Master of the Delta（ISBN=9780156033206）

"Piercing . . . Consuming suspense almost too concentrated to bear." (New York Daily News )PRAISE FOR THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING "[Dianas] inexorable descent into mania, narrated by her brother Dave, is as gripping as the mystery itself. A-." (Entertainment Weekly )

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 H. COOK was born in Fort Payne, Alabama in 1947. He is the author of twenty-one 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 the British Crime Writers' Association's Duncan Lawrie Dagger and won the Barry for Best Novel. The Chatham School Affair won the Edgar for Best Novel. He lives in New York City and Cape Cod.

ONE I was badly shaped by my good fortune and so failed to see the darkness and the things that darkness hides. Until the stark moment came, evil remained distant to me, mere lecture notes on the crimes of armies, mobs, and bloodthirsty individuals whose heinous acts I could thrillingly present to my captive audience of students. For that reason, it wasnt unusual that I was thinking of old King Herod that morning, the torment of his final days, his rotting genitals, how theyd swarmed with worms. It was a vision of guilt and punishment, of afflictions deserved by an abuser of power, and I knew that at some point during the coming semester Id find a place for it in one of my lectures. It was a bright April morning in 1954, a little less than one hundred years since the beginning of a conflict that had, by the time it ended, orphaned half the children of the South. I was twenty-four years old, and for the last three years had taught at Lakeland High School. At that time, Lakeland was typically demarcated by race and class, with a splendid plantation district, where my father still lived, and a New South section where local tradesmen and shop owners congregated in modest one-story houses strung together on short, tree-lined streets. The workers who manned the towns few factories resided in an area known as Townsend, and which consisted of small houses on equally small lots, though large enough to accommodate the vague hint of a lawn. To the east of them lived that class of people for whom, as goes the ancient story, there has never been room at the inn, and which was known as the Bridges. A Negro netherworld made up the east side of town, unknowable as Africa itself, and with nothing rising from it, at least not yet, save the fervent voices of its ministers and the singing of its choirs, both of which, during the long, languid summers of religious revival, were broadcast by loudspeakers mounted precariously in the trees gathered round their always freshly painted churches. During these humid evenings, their voices stretched as far north as the antebellum mansions where the Deltas eternal rulers sat on their verandas, sipping iced tea and chuckling at the religious revelries of the "Nigra" preachers. As a boy Id sat with my father on just such a veranda, evenings that despite all that has happened since still hold a storied beauty for me. There was something calm and sure about them, and it would never have occurred to me that anything might shatter the sheer stability of it all, a father much admired, a son who seemed to please him, a family name everywhere revered and to which no act of dishonor had ever been ascribed. As a son I could not have imagined a more noble father than my own, save perhaps that fabled one whod once cut down a cherry tree, then refused to tell a lie. And so the event my father forever after called the "incident" took me completely by surprise, though he never failed to make clear that it had sprung from a long