At the height of the Civil Rights movement, a young girl's murder stirs racial tensions in Birmingham, Alabama The grave on the football field is shallow, and easy to spot from a distance. It would have been found sooner, had most of the residents in the black half of Birmingham not been downtown, marching, singing, and being arrested alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. Police detective Ben Wellman is among them when he gets the call about the fresh...

Thomas Danforth, the privileged son of a wealthy importer, takes over the family business while the world suffers the beginnings of World War II, but his untroubled life changes when he agrees to allow access to his Connecticut mansion so that a mysterious woman can be trained in firearms and explosives and, when things go wrong and she disappears, Thomas sets out to find her.

A withdrawn architect revisits the darkest moment of his childhood Steve Farris was nine years old in 1959, the youngest child in a family that was about to be snuffed out. Around four o'clock on an ordinary November afternoon, Steve's father loaded his shotgun. With calm precision he killed his teenaged son and daughter, and then turned the weapon on his wife. For two hours he waited for his youngest son to come home from school. When Steve did not...

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 seemed perfectly tranquil: jobs at the...

David Sears grew up in the shadow of his brilliant 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 Diana will not accept the authorities' conclusion that Jason's drowning death was accidental. Or perhaps Diana is going mad. As she...

A gut-wrenching true-crime account of a couple on a twisted killing spree in the American South Evil has a way of finding itself. How else could you explain the bond between Alvin and Judith Ann Neelley, who consecrated their marriage in blood? Before the killings started, they restricted themselves to simple mischief: prank calls, vandalism, firing guns at strangers' houses. Gradually their ambition grew, until one day at the Riverbend Mall in Rome,...

Twenty years ago, Ray Campbell, now a cautious risk-management consultant, was a well-intentioned aid worker dedicated to improving conditions in Lubanda, a newly independent African country. He is forced to reconsider that year of living dangerously when a friend from his time in Lubanda is found murdered in a New York alley. Signs suggest that this most recent tragedy is rooted in the far more distant one of Martine Aubert, the only woman Ray ever...

Frank Clemons, an ex-cop turned private detective, faces a pair of perplexing cases on the mean streets of New York City The first case is simple. A wealthy man's wife has grown distant, and he asks Frank Clemons, a private eye hardened by his past work on Atlanta's homicide beat, to find out why. There are a number of simple reasons why a young woman might withdraw from her older husband, but the spurned spouse rejects them all. Her jewelry is disappearing,...

In 1954 Mississippi, Jack Branch returns to his father's Delta estate, Great Oaks, to perform an act of noblesse oblige: teaching at the local high school. Conducting a class on historical evil, Jack is shocked to discover that his unassuming student Eddie is the son of the Coed Killer, a notorious local murderer. Jack feels compelled to mentor the boy, encouraging Eddie to examine his father's crime and using his own good name to open the doors that...