Works by
Thomas H. Cook
(Writer)
[1947 - ]

Fiction

• Blood Innocents (1980)

• The Orchids (1982)

• Tabernacle (1983)

• Elena (1986)

• Streets of Fire (1989)

• City When It Rains (1991)

• Evidence of Blood (1991)
  Forty years ago in Sequoyah, Georgia, Charles Overton was sentenced to die for the murder of a young woman, even though her body was never found.  But the prosecution had all the ammunition it needed: a blood-stained dress and a jury out for vengeance....  
  
  Now true-crime writer Jackson Kinley is coming home to grieve for an old friend.  But Sequoyah sheriff Ray Tindall's death has left many questions: Why had he reopened the Overton case...  and then, without explanation, shut it down?  What was he looking for?  And what did he find that he couldn't bear to reveal?  The search for answers leads Kinley into a small-town web of corruption, secrecy, and lies--and finally into the darkest corners of the human heart, where the terrible truth lies...in the Evidence of Blood.

• Mortal Memory (1993)
  Along with Jamie and my  mother, Laura died at approximately four in the  afternoon. It was almost two hours later that Mrs.  Hamilton, a neighbor from across the street, saw my  father drive away. During those long two hours in  which he remained in the house, my father washed my  mother's body and arranged her neatly on the bed.  After that, he made a ham sandwich and ate it at  the table in the kitchen. He drank a cup of coffee,  leaving both the plate and the cup in the sink. He  didn't pack anything, because he left with  nothing. He didn't reenter either Laura's of Jamie's  room. He made no attempt to clean up the frightful  mess that had been made of them. And yet, for no  apparent reason, he remained in the house for a full  two hours. What had he been waiting for?

• Breakheart Hill (1995)
  From the author hailed as "an important talent, a storytelling writer of poetic narrative power" (Los Angeles Times Book Review) comes a dazzling novel of psychological suspense.  "This is the darkest story I've ever heard." With these haunting words, Thomas H. Cook begins a tale of love and its aftermath, of a town sent reeling from a moment of passionate betrayal. At its center was Kelli Troy and the town of Choctaw, Alabama. And on one hazy summer afternoon decades ago, a searing burst of violence engulfed Breakheart Hill. For one man who knows the truth about those shattering events, it is a memory that would become his awful secret.

• The Chatham School Affair (1996) -- Winner Edgar Award for Best Novel
  Attorney Henry Griswald has a secret: the truth behind the tragic events the world knew as the Chatham School Affair, the controversial tragedy that destroyed five lives, shattered a quiet community, and forever scarred the young boy. Layer by layer, in The Chatham School Affair, Cook paints a stunning portrait of a woman, a school, and a town in which passionate violence seems impossible...and inevitable. "Thomas Cook's night visions, seen through a lens darkly, are haunting," raved the New York Times Book Review, and The Chatham School Affair will cement this superb writer's position as one of crime fiction's most prodigious talents, a master of the unexpected ending.

• Instruments of the Night (1998)
  On a humid summer evening in 1963, following a hard day's work in the field, twelve-year-old Paul Graves came home to a nightmare. Snatched by a stranger, strapped to a chair in a sweltering farmhouse, he watched in horror as the man orchestrated the slow, deliberate, night-long brutalization and murder of his older sister....
  
  Now, more than thirty years later, Graves is a marginally successful writer who has lost himself in the anonymity of Manhattan and in the mind-numbing world of his crime fiction. But still held captive by his memories, still haunted by this sister's agonized whispers, he writes chilling tales of cruelty and sadism, of evil triumphing over good. Stories so convincing, they have earned him an invitation to the Riverwood Estate. But not to practice his craft as a writer. Alison Davies, who runs the retreat, is convinced he's the one man capable of bringing closure to the mystery that has haunted her own family, asking him to investigate the fifty-year-old unsolved murder of 16-year-old Faye Harrision, Alison's best friend, who was tortured, strangled, and left to molder in the dark confines of a cave.
  
  Graves, more than anyone, knows where to look for the truth, where the instruments of night are brought to bear: In the deep basements, the dark caves, the lonely farmhouses where cowardice bows before corruption, where love cannot withstand the intimidation and pain. Compelled to peer into the chaos of twisted motives and tainted passions, he will confront the ultimate atrocity. Not about who killed Faye Harrison, or who killed his sister. Not about what he has witnessed and could never reveal. But about what he is capable of...and what he has done.

• Places in the Dark (2000)
  It is autumn 1937 when a mystery woman appears in Port Alma, a sea village nestled on the chilly coast of Maine. A fragile, green-eyed beauty, the woman arrives with little more than the clothes on her back and a wealth of unspoken secrets.
  
  Before a year goes by, she will flee Port Alma on the same bus that brought her there. But before she goes, she will irrevocably alter the lives of two brothers — leaving one dead, and the other perched on the edge of madness.
  
  There is much that Dora March has hidden.
  
  But in Port Alma, Maine, there are other secrets, too....

• The Interrogation (2002)
  Albert Jay Smalls sits in an interrogation room accused of an unspeakable crime. The police have no witnesses, no physical evidence, but they are certain he is hiding the truth. With less than twelve hours before he must be released, Smalls will be put through one final interrogation. I
  
  It is a search that leads into the shadowed recesses of one man’s shattered mind–and to the devastating secrets buried in a desolate seaside town. It is a quest that takes three desperate cops down a dark, twisting road as they race against the clock to find out what really happened one rainy autumn afternoon in 1952. The answers will be more shocking than anyone can imagine, blurring the boundaries between pursuers and prey, between the innocent and the guilty, between the truth that sets us free and the tragedies that haunt us to the grave.

