Michael Gruber

The Book of Air and Shadows

This critically acclaimed tale of a witch and her goblin-child is wholly original, and the legendary characters of old who touch their story -- Cinderella, Rapunzel, Rumplestiltskin -- are made new through Michael Gruber's imaginative lens. Gruber's literary voice is as magical as his imagination. With The Witch's Boy he has created a wondrous journey through the realms of magic.

The Witch's Boy

When a shattering piece of news awakens his buried desire for vengeance, Richard Marder, with nothing left to lose, sets out to punish the people whose actions, years earlier, changed his life and, with an old army buddy by his side, encounters a colorful cast of dangerous characters along the way.

A Novel

The Return

New York Times bestselling author Michael Gruber, a member of the elite ranks of those who can both chill the blood and challenge the mind, delivers a taut, multilayered, riveting novel of suspense.

The Good Son

Having inherited his father's considerable artistic talents but unable to find buyers for his works, Chaz Wilmot accepts a commission to restore an antique fresco in a European castle, a job that brings unexpected success and a sinister offer.

The Forgery of Venus

Not since The Secret History has a novel so flawlessly married the ferocious intensity of an unforgettable thriller with the depth, daring, and nuance of our most celebrated literary fiction. Tropic of Night is a virtuoso performance -- an unforgettably accomplished novel, a masterpiece of electricity and ambition. Jane Doe was a promising anthropologist, an expert on shamanism. Now she's nothing, a shadow: after faking her own suicide, she's living under an assumed identity in Miami with a little girl to protect. Everyone thinks she's dead. Or so she hopes. Then the killings start, a series of ritualistic murders that terrifies all of Miami. The investigator is Jimmy Paz, a Cuban-American police detective. There are witnesses, but they can recall almost nothing of the events, as though their memories have been erased -- as if a spell has been cast on each of them. Equally bizarre is the string of clues Paz uncovers: a divination charm, exotic drugs found in the bodies of the victims, a century-old report telling of a secret place in the heart of Africa. These clues point Paz inexorably toward the fugitive, Jane Doe, and force Jane to realize that the darkness she has fled is seeking her out, hunting her down. By the time her path intersects with Jimmy Paz's, the two will be thrust into a cataclysmic battle between good and an evil unimaginable to the Western mind.

Tropic of Night

Investigating the murder of an oil tycoon, detective Jimmy Paz interviews an unlikely suspect in pious young Emmylou Dideroff, whose claim about her ability to commune with saints places her sanity in question and tests the belief systems of police psychologist Lorna Wise. By the author of Tropic of Night. 100,000 first printing.

Valley of Bones

An artist born outside his time, Chaz Wilmot can paint like Leonardo, Goya, Gainsborough—and he refuses to shape his talent to fit the fashion of the day. His unique abilities attract the attention of Werner Krebs, an art dealer with a dark past and shadier present, and soon Wilmot is working with a fervor he hasn't felt in years. But his creative burst is accompanied by strange interludes—memories that are not memories . . . and he begins to wonder if he is really the person he believes he is. When a previously unknown masterpiece by the Spanish painter Velázquez is discovered, the artist suddenly finds himself lost in a mirrored house of illusions—and propelled into a secret world of greed, lies . . . and murder.

Witch's Boy

Lump, the ugliest boy in the world, is abandoned in the forest, where he is found and taken in by a witch. With a bear for a nanny, a genie as a servant and only a cat to talk to, the household is a strange one, but Lump grows up knowing nothing but love. Until one day he has to go out and face the world - and meets rejection at every turn. This is the story of Lump's difficult journery to adulthood, his craving for the magical powers of his mother and his search for love and acceptance, set against the backdrop of a world full of natural magic in delicate balance, where the slightest disturbance can be catastrophic.

On l'appelle Tibou le laid, le difforme, plus gobelin qu'humain. Enfant abandonné, il est recueilli par une sorcière et élevé par une ourse. Ses seuls camarades de jeu sont les créatures de la forêt. Il apprend même à parler leur langue. Mais un jour, le fils de la sorcière entre dans le monde des humains. Amère désillusion : leur cruauté transforme son innocence en un désir de vengeance qui lui fait courir de grands dangers. Pour Tibou, c'est le début d'un voyage fascinant dans un univers qu'il ne connaît pas.

