Thomas H Cook Books in Order

When mutilated animals in the Central Park Children’s Zoo are followed by a pair of murders in Greenwich Village, New York panics. Cook’s debut is a lean police novel about a killer stalking the city and the investigators trying to stop him.

Two aging Nazis hide in a South American refuge, living off stolen wealth and old illusions of safety. As one tends his orchids and broods on the past, the novel studies guilt, exile, and the slow approach of reckoning.

Former NYPD detective Tom Jackson hunts a murderer whose religious fanaticism drives him toward ever more extreme violence. The chase moves through Salt Lake City and toward the Mormon Tabernacle, where faith and obsession collide.

Told by her brother, this novel traces the long life of Elena Franklin, a gifted and difficult American writer whose career crosses decades of literary and political change. It is less a mystery than a portrait of talent, solitude, and self-invention.

Atlanta homicide detective Frank Clemons becomes obsessed with the murder of Angelique Devereaux, a wealthy pregnant teenager found dead far from home. The investigation leads him through class lines, hidden relationships, and a truth that cuts close to the bone.

Private investigator Frank Clemons is hired to find the next of kin of murdered seamstress Hannah Karlsberg, but the job keeps growing. His search reaches back to sweatshops, union battles, and old immigrant lives that never stopped casting shadows.

Set in Birmingham during the sweltering summer of 1963, this crime novel treats every act of violence as a spark near gasoline. Cook uses a murder case to explore fear, race, and the pressure building inside a divided city.

Cook’s true-crime account follows Alvin and Judith Ann Neelley, whose brutality led to one of the most notorious murder cases in the South. It is a stark reconstruction of violence, manipulation, and the human wreckage left behind.

Now a private eye in New York, Frank Clemons juggles two cases: a rich man’s mysteriously distant wife and the murder of an old gypsy woman on Tenth Avenue. The deeper he goes, the stranger and sadder the city becomes.

True-crime writer Jackson Kinley returns to Sequoyah, Georgia, after a friend’s death and gets pulled into an old murder case built on missing evidence and local vengeance. His search uncovers a town’s habit of hiding corruption behind certainty.

Freelance photographer David Corman is broke, fighting for custody of his daughter, and trying to hold on to his principles in Manhattan. When violence touches his life, the city he documents begins to feel even more precarious and unforgiving.

This true-crime book revisits the 1973 Alday mass murder in rural Georgia and the long legal aftermath that followed. Cook tracks not just the crime but the way trials, appeals, and public fury kept reopening the wound.

As a child, Steve Farris survived the night his father murdered the rest of the family and vanished. Years later, a writer researching family killers forces him to reopen the past and question everything he thinks he remembers.

Years after Kelli Troy’s violent death on Breakheart Hill, Dr. Ben Wade finally tells what really happened. It begins as a story of teenage love and small-town pressure, then darkens into a reckoning with guilt that never eased.

When a prosperous man asks an attorney to prepare his will, an old scandal at the Chatham School rises again. The novel looks back on a doomed affair, a boy’s loyalty, and the tragedy that shattered a small New England community.

Mystery writer Paul Graves, haunted since boyhood by his sister’s murder, spends a summer at the remote Riverwood estate. There he becomes obsessed with a decades-old killing, and with the ways old crimes keep reshaping the living.

In 1952, detectives have only hours to make prime suspect Albert Jay Smalls talk about the murder of young Cathy Lake. The case becomes a grim psychological duel, as the investigators’ own grief and damage start to matter as much as the evidence.

In 1937, Dora March arrives in Port Alma, Maine, beautiful, secretive, and impossible to place. A year later Billy Chase is dead and Dora has vanished, sending his brother Cal into a haunted search through memory, guilt, and buried violence.

Based on the miniseries, this sprawling novel follows three families whose lives are transformed by wartime encounters, Roswell secrets, and decades of unexplained events. It blends government conspiracy, alien mystery, and family drama across sixty years of American history.

This collaboration with Larry King spins a lively New York tale of love, ambition, and intrigue under the city’s bright lights. Part romance, part comic mystery, it uses Manhattan itself as the real star.

Roy Slater returns to Kingdom County, West Virginia, to see his dying father after years away. A new murder drags him back into the old crime and family secrets he once fled, in a small town built on memory, prejudice, and lies.

Terrified that staying in her marriage will get her killed, Sara Labriola disappears and tries to build a new life under the radar. Cook turns her flight into a tense story about fear, reinvention, and the dangers that refuse to stay buried.

When eight-year-old Amy Giordano disappears after being babysat by Eric Moore’s teenage son, the quiet life of an ordinary family starts to collapse. Eric wants to protect Keith, but the deeper the investigation goes, the less sure he is of him.

This anthology of long-form true crime, co-edited by Ellroy, gathers magazine pieces on topics like sex trafficking, con artists, barroom violence, and high-end theft, and includes an original essay in which he recalls how reading Joseph Wambaugh helped shape his own fixation on crime.

Lawyer David Sears watches his sister unravel after the drowning of her troubled son, Jason. As she accuses her husband of murder and pulls David’s family into her orbit, grief, madness, and suspicion become harder to separate.

Jack Branch grows up under the weight of a proud Southern name, while his friend Eddie Miller is known only as the killer’s son. When Eddie starts digging into his father’s crime, both men are forced to face the myths that shaped them.

After the unsolved murder of his young son, former travel writer George Gates has shrunk into small-town journalism and grief. Then a retired detective hands him the trail of vanished writer Katherine Carr, and one disappearance begins to speak to another.

Historian Lucas Page goes to St. Louis for a forgettable reading and instead comes face to face with Lola Faye Gilroy, the woman he blames for his father’s long-ago death. Their meeting pulls him back into a family history he never understood.

In 1939, Thomas Danforth agrees to help the mysterious Anna Klein prepare for a dangerous mission into Nazi Germany. When she disappears, his search stretches across decades and continents, turning into a spy story powered by obsession, love, and betrayal.

After celebrated crime writer Julian Wells is found dead in a boat on Montauk Pond, his friend Philip Anders tries to understand why. The search turns into a labyrinth of travel, hidden identities, old betrayals, and moral unease.

This collection gathers Cook’s short fiction across a wide emotional range, from Depression-era Appalachia to campus unrest and Christmas Eve in a Manhattan bookshop. The stories are compact, sharp, and deeply interested in guilt, family, and sudden loss.

English professor Samuel Madison stands trial after his wife, Sandrine, dies from a drug overdose and everyone doubts it was suicide. As witnesses speak, the novel becomes a tense reconstruction of a marriage, a death, and a man’s uncertain truth.

When a man from Ray Campbell’s past is murdered in New York, he is forced to revisit his years as an aid worker in newly independent Lubanda. The case leads back to Martine Aubert, the woman he loved and failed.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the Armistice, rare-books dealer Franklin Altman is handed a manuscript by a mysterious old German who claims it could change history. Cook turns a bookish encounter into an eerie tale about war, identity, and the stories nations tell themselves.

Set in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, this story follows a beloved neighborhood baker whose delectable creations hide darker ingredients. When a series of misfortunes strike people around the shop, a curious observer starts to wonder whether coincidence is really to blame.

Cook visits places marked by atrocity, loss, and human cruelty, asking what dark travel can teach the living. Part memoir, part history, it is a reflective journey through landscapes where the past still presses hard on the present.

In this nonfiction memoir, Cook travels to some of the darkest places on earth and reflects on why sites of suffering still draw him back. It blends travel writing, history, and personal reckoning in a quiet, searching voice.