• Taken (2002)
  In the last days of World War II, a strange phenomenon saves a doomed Air Force pilot named Russell Keys--and plunges him into torment. In a place called Roswell, New Mexico, a man named Owen Crawford is drawn to a bizarre crash site in the desert, and into a government cover-up. And in a remote Texas town, a lonely woman named Sally Clarke finds a stranger hiding in her barn, and reaches out to touch him…
  
  This epic novel, based on the gripping ten-part SCI FI Channel® miniseries from DreamWorks Television, spans sixty years of American history...as the lives of three people are changed in an instant--and the consequences are played out over three generations of harrowing encounters and unexplained events. While the government lies, and a nation doubts, three families know they have been touched, know that something has been taken from them...something that will change their lives forever.

• Moon Over Manhattan: Mystery and Mayham (2002)  by Larry King and Thomas H. Cook
  It's welcome to New York and watch out for the locals in this delightful new tale of love, mystery, madness and mayhem in the most most intriguing, romantic, and fast- paced setting of them all! Bestselling authors Larry King and Thomas H. Cook have collaborated on this Valentine to New York City...this top-speed ride throughout the bright lights and dim wits of the big city.
  
  Arthur Vandameer, single dad and TV political commentary giant, the host of WNIN's Speaking Truth to Power, is rich, famous and miserable. He has risen to the top of the city's glittering media heap only to find...nothing. His teenage daughter, privileged and glamorous Allison Vandameer is blonde, beautiful and wants nothing more than to go to film school. Her boyfriend, Joselito Diaz (aka Goonie), is special to her only because she knows her father cannot stand him.
  
  Roy Bumble spends his time contemplating "the big score" that will make him infinitely wealthy...but returns home to Queens each day from his humdrum doorman job at the posh Sherry-Netherland to his whiny wife Bea Bumble.
  
  Charlie Moon is the big city newspaperman, who is convinced that he has seen everything in this crazy town, until he's sent out on assignment to do a piece for the style section of The Daily Register.
  
  Harry "Ace" Stumbo and Cheeky Putoyna round out the pack. They know all the angles in this dirty town--all the bad men and the worst women--but just don't know how to keep their fingers off them.
  
  When the lovely Allison disappears, these colorful characters (and Mr. Peanut too) are thrown into a citywide web of intrigue, insanity, political values and personal agendas which takes them from The Plaza, to Queens, to Herald Square, to Tiffany, a few bars, a few bedrooms, Bergdorf Goodman and back culminating on live television in front of all of America.

• Peril (2004)
  Sara Labriola is a married woman haunted by the shattering secrets of her past—and terrified of the future. Tired of living in fear—and knowing that if she stays in her marriage she'll be killed—Sara decides to do the only thing she can: she makes herself disappear.
  
  One afternoon, without telling a soul, she packs a single suitcase and leaves her life in Long Island behind. In New York City, she will reinvent herself. She will change her identity, and maybe even get the happy ending she's always dreamed of. But that dream is about to become a nightmare when her father-in-law decides to make her pay for abandoning his son.
  
  Leo Labriola runs his modest but lucrative criminal organization like he does his family—with unspeakable brutality and zero tolerance for disobedience. He's determined to teach Sara a lesson and he'll stop at nothing to do it. Now six differently desperate and dangerous men—each with the power to destroy her—are on Sara's trail. But none of them suspect that the woman they are seeking has a dangerous secret of her own. For Sara is leading all of them down a path of private demons, past sins, and the deadliest peril.

• Into the Web (2004)
  Twenty-five years ago, an unspeakable crime was committed and Roy Slater fled--from the life he thought he wanted, from the memories he couldn't avoid, and from the devastating suspicions of those he called friends. But now that his estranged father is dying, the prodigal son has returned to confront the past--and finds himself inextricably caught up with an old flame and a new murder, one that leads him inevitably back into the twisted web of deceit and violence from which he thought he'd escaped.
  
  In this haunting novel of literary suspense, Edgar Award-winner Thomas Cook once again delves deep into the realms of betrayal, passion and murder.

• Red Leaves (2005) -- Nominee Anthony Award for Best Novel nominee, Dagger Award for Best Novel, and Edgar Award for Best Novel
  Eric Moore has a prosperous business, a comfortable home, a stable family life in a quiet town. Then, on an ordinary night, his teenage son Keith babysits Amy Giordano, the eight-year-old daughter of a neighboring family. The next morning Amy is missing, and Eric isn't sure his son is innocent.
  
  In his desperate attempt to hold his family together by proving his-and the community's-suspicions wrong, Eric finds himself in a vortex of doubt and broken trust. What should he make of Keith's strange behavior? Of his wife's furtive phone calls to a colleague? Of his brother's hints that he knows things he's afraid to say?
  
  In a "heart-wrenching and gut-wrenching" (New York Daily News) race against time and mistrust, Eric must discover what has happened to Amy Giordano and face the long-buried family secrets he has so carefully ignored.

• The Cloud of Unknowing (2006)
  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 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 son’s murder who could give evidence in the case she is building against her husband. David soon fears for his own family’s safety as the seductive qualities of Diana’s manic energy become impossible to ignore.
  
  In The Cloud of Unknowing, Cook explores the power of blood and family mythology.  Also known as The Murmur of Stones

• Master of the Delta (2007 release)

• The Best American Crime Writing: The Year's Best True Crime Reporting (2002), Otto Penzler and Thomas H. Cook, eds.

• The Best American Crime Writing: The Year's Best True Crime Reporting (2003), Otto Penzler and Thomas H. Cook, eds.

• Best American Crime Writing (2004), Otto Penzler and Thomas H. Cook, eds.