense writer takes readers as deeply into the heart of darkness as Thomas H. Cook."-CHICAGO TRIBUNE
"There's no ignoring [Cook's] savage imagery, or escaping the airless chambers of his disturbing imagination." -THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Review
PRAISE FOR
THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING"[Dianas] inexorable descent into mania, narrated by her brother Dave, is as gripping as the mystery itself. A-."Entertainment Weekly
"Piercing . . . Consuming suspense almost too concentrated to bear."New York Daily News
Review
PRAISE FOR
RED LEAVES"Red Leaves is both heart-wrenching and gut-wrenching. A family can be 'briefly held,' and yet so enduring."--New York Daily News
"One of the most suspenseful of crime-fiction writers, [Cook] is also one of the most lyrical . . . Readers will glimpse blurred snapshots from their own lives--and be afraid."--The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
Review
"[Dianas] inexorable descent into mania, narrated by her brother Dave, is as gripping as the mystery itself. A-"
Review
"An eerie, unsettling, beautifully composed and suspenseful novel quite unlike anything Thomas H. Cook has written before."
Review
"Cook smartly goes against genre expectations . . . Whats at stake isnt so much the resolution of a mystery as the integrity of a family."
Review
PRAISE FOR
MASTER OF THE DELTA"Thomas Cook never disappoints. With Master of the Delta he elevates the game once again. Beautifully written and heavily muscled with character and intrigue, this novel is a tour de force. Nobody tells a story better than Cook."--Michael Connelly
"Enthralling . . . a thrilling, if dangerous, subject for a master storyteller like Cook." New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
On the eve of World War II, an international plot gone wrong leads a wealthy man on a quest that spans decades and continents, to the dawn of a troubled new century.
Synopsis
Thomas Danforth has lived a fortunate life. The son of a wealthy importer, he traveled the world in his youth, and now, in his twenties, he lives in New York City and runs the family business. It is 1939, and the world is on the brink of war, but Danforths life is untroubled, his future assured. Then, on a snowy evening walk along Gramercy Park, a friend poses a fateful question.
As it turns out, this friend has a dangerous idea that can change the world. Danforth is to provide a place where a “brilliant woman” can receive training in firearms and explosives. This is to be the beginning of an international plot carried out by the mysterious Anna Klein—a plot that will ensnare Danforth in more ways than one. When the plan goes wrong and Klein disappears, Danforths quest begins: it is a journey of ever-shifting alliances and betrayals that will lead him across a war-torn world in search of answers. Now in his ninety-first year, at the dawn of a troubled new era, he sits in luxury at the Century Club and tells his tale to the young man from Washington he has summoned, for reasons of his own, to hear it.
Synopsis
Thomas Danforth has lived a fortunate life. The son of a wealthy importer, he traveled the world in his youth, and now, in his twenties, he lives in New York City and runs the family business. It is 1939, and the world is on the brink of war, but Danforths life is untroubled, his future assured. Then, on a snowy evening walk along Gramercy Park, a friend poses a fateful question.
As it turns out, this friend has a dangerous idea that can change the world. Danforth is to provide a place where a “brilliant woman” can receive training in firearms and explosives. This is to be the beginning of an international plot carried out by the mysterious Anna Klein—a plot that will ensnare Danforth in more ways than one. When the plan goes wrong and Klein disappears, Danforths quest begins: it is a journey of ever-shifting alliances and betrayals that will lead him across a war-torn world in search of answers. Now in his ninety-first year, at the dawn of a troubled new era, he sits in luxury at the Century Club and tells his tale to the young man from Washington he has summoned, for reasons of his own, to hear it.
Synopsis
“Nobody tells a story better than Thomas H. Cook.” —Michael Connelly
ON THE EVE OF WORLD WAR II, A HIGH STAKES INTERNATIONAL PLOT LEADS TO A DEADLY OBSESSION
Thomas Danforth has lived a fortunate life. The son of a wealthy importer, he wandered the globe in his youth, and now, in his twenties, he lives in New York City and runs the family business. It is 1939 and the world is on the brink of war, but his life is untroubled, his future assured. Then, on 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.
Danforth is to provide access to his secluded Connecticut mansion, where a mysterious woman will receive training in firearms and explosives. Thus begins an international plot carried out by the strange and alluring Anna Klein—a plot that will ensnare Thomas in more ways than one. When it all goes wrong and Anna disappears, his quest across a war torn world begins…
Synopsis
The latest mystery from the author of THE FATE OF KATHERINE CARR
Synopsis
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 focuses on Keith, Eric must counsel his son, find him a lawyer, protect him from the community's steadily growing suspicion. Except that Eric is not so sure his son is innocent. And if Keith is not . . . and might do the same thing again . . . what then should a father do?
Red Leaves is a story of broken trust and one man's heroic effort to hold fast the ties that bind him to everything he loves.
Synopsis
In 1954 Mississippi, Jack Branch returns to his fathers 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 fathers crime and using his own good name to open the doors that Eddies lineage cant. But when Eddies investigation leads him to Great Oaks and to Jacks own father, Jack finds himself questioning Eddies motivesand his own.
As the deadly consequences of Jacks actions fall inescapably into place, Thomas H. Cook masterfully reveals the darker truths that lurk in the recesses of small-town lives and in the hearts of even well-intentioned men.
Synopsis
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, wholike David and Dianas fatheris schizophrenic. Her husband, Mark, a geneticist, never made peace with Jasons 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 sons murder who could give evidence in the case she is building against her husband. David soon fears for his own familys safety as the seductive qualities of Dianas manic energy become impossible to ignore. In The Cloud of Unknowing, Cook explores the power of blood and family mythology.
Synopsis
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 sons last day.
Enter Arlo MacBride, a retired missing-persons detective still obsessed with the unsolved case of Katherine Carr. When he gives Gates the story she left behind—a story of a man stalking a woman named Katherine Carr—Gates too is drawn inexorably into a search for the missing authors brief life and uncertain fate. And as he goes deeper, he begins to suspect that her tale holds the key not only to her fate, but to his own.
About the Author
Thomas H. Cook was born in Fort Payne, Alabama in 1947. He has been nominated for the Edgar seven times in five different categories. He is the recipient of the Best Novel Edgar (for
The Chatham School Affair), the Martin Beck Award of the Swedish Academy of Detection, the Herodotus Prize for Best Historical Short Story, and the Barry for Best Novel (
Red Leaves). He has been nominated for the Lawlie Dagger award of the Association of British Crime Writers, the Macavity Award, the Anthony Award, and the Dashiell Hammett Prize. He lives in New York City and on Cape Cod.