“The Interrogation”
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.
Against a gripping backdrop of murder and redemption, master storyteller Thomas Cook probes the uneasy, shifting bonds of family, love, and unbearable loss, proving once again why he is “perhaps the best American writer of crime fiction currently practicing”
Thomas H. Cook offers one of his most compelling novels ever in Sandrine's Case, in which a college professor falls in love with his wife all over again...while on trial for her murder.
Samuel Madison always wondered what Sandrine saw in him. He was a meek, stuffy doctorate student, and she a brilliant, beautiful, bohemian with limitless talents and imagination. On the surface their relationship and marriage semed perfectly tranquil: jobs at the same small, liberal arts college, a precocious young daughter, a home filled with art and literature, and trips to some of the world's most beautiful cities and towns. And then one night Sandrine is found dead in their bed and Samuel is accused of her murder.
As the truth about their often tumultuous relationship comes to light, 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 that make him fall in love with her for a second time. A searing novel about love lost and rediscovered, from one of our greatest chroniclers of the human heart.
“Peril”
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.
Thomas H. Cook was born in Fort Payne, Alabama, in 1947. He has been nominated for the Edgar Award seven times in five different categories.
He received the best novel Edgar for “The Chatham School Affair,} the Martin Beck Award, the Herodotus Prize for best historical short story, and the Barry for best novel for “Red Leaves,” and has been nominated for numerous other awards.