Showing results by author "Thomas Cook" in All Categories

The first case is simple. A wealthy man’s wife has grown distant, and he asks Frank Clemons, a private eye hardened by his past work on Atlanta’s homicide beat, to find out why. There are a number of simple reasons why a young woman might withdraw from her older husband, but the spurned spouse rejects them all. Her jewelry is disappearing, but he insists that she doesn’t have trouble with blackmail, drugs, or gambling. The answer must be more complex, and he begs Frank to find out what it is.

The sleek high-rises of Park Avenue make Frank Clemons uneasy. The former Atlanta homicide detective came to New York after a sickening murder case soured him on the South, but despite the glitz and excitement of his new surroundings and the beauty of the woman he shares them with, the city makes his skin crawl. Now a private eye, he is only at ease in the city's darker corners, among the whores, gamblers, and pimps who call Eighth Avenue home. That affinity for the socially isolated is what draws him to the case of Hannah Karlsberg, an elderly seamstress who deserved a better death than she got.

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.

One day in 1952, the strangled body of 10-year-old Cathy Lake is discovered in a public park. A homeless suspect, Albert Jay Smalls, is arrested and held for interrogation. Now, Officers Norman Cohen and Jack Pierce have only 24 hours to make the sullen young man talk before he's released. How far are they willing to push him to get a confession?

George Gates is a former travel writer. He used to specialise in writing about places where people disappeared, sometimes individuals, sometimes whole societies. Now, since the murder of his eight-year-old son, Gates writes for the town paper about flower festivals and local celebrities. Enter Arlo McBride, a retired missing-persons detective. Knowing Gates' past, he mentions the case of Katherine Carr, a woman who vanished 20 years before....

Over his acclaimed career, Cook’s novels have haunted, riveted, and spellbound audiences 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.

The young girl lies in a ditch without a scratch on her - a white high school student stretched out dead in the black part of Atlanta. She was a rich girl from a cold family, too genteel for the neighborhood where she died, and only the baby in her belly suggests how she might have gotten there. For Detective Frank Clemons, the scene is far too familiar. Too close to how it was when he found his own daughter, dead in the woods by her own hand, her youthful beauty cruelly ravaged by depression. To hang on to sanity, he must do everything he can to find justice for the dead.

Most people today are familiar with radio-frequency identification technology that is expanding within public and private firms as a method for verifying and tracking inventory and people. Yet how many know a plan exists for widespread adoption of human microchipping beginning in the year 2017? While testimony has been given that safeguards are in place to ensure privacy in connection with implantable biometric identification, some believe confidentiality is the last thing internal radio transmitters will protect--that the plan to microchip humanity smacks of the biblical mark of the Beast.

Introducing "the big words podcast" - the podcast where five brilliant minds collide in a whirlwind of wit, banter, and downright nonsense. Each episode dives headfirst into a chaotic symphony of topics ranging from the profound to the absurd. From dissecting the mysteries of the universe to debating the merits of pineapple on pizza, no subject is off-limits in this whirlwind of intellectual chaos.