New York Times best-selling author and Edgar Award winner Thomas H. Cook's atmospheric thrillers cut to the core of humanity's deepest fears. Here, a floundering middle-aged historian reluctantly sits down with the woman he suspects was responsible for his father's murder decades before. As they drink, they open up about this seminal event and he discovers much of what he thought to be true is anything but.
Edgar Award-winning author Thomas H. Cook spins a riveting tale about one man's struggle to cope
with staggering loss. Until his son was kidnapped and murdered, George Gates was a globe-trotting travel writer. Now he writes boring articles by day and broods at night. But when a retiring cold-case detective piques his interest with details of a missing writer, he feels compelled
to discover her fate.
A Portuguese Jew living in Holland, Spinoza sought a life of "supreme and unending happiness". Unable to find deep satisfaction in the usual pleasures of social life, politics or business (or in riches, fame, or sensual pleasure), Spinoza sought a more stable source of contentment. And he found this contentment in God, though not the God of Moses or the Christian Trinity.
Spinoza wrote in the rationalist style of a geometric proof to develop his idea that God is a permanent, indwelling cause of all things. He sees God as a single, unified, all-inclusive causal system that is virtually synonymous with nature. Spinoza believed that the Biblical account of creation is demonstrably false; that there is no such thing as a free will, either for God or man; all things are necessary and inevitable; and all objects, including humans are part of God's active self-expression. Spinoza saw the presence of God in the constant and orderly working of nature. Spinoza's sophisticated moral psychology sees evil in the "unruly passions," and says they can be overcome by stronger, positive passions. Our minds can participate in the eternity of God by focusing on natural laws and the way all things follow from God or nature.
Nominated three times for the Edgar Award, Thomas H. Cook continues to mesmerize readers with novels that combine tales of passion and intrigue with the best in page-turning suspense. Listeners find his pensive, lyrical style irresistible. As lawyer Henry Griswald draws up an aging client's will, he reflects on a series of events in 1926-1927 that shattered the peace of his boyhood community. Griswald, then a student at the school where his father was headmaster, witnessed a passion that would change him forever. At the heart of Griswald's reverie lies a mystery only he can solve. What really happened at Black Pond-a tragedy that eventually destroyed five lives? Seeing his boyhood memories through the eyes of experience and age, Griswald relives the emotion-charged chain of events. As he pieces the tantalizing puzzle together, he also pulls the listener into a growing awareness of the terrible consequences of his childish vision.
It is May 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama. As Martin Luther King, Jr.'s civil rights demonstrations begin to fill the streets, prejudices awaken and tempers flare. Amid the violence and confusion, a deaf black girl is found raped and murdered. Veteran homicide detective Ben Wellman pursues the murderer through the throngs of protesters, the pool halls of the black district of Bearmatch, the white mansions of Mountain Brook, and finally, even in his own department. As he did in Sacrificial Ground, Cook has created a novel of uncommon force and resonance.
