Mortal Memory

Literature & Fiction

Cook, Thomas H.

Genre Fiction

Harpercollins

Steve Farris is an unexceptional middle-aged architect with an extraordinary past: when he was nine, his father came home one evening and coolly murdered his mother, brother and sister, before vanishing off the face of the earth. Steve has coped mainly by blotting out the terrible memories, but when writer Rebecca Soltero arrive to interview him about his father, he is forced to reawaken the horrors of his childhood. As Rebecca takes him back, probing his memory, unexpected new facts are revealed with disturbingly shocking parallels to his current situation. Steve knows that if he is to find out whether he too is heading down the road to tragedy, he must discover the truth about his past.

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:
<ul>
<li>Jeffrey Toobin's eye-opening exposé in The New Yorker about a famous prosecutor who may have put the wrong man on death row</li>
<li>Skip Hollandsworth's amazing but true tale of an old cowboy bank robber who turned out to be a "classic good-hearted Texas woman"</li>
<li>Jimmy Breslin's stellar piece about the end of the Mob as we know it</li>
</ul>

The Best American Crime Writing 2006

Politics & Social Sciences

Penzler, Otto

BOWDEN, Mark

Social Sciences

Ecco

Eric Moore has reason to be happy. He has a prosperous business, a comfortable home, a stable family life in a quiet town. Then, on an ordinary night, his teenage son Keith is asked to babysit Amy Giordano, the eight-year-old daughter of a neighboring family. The next morning Amy is missing. Suddenly Eric is one of the stricken parents he has seen on television, professing faith in his child's innocence. As the police investigation increasingly focuses on Keith, Eric must counsel his son, find him a lawyer, protect him from the community's steadily growing suspicion. Except that Eric is not so sure his son is innocent. And if Keith is not . . . and might do the same thing again . . . what then should a father do? Red Leaves is a story of broken trust and one man's heroic effort to hold fast the ties that bind him to everything he loves.

Red Leaves

Literary

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

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 Eddie’s lineage can’t. But when Eddie’s investigation leads him to Great Oaks and to Jack’s own father, Jack finds himself questioning Eddie’s motives—and his own. As the deadly consequences of Jack’s actions fall inescapably into place, Thomas H. Cook masterfully reveals the darker truths that lurk in the recesses of small-town lives and in the hearts of even well-intentioned men.

Master of the Delta

United States

The Cloud of Unknowing

David Sears grew up in the shadow of his brilliant younger 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, when Jason drowns, Diana will not accept the authorities’ conclusion that his death was accidental. Or perhaps Diana is going mad. She begins to send David faxes and e-mails about ancient murders, driven by her growing belief that the earth is Gaia, a living witness to her son’s murder who could give evidence in the case she is building against her husband. David soon fears for his own family’s safety as the seductive qualities of Diana’s manic energy become impossible to ignore. In The Cloud of Unknowing, Cook explores the power of blood and family mythology.

Harper

George Gates used to be a travel writer who specialized in places where people disappeared—Judge Crater, the Lost Colony.Then his eight-year-old son was murdered, the killer never found, and Gates gave up disappearance. Now he writes stories of redemptive triviality about flower festivals and local celebrities for the town paper, and spends his evenings haunted by the image of his son’s last day. 
Enter Arlo MacBride, a retired missing-persons detective still obsessed with the unsolved case of Katherine Carr. When he gives Gates the story she left behind—a story of a man stalking a woman named Katherine Carr—Gates too is drawn inexorably into a search for the missing author’s brief life and uncertain fate. And as he goes deeper, he begins to suspect that her tale holds the key not only to her fate, but to his own.

The Fate of Katherine Carr

Middling historian Lucas Paige visits St. Louis to give a sparsely attended reading—nothing out of the ordinary. Except among the yawning attendees is someone he did not expect: Lola Faye Gilroy, the “other woman” he has long blamed for his father’s murder decades earlier.Reluctantly, Luke joins Lola Faye for a drink. As one drink turns into several, these two battered souls relive, from their different perspectives, the most searing experience of their lives. Slowly but surely, the hotel bar dissolves around them and they are transported back to the tiny southern town where this defining moment—a violent crime of passion—is turned in the light once more to reveal flaws in the old answers. As it turns out, there is much Luke doesn’t know. And what he doesn’t know can hurt him. Trapped in an increasingly intense emotional exchange, and with no place to go save back into his own dark past, Luke struggles to gain control of an ever more threatening conversation, to discover why Lola Faye has come and what she is after—before it is too late.A taut literary thriller in the gothic tradition of Master of the Delta.

The Last Talk with Lola Faye

Eric Moore has a prosperous business, a comfortable home, a stable family life in a quiet town. Then, on an ordinary night, his teenage son Keith babysits Amy Giordano, the eight-year-old daughter of a neighboring family. The next morning Amy is missing, and Eric isn't sure his son is innocent. In his desperate attempt to hold his family together by proving his-and the community's-suspicions wrong, Eric finds himself in a vortex of doubt and broken trust. What should he make of Keith's strange behavior? Of his wife's furtive phone calls to a colleague? Of his brother's hints that he knows things he's afraid to say? In a "heart-wrenching and gut-wrenching" (New York Daily News) race against time and mistrust, Eric must discover what has happened to Amy Giordano and face the long-buried family secrets he has so carefully ignored.

Mariner Books

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 builds a case against her husband and the seductive qualities of her manic energy become impossible to ignore, David finds himself afraid for his own family’s safety. In The Cloud of Unknowing, Cook explores the power of blood and family mythology.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cook, Thomas H.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Cook, Thomas H.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cook, Thomas H.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Mortal Memory

Mortal Memory

The Best American Crime Writing 2006

Red Leaves

Master of the Delta

The Cloud of Unknowing

The Fate of Katherine Carr

The Last Talk with Lola Faye

Red Leaves

The Cloud of Unknowing