Le fils de la sorcière

The startling reviews of Tropic of Night announced Michael Gruber as one of the most talented thriller writers to debut in many years. Now, with the much-anticipated publication of Valley of Bones, Gruber fulfills that genre-bending promise as perhaps no writer since Graham Greene, with a genuinely exhilarating thriller that simultaneously offers a profound, deeply provocative exploration of the nature of faith itself. The setting is Miami. Rookie cop Tito Morales arrives at the Trianon Hotel to investigate a routine disturbance call -- and, to his shock and horror, watches as a wealthy oilman plunges ten stories and impales himself on a nearby fence. Soon Morales is joined by detective Jimmy Paz, famous throughout the city for solving -- or at least providing a plausible solution to -- the so-called Voodoo Murders that left Miami burning months earlier. Together Paz and Morales enter the hotel and discover, in the dead man's room, a most unusual suspect, an otherworldly woman by the name of Emmylou Dideroff. She emerges from a rapturous, prayerlike state and admits that she had a motive for killing the oilman. Ultimately, she says she wants to confess, and asks for a pen and several notebooks in which to convey the details of her confession. What Emmylou writes is nothing like what Paz expects; he enlists psychologist Lorna Wise in an effort to make sense of things that go beyond Emmylou's explanation of the murder: details of childhood abuse, of other crimes committed, of regular communion with saints -- and with the devil. Is she mentally disturbed or playacting in hopes of getting declared unfit for trial? Or does she really believe herself to be an instrument of God? And why is it that so many people -- including Paz's biological father -- are suddenly interested in the contents of these notebooks and in preventing them from becoming public? As Valley of Bones moves toward its startling and dramatic finale, Emmylou's "confessions" lead Jimmy Paz, Lorna Wise, and Tito Morales down a series of unexpected and dangerous turns that puts them in the path of perhaps the most terrifying evil imaginable and forces each of them to confront questions about faith, love, and the possibility of the miraculous.

LITERARY REVIEW's Best Thrillers of 2010 SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2011 CWA GOLD DAGGER AWARD The Agent: In the mountain fastness of the Hindu Kush a deadly game of deception and intrigue is entering its final phase. At its heart, a man known only as the Engineer. The Analyst: In the subterranean corridors of Washington an ambitious young NSA operative receives an intercept that confirms her agency's worst fears. But she's not convinced. She thinks it's a trap. The Mother: In a fortified village high above the Swat Valley, a hostage awaits execution. She can't out-fight her captors, but can she out-think them? Can she get into their heads before she loses hers? The Son: On the other side of the world, a Special Forces soldier in a clandestine branch of the American military plans a daring rescue operation. But to save his mother he will have to betray his country. At the intersection of East and West, of faith and fanaticism, of loyalty and betrayal, New York Times bestselling author Michael Gruber has created a provocative, high-calibre thriller where one family's convoluted past is catching up with the present, where nightmares and dreams can become real, where truth and lies can be one and the same.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2011 CWA GOLD DAGGER AWARD

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Air and Shadows, the story of one man's fearless quest for revenge among some of the world's most dangerous criminals Lauded as his #1 favorite book of the year, Stephen King advised President Obama, in the pages of Entertainment Weekly, to pick up Michael Gruber's previous book, The Good Son. With an unforgettable hero, The Return is as exciting and provocative as Gruber's best work. The real Richard Marder would shock his acquaintances, if they ever met him. Even his wife, long dead, didn't know the real man behind the calm, cultured mask he presents to the world. Only an old army buddy from Vietnam, Patrick Skelly, knows what Marder is capable of. Then a shattering piece of news awakens Marder's buried desire for vengeance, and with nothing left to lose, he sets off to punish the people whose actions, years earlier, changed his life. Uninvited, Skelly shows up and together the two of them raise the stakes far beyond anything Marder could have envisioned. As Marder and Skelly head toward an apocalypse of their own making, Marder learns that good motives and sense of justice can't always protect the people a man loves. A range of fearsomely real characters, from a brutally violent crime lord to a daringly courageous young woman, a roller-coaster of twists and turns, and a shattering exploration of what constitutes morality in the face of evil, Michael Gruber has once more proven that he is "a gifted and natural storyteller" (Chicago Tribune) and shows why he has been called "the Stephen King of crime writing" (The Denver Post).

In his first novel for young readers, the author of the acclaimed thriller "Tropic of Night," creates a world that is at once deceptively familiar and stunningly original in this collection of ingenious retellings of classic fairy tales.

“Like settling down with a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel—if it was rewritten by James M. Cain.” —Denver Post Michael Gruber’s Night of the Jaguar—like his earlier novels featuring Miami detective Jimmy Paz (Tropic of Night, Valley of Bones)—transforms the conventional thriller into something extraordinary, taking the crime novel to a place it has never gone before. Combining a grisly murder investigation with chilling supernatural elements and provocative thought, Night of the Jaguar is a bravura display of the originality and artistry that has won Gruber the title, “the Stephen King of crime fiction” while inspiring the Washington Post Book World to name the Jimmy Paz trilogy, “among the essential novels of recent years.”

Michael Gruber

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