Best-selling suspense author Mary Higgins Clark invites you on a tour of Manhattan's most iconic neighborhoods in this anthology of all-new stories from Mystery Writers of America, produced to commemorate its 70th anniversary. In Lee Child's The Picture of the Lonely Diner, legendary drifter Jack Reacher interrupts a curious stand-off in the shadow of the Flatiron Building. In Jeffery Deaver's The Baker of Bleecker Street, an Italian immigrant becomes ensnared in WWII espionage. And in The Five-Dollar Dress, Mary Higgins Clark unearths the contents of a mysterious hope chest found in an apartment on Union Square. With additional stories from T. Jefferson Parker, S. J. Rozan, Nancy Pickard, Ben H. Winters, Brendan DuBois, Persia Walker, Jon L. Breen, N. J. Ayres, Angela Zeman, Thomas H. Cook, Judith Kelman, Margaret Maron, Justin Scott, and Julie Hyzy, Manhattan Mayhem is teeming with red herrings, likely suspects, and thoroughly satisfying mysteries. Illustrated with iconic photography of New York City and packaged in a handsome hardcover, Manhattan Mayhem is a delightful read for armchair detectives and armchair travelers alike!

Haunted by the suicide of his friend, the true crime writer Julian Wells, Philip Anders starts to reread his books. And in their pages, he starts to glimpse a darkness that might drive a man to suicide. In an effort to understand Julian's death, Anders travels to Paris, revisiting the places that Julian used as the research and settings for his books. But even as he embarks on this personal quest, Anders is plagued by the memory of a woman the two men once knew. And he comes to wonder if her disappearance, long ago, may be the crime that drove his friend to take his own life...

Shortlisted for the 2014 Edgar Award and Barry Award for Best Novel
Thomas H. Cook is peerless in finding the humanity behind crime. In one of his greatest novels yet, a man explores unspools the history of his fractured relationship with his wife, as he stands trial for her murder.
Samuel Madison always wondered why Sandrine chose him. He was a meek, stuffy doctorate student; she a brilliant bohemian with limitless imagination. On the surface, their relationship seemed tranquil: jobs at the same liberal arts college, a precocious young daughter, and a home filled with art and literature. And then one night Sandrine is found dead in their bedroom from an overdose of pain medication and alcohol, and Samuel is accused of poisoning her.
As secrets about their often tumultuous marriage come to light in the courtroom, Samuel must face a town convinced of his guilt, a daughter whose faith in her father has been shaken to its core, and the truth about his wife, who never ceased being a mystery to him. "Sandrine's Case" is a powerful novel about the evil that can lurk within the heart of a seemingly ordinary man, and whether love can be reawakened even after death.

"Nobody tells a story better than Thomas H. Cook." --Michael Connelly
ON THE EVE OF WORLD WAR II, A HIGH STAKES INTERNATIONAL PLOT LEADS TO A DEADLY OBSESSION
Thomas Danforth has lived a fortunate life. The son of a wealthy importer, he wandered the globe in his youth, and now, in his twenties, he lives in New York City and runs the family business. It is 1939 and the world is on the brink of war, but his life is untroubled, his future assured. Then, on a snowy evening walk along Gramercy Park, a friend makes a fateful request--and involves Thomas in a dangerous idea that could change the fates of millions.
Danforth is to provide access to his secluded Connecticut mansion, where a mysterious woman will receive training in firearms and explosives. Thus begins an international plot carried out by the strange and alluring Anna Klein--a plot that will ensnare Thomas in more ways than one. When it all goes wrong and Anna disappears, his quest across a war torn world begins...

Thomas Cook has always been drawn to dark places, for the powerful emotions they evoke and for what we can learn from them. These lessons are often unexpected and sometimes profoundly intimate, but they are never straightforward. With his wife and daughter, Cook travels across the globe in search of darkness-from Lourdes to Ghana, from San Francisco to Verdun, from the monumental, mechanized horror of Auschwitz to the intimate personal grief of a shrine to dead infants in Kamukura, Japan. Along the way he reflects on what these sites may teach us, not only about human history, but about our own personal histories. During the course of a lifetime of traveling to some of earth's most tragic locals, from the leper colony on Molokai to ground zero at Hiroshima, he finds not only darkness, but a light that can illuminate the darkness within each of us. Written in vivid prose, this is at once a personal memoir of exploration (both external and internal) and a strangely heartening look at the radiance and optimism that may be found at the very heart of darkness.

