Thomas H. Cook

When Malcolm Gaines asks his attorney to prepare his will, he resurrects the long-buried secret behind a tragedy at Chatham School, which destroyed lives and shattered a quiet community

The Chatham School Affair

When his teenage son, Keith, is accused in the disappearance of an eight-year-old girl, Eric Moore struggles to shelter Keith from the subsequent police investigation and local suspicion while seeking legal counsel and wondering in the face of mounting evidence about his son's possible guilt. By the author of Peril. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

Red Leaves

Otto Penzler

Collects short true crime stories by authors including Peter Richmond, Joshua Hammer, Marie Brenner, and Jesse Katz, taken from such magazines as GQ, the New Yorker, Newsweek, and Vanity Fair.

The Year's Best True Crime Reporting

The Best American Crime Writing

In this Edgar Award Finalist and “slow-burning, intricate” thriller, a professor falls for his wife all over again . . . while he stands trial for her murder (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Samuel Madison always wondered what Sandrine saw in him. He was a meek, stuffy doctoral student while she was a beautiful bohemian with limitless talent and imagination. On the surface their marriage seemed tranquil: jobs at the same small liberal arts college, a precocious young daughter, and a home filled with art and literature. But then one night Sandrine is found dead from an overdose—and Samuel is accused of poisoning her. As secrets about their tumultuous marriage come to light in the courtroom, Samuel must face a town and media convinced of his guilt, a daughter whose faith in her father has been shaken to its core, and astonishing revelations about his wife, who never ceased being a mystery to him. Sandrine’s Case is a “gripping, moving, and elegiac” novel about the evil that can lurk within the heart of a seemingly ordinary man (Michael Connelly). “Cook plays with and against the conventions of the noir mystery to craft a novel deeper and richer than the genre would seem to allow.” —Columbus Dispatch

Sandrine's Case

When a famous true-crime writer is found dead in a boat on a Montauk pond, his best friend begins a quest to determine if the author committed suicide and uncovers a darkness amidst a life filled with adventure and achievement.

The Crime of Julian Wells

Shattered by the unsolved murder of his eight-year-old son, travel writer George Gates is approached by a retired missing-persons detective and given a mysterious story left behind by a woman who disappeared twenty years earlier. By the author of Master of the Delta.

The Fate of Katherine Carr

Mark Bowden

A sterling collection of the year's most shocking, compelling, and gripping writing about real-life crime, the 2006 edition of The Best American Crime Writing offers fascinating vicarious journeys into a world of felons and their felonious acts. This thrilling compendium includes: Jeffrey Toobin's eye-opening exposé in The New Yorker about a famous prosecutor who may have put the wrong man on death row Skip Hollandsworth's amazing but true tale of an old cowboy bank robber who turned out to be a "classic good-hearted Texas woman" Jimmy Breslin's stellar piece about the end of the Mob as we know it

The Best American Crime Writing 2006

Thieves, liars, and killers—it’s a criminal world out there, and someone has to write about it. A thrilling collection of the year’s best reportage by the aces of the true-crime genre, The Best American Crime Reporting 2010 brings together the mysteries and missteps of an eclectic and unforgettable set of criminals. Gripping, suspenseful, and brilliant, this latest addition to the highly acclaimed series features guest editor Stephen J. Dubner, award-winning and megabestselling coauthor of SuperFreakonomics and Freakonomics.

The Best American Crime Reporting 2010

In Thomas H. Cook’s first novel, a weary detective tracks a blood-crazed psychopath Blood seeps into the gutters at the children’s zoo in Central Park. Two deer have been slaughtered, one stabbed fifty-seven times and the other slashed across the neck. Normally it would be a case for the Parks Department, but these are no ordinary deer. The pride of the small menagerie, they were given to the zoo by a prominent socialite who cannot afford bloody headlines. The NYPD hands the case to Detective Reardon, star of the homicide squad. A recent widower at fifty-six, Reardon has seen too many human victims to care much about the two butchered animals. He resents being taken off other pressing cases for the sake of politics, but soon another killing snaps him to attention. Two women are found dead in their apartment, one stabbed fifty-seven times and the other with her throat cut. Surely this vicious parallel isn’t a coincidence.…

Blood Innocents

Places in the Dark

As the first of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s civil rights demonstrations proceeds through Alabama, a young Black girl is found murdered, and Detective Ben Wellman pursues the killer, unearthing more corpses as he goes

Streets of Fire

Evidence of Blood

Sacrificial ground

The Cloud of Unknowing (Otto Penzler Book)

Based on the gripping ten-part miniseries. . . . Three people know the truth. Three families will be changed forever. 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 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.

A Novel

Taken

Linda Fairstein

The Best American Crime Reporting 2007

James Ellroy

The Best American Crime Writing 2005 (Best American Crime Writing)

Five decades after war’s end, a rare-books dealer receives a strange visitor. The guns went silent on November 11, 1918, never to fire again. Throughout the 1920s, unrest seethed across Europe, and Fascists battled Communists in the streets of Berlin, but democracy won out. For years, peace has prevailed around the world. But there is a part of Franklin Altman that misses the war. A rare-books dealer living in New York City, Altman has devoted his life to studying the history of the Weimar Republic, when all of Europe hung in the balance and it seemed it would take but a single spark to set the world ablaze. Why did that spark never come? Altman is musing on these questions one evening when a man comes into his shop. An aged German veteran with a limp and the faint shakes of Parkinson’s, he is about to teach Altman that in history, the devil is in the details. The Bibliomysteries are a series of short tales about deadly books, by top mystery authors.

What's in a Name?

In this affecting crime novel, shortlisted for both the Edgar and the Duncan Lawrie Dagger, Eric Moore watches his safe, solid world disintegrate. When eight-year-old Amy Giordano disappears from her family's house, while Keith, Eric's teenage son, is babysitting, Keith becomes an obvious suspect, and even his parents have misgivings. As time passes without Amy being found, a corrosive suspicion seeps into every aspect of Eric's life. That suspicion is fed by Eric's shaky family history - a father whose plans failed, an alcoholic older brother, a younger sister who died aged seven and a mother driven to suicide. Not even Eric's loving wife, Meredith, is immune from his doubts as he begins to examine and re-examine every aspect of his life. The totally unexpected resolution is both shocking and perfectly apt.

Jonathan Kellerman

Thieves, liars, killers, and conspirators—it's a criminal world out there, and someone has got to write about it. An eclectic collection of the year's best reportage, The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 brings together the murderers and the master­minds, the mysteries and missteps that make for brilliant stories, told by the aces of the true-crime genre. This latest addition to the highly acclaimed series features guest editor Jonathan Kellerman, bestselling author of more than twenty crime novels, most recently Compulsion and the forthcoming Bones.

Thomas H. Cook

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