With The Crime of Julian Wells, Thomas H. Cook, one of America’s most acclaimed suspense writers, has written a novel in the grand tradition of the twisty, cerebral thriller. It’s a mystery of identity, a journey into the maze of a mysterious life.
When famed true-crime writer Julian Wells’ body if found in a boat drifting on a Montauk pond, the question is not how he died, but why?
The death is obviously a suicide. But why would Julian Wells have taken his own life? And was this his only crime? These are the questions that first intrigue and then obsess Philip Anders, Wells’ best friend and the chief defender of both his moral and his literary legacies.
Anders’ increasingly passionate and dangerous quest to answer these questions becomes a journey into a haunted life, one marked by travel, learning, achievement and adventure, a life that should have been celebrated, but whose lonely end points to terrors still unknown.
Spanning four decades and traversing three continents, The Crime of Julian Wells is a journey into one man’s heart of darkness than ends in a blaze of light.
Praise for The Crime of Julian Wells
Philip’s travels through three continents bring him in contact with a succession of unsavory people and deeper into a world that walks a fine line between appearance and reality. Cook’s characterizations are richly balanced and finely nuanced, with a narrative driven more by psychological insight than pyrotechnics. -Los Angeles Times
Philip’s own odyssey –to find the meaning behind his friend’s death– is one of the many pleasures of Mr. Cook’s intelligent and elegant work. -Wall Street Journal
Unfolds slowly but hauntingly… hearkens back to the best work of such authors as Eric Ambler and Graham Greene while standing firmly on its own. -BookReporter
Spellbinding. -Publishers Weekly
[Cook] knows how to spin a seductive tale. -Booklist
An homage to the Graham Greene school of spy novels - erudite, layered, set in the modern day but with a distinctly antique overlay, all croquet and Proust and crumbling towers… a well-crafted story> -Charlotte Observer
There’s not a single word too many in this novel. The author wanted to tell a story about love and loss, but also about personal and collective pain, and dress it in a coat of mystery and he did just that. This is not your usual crime novel. -Criminal Element
Thomas H. Cook has been crafting some of the best novels in the crime fiction genre for the past 30 years. And for all too many readers, this may be the first time you’ve ever heard of him. His latest novel, The Crime of Julian Wells, is an excellent addition to Cook’s body of work. -Tulsa World
The mystery at the heart of Thomas H. Cook’s new novel, The Crime of Julian Wells, emerges like the image on a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces the author dispenses, one by one, until the pattern emerges, complete and inevitable. In this elegant thriller, there are no sudden moves. Action is born of stillness and reflection while the crimes of the past, reluctantly exposed, bleed gradually but inexorably into the present. -Barnes & Noble Review