In Thomas H. Cook's Edgar Award-nominated first novel, a weary detective tracks a blood-crazed psychopath Blood seeps into the gutters at the children's zoo in Central Park. Two deer have been slaughtered, one stabbed fifty-seven times and the other slashed across the neck. Normally it would be a case for the Parks Department, but these are no ordinary deer. The pride of the small menagerie, they were given to the zoo by a prominent socialite who cannot afford bloody headlines. The NYPD hands the case to Detective Reardon, star of the homicide squad. A recent widower at fifty-six, Reardon has seen too many human victims to care much about the two butchered animals. He resents being taken off other pressing cases for the sake of politics, but soon another killing snaps him to attention. Two women are found dead in their apartment, one stabbed fifty-seven times and the other with her throat cut. Surely this vicious parallel isn't a coincidence....

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."

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.

Thieves, liars, and killers--it's a criminal world out there, and someone has to write about it. A thrilling collection of the year's best reportage by the aces of the true-crime genre, "The Best American Crime Reporting 2009" brings together the mysteries and missteps of an eclectic and unforgettable set of criminals. Gripping, suspenseful, and brilliant, this latest addition to the highly acclaimed series features guest editor Jeffrey Toobin, "New Yorker" staff writer, CNN senior legal analyst, and bestselling author of "The Nine."

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.While conducting a class on evil throughout history, 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 the investigation turns in an unexpected direction, 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 well-intentioned men.

"Thomas Cook writes like a wounded angel, and "Red Leaves" is one of his masterworks."--Peter Straub
Eric Moore has a stable 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. Caught in a vortex of doubt and lies, Eric must find out what happened to Amy Giordano before his--and the community's--suspicions about Keith are proved right. An Edgar Award Nominee for Best Novel
"Red Leaves is both heart-wrenching and gut-wrenching. A family can be 'briefly held, ' and yet so enduring."--"New York Daily News
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"[Cook is] one of the most suspenseful of crime-fiction writers . . . Readers will glimpse blurred snapshots from their own lives--and be afraid."--"Cleveland Plain Dealer
""This disturbing exploration of humans' true motives . . . builds to a rapid and unexpected climax."--"Newsweek
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THOMAS H. COOK has been nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award five times in four different categories, and won the Edgar for Best Novel for "The Chatham School Affair," He lives in New York City and Cape Cod.

"[Diana's] inexorable descent into mania, narrated by her brother Dave, is as gripping as the mystery itself. A-"--"Entertainment Weekly
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David Sears grew up in the shadow of his brilliant sister, Diana, told by their schizophrenic father that she would accomplish great things. But when she becomes convinced that her husband murdered their drowned son, David doesn't know what to believe. Has their family history of mental illness finally caught up with her? Or could Diana be on to the truth? In "The Cloud of Unknowing," Cook explores the power of blood and family mythology.
"What's at stake isn't so much the resolution of a mystery as the integrity of a family."--"Time Out New York
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"So spare and precise, it feels as if it has been chiseled in stone with something like a surgical instrument."--Joyce Carol Oates
Thomas H. Cook is the author of nineteen novels and two works of nonfiction. He has been nominated for the Edgar Award seven times in five different categories, including Best Novel for "Red Leaves," which was also nominated for a Barry and a Duncan Lawrie Dagger. His novel "The Chatham School Affair" won the Edgar for Best Novel. He lives in New York City and Cape Cod. An Otto Penzler Book

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, wholike David and Dianas fatheris schizophrenic. Her husband, Mark, a geneticist, never made peace with Jasons condition. Perhaps this is why Diana will not accept the authorities conclusion that Jasons 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 familys safety. In The Cloud of Unknowing, Cook explores the power of blood and family mythology.

Over his acclaimed career, Cook's novels have haunted, riveted, and spellbound readers across the world, and his short stories are equally acclaimed. They range from the intensely focused world of "Fatherhood," the Herodotus prize-winning title story, to the Edgar nominated "Rain," a dark, kaleidoscopic tale of Manhattan on a single, rain-swept night. "The Fix," the story of a famous boxing fix that was, well, not a fix at all, was selected for inclusion in Best Mystery Stories of the Year. "What She Offered," the gripping tale of a one-night stand, was included in The Best Noir Stories of the Century. Like Cook's novels, the range of this collection is, itself, astonishing. From a backwoods Appalachian shack during the Depression ("Poor People") to a Midwestern college campus in the throes of Sixties revolt ("The Sun-Gazer") to a midtown Manhattan bookstore on Christmas Eve, "The Lessons of the Season," this collection demonstrates precisely that, in the words of Michael Connolly, "no one tells a story better than Thomas H. Cook."