Stephen Amidon

A Novel

Locust Lane

Drew Hagel's financial decline is halted by his relationship with hedge fund manager Quint Manning, but the relationship between Drew's and Quint's teenage children bears the most fruit when an accident involving the two promises a big payoff.

Human Capital

Thomas Amidon, MD

A lyrical history of the human heart draws on scientific, religious and literary sources to reveal the heart's role in human imagination and culture from the ancient world to today. Co-written by the author of Human Capital.

A Biography of the Human Heart

The Sublime Engine

The New City

Il capitale umano

In North Carolina, a woman escapes from hospital after a car accident, arriving in the office of the real estate agent who caused it, asking his help without explaining why. He is so intrigued he offers her one of the agency's houses and begins an affair behind his wife's back, unaware of what he is getting into.

The Primitive

Thirst

A brief love affair turns into an overwhelming obsession in a new novel that brings the talents of a superb literary stylist to a work of suspense, with thrilling results. The beautiful younger woman who appeared so unexpectedly, so gloriously, in Michael Coolidge’s life one night—a seemingly chance pick-up at a quiet neighborhood bar—vanished just as suddenly a few days later, leaving him dazed and bewildered. Months later he chances upon Justine on a village street, locked in a violent quarrel with a menacing stranger—a day later, that man is found dead in a seedy motel and Justine has disappeared again, leaving behind only a hasty plea for help. Michael’s efforts to locate her, or to find out something more about her elusive past, yield only further mystery, a confusing web of lies, manipulations and false leads. Who is the real Justine? Downtown art world sophisticate, or small town innocent? Victim or predator? Someone he can trust, or someone he should actually fear? This spellbinding psychological thriller confounds the reader at every turn, constantly causing us to revise our assumptions. It’s a fascinating study in character and a relentless, ingeniously head-spinning story—all deliciously unresolved until the very last page.

The Real Justine: A Novel

A thought-prooking thriller and a literate page-turner, Stephen Amidon's The New City takes aim at the suburban American dream and captures the real nightmare behind it. It is 1973, the Vietnam War is winding down and the Senate Watergate hearings are heating up. But Newton, Maryland, is a model community, an enclave of harmony and prosperity. Through years of cunning legal maneuvering and smooth real-estate deals, the white lawyer Austin Swope has made the dream of this new city a reality. His best friend is Earl Wooten, the black master builder who raised Newton from its foundations. Their teenaged sons, Teddy and Joel, each the repository of his father's deepest hopes for the future, are inseparable buddies. But cracks begin to appear in this pristiine and meticulously planned community, and an innocent misunderstanding is about to set the two men who control its quiet streets on a fateful collision course.

Everything is neat and peaceful in Stoneleigh. Bad things don't often happen, and when they do, the residents trust the forces of law and order to deal with them efficiently and with minimum fuss. But appearances can be misleading. It takes just one crime - a disturbing allegation of sexual assault - to blast through the veneer of mutual trust, to expose a hotbed of suspicion and paranoia. Suddenly politicians, businessmen, mothers, students and gossips all seem to care less about the truth, than they do about the illusion of personal and public security. Security is a tense, penetrating and brilliantly observed novel about actual and imagined safety - about public and private life today.

Security

After Daniel North's alcoholic father dies on an airplane on the way to see his son, Daniel travels to Arizona to visit his father's second wife, Lindy, and young son and to unravel the mysteries of his father's life.

Stephen Amidon

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