Thorn

The first Thorn mystery from Edgar Award-winning author James W. Hall-a story of revenge in the Florida Keys that "starts good and stays good, right to the end" (Chicago Tribune). Thorn's parents died the day he was born, run off the road by a drunk driver on their way back from the hospital. The baby lived, the offender beat the rap, and both went on with their lives-until nineteen years later, when Thorn took revenge, hunting down his parents' killer and taking his life in a vain attempt to bring back those who had been lost. Two decades later, Thorn remains scarred by his crime. He lives in Key West, selling fishing flies and keeping an eye on Kate Truman, the woman who adopted him. But now he has lost her, too, to a pair of brutal murderers whom the police have no hope of tracking down. Thorn knows the Keys, and he will find them-but before he can take revenge, he must confront the horror of the first time he killed. The first in the series featuring Thorn, who "may remind you of John D. MacDonald's immortal Travis McGee . . . or perhaps Lee Child's Jack Reacher" (The Washington Post Book World), this intense thriller is filled with both danger and emotional depth. Elmore Leonard has called James W. Hall's debut novel "a beauty."

The rugged Florida troubleshooter Thorn is back in another high-tension story of crime, love, and revenge, described by the Chicago Tribune as wry, vivid, wonderful. . . . A first-rate thriller! In an exotic blue-water locale where greed and criminality thrive, the mysterious disappearance of Thorn's boyhood friend Gaeton Richards, an FBI agent, entangles Thorn in a web of violence and intrigue that takes him from seamy local bars to glittering ocean villas. Then, when Gaeton's beautiful sister becomes Thorn's lover, he finds himself facing a jealous lunatic stalking her, a rogue government agent involved in a murderous scam, and an unforgettable underworld of petty crooks, amoral hired guns, and dangerous losers.

Beneath the still blue waters off Key Largo, a woman dives into a dazzling array of color. But behind the shimmering schools of fish, somewhere in the shadows of the reef, a death trap awaits. In minutes one life will be expertly, brutally taken, and another plunged into a mean season of fury, obsession, and revenge… His name is Thorn, his world is mangrove islands, open waters, and the ghosts of a too-violent past. Darcy Richards was everything to him. Now, finding her killer is. Wading into a seething mystery, Thorn is catapulted into a nightmare of violence and deception. There lurks a sensual young woman with a hard come-on, an aging former mobster, and a diabolical ex-CIA man. What they all have in common is each other's mad ruthlessness-and a little red fish that will make some people very rich, and others very dead…

From James W. Hall, the highly acclaimed best-selling author of Hard Aground, Mean High Tide, and Bones Of Coral, comes a stunning and superbly rendered new thriller in which the most deadly animals in the jungle are the ones that kill for money. With one poacher's bullet, a young woman's life is tragically, brutally taken-and her mother's is shattered forever. Thus begins Gone Wild, James W. Hall's electrifying new novel, which penetrates the lush, sultry jungles of Africa and Malaysia to explore the mercenary slaughter of animals-and to expose the savagery and humanity in us all. Gone Wild brings back Thorn, the haunting, quixotic hero last seen in the best-seller Mean High Tide. And in a novel filled with the author's signatures exotic locales, vise-tightening suspense, steamy sexuality, hypnotic prose, Hall introduces a bold new element: one of the toughest, most complex female characters in modern fiction. Allison Farleigh's desperate struggle to save the endangered orangutans from poachers-and to uncover the truth about her daughter's murder-give the novel its passion and its fire. And the shocking international conspiracy she exposes in the process gives Gone Wild its relentless, heart-pounding tension. A mesmerizing journey into the heart of darkness, Gone Wild is one of those rare thrillers that not only makes you sweat-it makes you think.

A brutal hijacker. A missing heiress. … and a luxury liner racing toward disaster. In the quiet shallows of the Florida Keys, Thorn has made a home, tying fishing flies and trying to forget the violence of his past. Now Key Largo is his world. He fishes it, breathes it, makes love in it. Until a phone call from Miami changes everything plunging Thorn into the deep waters of madness and revenge… In Miami, Thorn's best friend, Sugarman, is fighting for his life. While working security for a luxury liner plagued by theft, Sugarman was attacked by a man with a knife in one hand and 400,000 volts of electricity in the other. And when the M.S. Eclipse sets sail for the Caribbean, both Thorn and Sugarman are swept into a voyage of terror… where a madman hijacks the Eclipse, killing off crew members one by one… where the cruise line owner's missing daughter reappears, igniting the killer's passions-and Thorn's battered heart-where hundreds of lives hang in the balance, as only Thorn stands between a madman's rage and the ultimate carnage at sea.

A simple black-and-white photograph taken during the 1964 Cassius Clay–Sonny Liston fight on Miami Beach may hold the key to a horrific, politically motivated crime forty-two years earlier. After it mysteriously reappears, the photo is burned in an act of arson that sets off a modern-day killing spree reaching from the quiet neighborhoods of Miami to the back corridors of the White House.What the killer did not know is that a copy of the photograph still remains. When it falls into Thorn's hands, he and everyone close to him-including his beloved Alexandra-become the targets of madmen and trained hitmen, each of whom has a powerful motive to see the photograph destroyed…and each of whom will go to murderous lengths to make it disappear forever.

Wealthy Florida matron Abigail Bates is on a canoe trip down a backwater river when suddenly, from out of nowhere, she is held underwater to drown by a strange and merciless killer...Thorn is aboard a houseboat in Hell's Bay when he is confronted by Abigail's son and alluring granddaughter. Thorn soon learns that they are his long-lost relatives-and that he is about to inherit a great fortune. He's also about to find out that being a member of the Bates family comes with a price...As he searches for clues about Abigail's murder, Thorn's houseboat becomes a precarious island of safety as he and the others find themselves hunted by an invisible enemy. For someone out there knows much more about the Bates family's dark past than Thorn does. Someone who has lived a lifetime in their shadow-and has seen the damage their wealth and influence has caused. Someone who is determined to exact revenge on the family...no matter what the cost.

Earl Hammond, the wealthy patriarch of a family of ranchers, lies dead, shot just as he was to donate his Coquina Ranch to the state to preserve it from developers. Spearheading the plan to save this environmental treasure was Thorn, a reluctant heir to a secret family fortune, who now finds himself in terrible danger as well. A pair of deviant brothers, both contract killers, kidnap and imprison him in a sinkhole-a dungeon from which there is no escape.But Frisco Hammond, the dark sheep of the family, is drawn into the investigation of his father's murder and Thorn's disappearance. He suspects the crimes are related. Helping him is his brother's beautiful, troubled wife, Clare. They uncover a trail that leads back to the 1930s, to a cabal of powerful and rich men with a sinister plan.Silencer pits brother against brother and wife against husband in a thriller that proves once again that James W. Hall is "a master of suspense" (Publishers Weekly).