The Book of Air and Shadows

"Tap-tapping the keys and out come the words on this little screen, and who will read them I hardly know. I could be dead by the time anyone actually gets to read them, as dead as, say, Tolstoy. Or Shakespeare. Does it matter, when you read, if the person who wrote still lives?" These are the words of Jake Mishkin, whose seemingly innocent job as an intellectual property lawyer has put him at the center of a deadly conspiracy and a chase to find a priceless treasure involving William Shakespeare. As he awaits a killer-or killers-unknown, Jake writes an account of the events that led to this deadly endgame, a frantic chase that began when a fire in an antiquarian bookstore revealed the hiding place of letters containing a shocking secret, concealed for four hundred years. In a frantic race from New York to England and Switzerland, Jake finds himself matching wits with a shadowy figure who seems to anticipate his every move. What at first seems like a thrilling puzzle waiting to be deciphered soon turns into a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse, where no one-not family, not friends, not lovers-is to be trusted. Moving between twenty-first-century America and seventeenth-century England, The Book of Air and Shadows is a modern thriller that brilliantly re-creates William Shakespeare's life at the turn of the seventeenth century and combines an ingenious and intricately layered plot with a devastating portrait of a contemporary man on the brink of self-discovery...or self-destruction.

Literature & Fiction

Gruber, Michael

Genre Fiction

Harpercollins

"Tap-tapping the keys and out come the words on this little screen, and who will read them I hardly know. I could be dead by the time anyone actually gets to read them, as dead as, say, Tolstoy. Or Shakespeare. Does it matter, when you read, if the person who wrote still lives?"These are the words of Jake Mishkin, whose seemingly innocent job as an intellectual property lawyer has put him at the center of a deadly conspiracy and a chase to find a priceless treasure involving William Shakespeare. As he awaits a killer-or killers-unknown, Jake writes an account of the events that led to this deadly endgame, a frantic chase that began when a fire in an antiquarian bookstore revealed the hiding place of letters containing a shocking secret, concealed for four hundred years. In a frantic race from New York to England and Switzerland, Jake finds himself matching wits with a shadowy figure who seems to anticipate his every move. What at first seems like a thrilling puzzle waiting to be deciphered soon turns into a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse, where no one-not family, not friends, not lovers-is to be trusted.Moving between twenty-first-century America and seventeenth-century England, The Book of Air and Shadows is a modern thriller that brilliantly re-creates William Shakespeare's life at the turn of the seventeenth century and combines an ingenious and intricately layered plot with a devastating portrait of a contemporary man on the brink of self-discovery...or self-destruction.

Harper Collins Publ. UK

Not since The Secret History has a novel so flawlessly married the ferocious intensity of an unforgettable thriller with the depth, daring, and nuance of our most celebrated literary fiction. Tropic of Night is a virtuoso performance -- an unforgettably accomplished novel, a masterpiece of electricity and ambition.
Jane Doe was a promising anthropologist, an expert on shamanism. Now she's nothing, a shadow: after faking her own suicide, she's living under an assumed identity in Miami with a little girl to protect. Everyone thinks she's dead. Or so she hopes.
Then the killings start, a series of ritualistic murders that terrifies all of Miami. The investigator is Jimmy Paz, a Cuban-American police detective. There are witnesses, but they can recall almost nothing of the events, as though their memories have been erased -- as if a spell has been cast on each of them. Equally bizarre is the string of clues Paz uncovers: a divination charm, exotic drugs found in the bodies of the victims, a century-old report telling of a secret place in the heart of Africa.
These clues point Paz inexorably toward the fugitive, Jane Doe, and force Jane to realize that the darkness she has fled is seeking her out, hunting her down. By the time her path intersects with Jimmy Paz's, the two will be thrust into a cataclysmic battle between good and an evil unimaginable to the Western mind.

Tropic of Night

Romance

William Morrow

When her sister is killed during a scientific study, an anthropologist fakes her own suicide and hides in Miami to prevent herself from becoming the latest victim in a string of ritualistic murders, while police detective Jimmy Paz tries to figure out how witness memories are being erased. Reprint.

United States

William Morrow Paperbacks

HarperAudio

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Thrillers & Suspense

William Morrow. New York

The startling reviews of Tropic of Night announced Michael Gruber as one of the most talented thriller writers to debut in many years. Now, with the much-anticipated publication of Valley of Bones, Gruber fulfills that genre-bending promise as perhaps no writer since Graham Greene, with a genuinely exhilarating thriller that simultaneously offers a profound, deeply provocative exploration of the nature of faith itself.
The setting is Miami. Rookie cop Tito Morales arrives at the Trianon Hotel to investigate a routine disturbance call -- and, to his shock and horror, watches as a wealthy oilman plunges ten stories and impales himself on a nearby fence. Soon Morales is joined by detective Jimmy Paz, famous throughout the city for solving -- or at least providing a plausible solution to -- the so-called Voodoo Murders that left Miami burning months earlier.
Together Paz and Morales enter the hotel and discover, in the dead man's room, a most unusual suspect, an otherworldly woman by the name of Emmylou Dideroff. She emerges from a rapturous, prayerlike state and admits that she had a motive for killing the oilman. Ultimately, she says she wants to confess, and asks for a pen and several notebooks in which to convey the details of her confession.
What Emmylou writes is nothing like what Paz expects; he enlists psychologist Lorna Wise in an effort to make sense of things that go beyond Emmylou's explanation of the murder: details of childhood abuse, of other crimes committed, of regular communion with saints -- and with the devil. Is she mentally disturbed or playacting in hopes of getting declared unfit for trial? Or does she really believe herself to be an instrument of God? And why is it that so many people -- including Paz's biological father -- are suddenly interested in the contents of these notebooks and in preventing them from becoming public?
As Valley of Bones moves toward its startling and dramatic finale, Emmylou's "confessions" lead Jimmy Paz, Lorna Wise, and Tito Morales down a series of unexpected and dangerous turns that puts them in the path of perhaps the most terrifying evil imaginable and forces each of them to confront questions about faith, love, and the possibility of the miraculous.

Valley of Bones

The body of a wealthy oilman plunges ten stories from the balcony of a Miami hotel, and is impaled on an iron fence below. In the dead man's room, Jimmy Paz, the famed detective who solved the grisly Voodoo Murders, and Tito Morales, a young cop who witnessed the fall, find a woman on her knees, engaged in intimate conversation with Saint Catherine of Siena. Emmylou Dideroff had a strong motive for murder, and the evidence against her is overwhelming -- but she insists she's innocent of the crime, while freely admitting her guilt in numerous other amoral and unspeakable acts. And the shocking confessions of this complex enigma -- abused victim or vengeful whore, god-touched prophetess or delusional psychopath, demon or saint -- are leading Paz, Morales, and psychologist Lorna Wise into a terrifying dance with the Devil himself.

“Like settling down with a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel—if it was rewritten by James M. Cain.”
—Denver Post
Michael Gruber’s Night of the Jaguar—like his earlier novels featuring Miami detective Jimmy Paz (Tropic of Night, Valley of Bones)—transforms the conventional thriller into something extraordinary, taking the crime novel to a place it has never gone before. Combining a grisly murder investigation with chilling supernatural elements and provocative thought, Night of the Jaguar is a bravura display of the originality and artistry that has won Gruber the title, “the Stephen King of crime fiction” while inspiring the Washington Post Book World to name the Jimmy Paz trilogy, “among the essential novels of recent years.”

Night of the Jaguar: A Novel

Night of the Jaguar (Jimmy Paz)

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

Books by Gruber, Michael

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

The Book of Air and Shadows

The Book of Air and Shadows

Tropic of Night

Tropic of Night

Tropic of Night

Tropic of Night

Valley of Bones

Valley of Bones

Night of the Jaguar: A Novel

Night of the Jaguar (Jimmy Paz)