From the New York Times bestselling author Greg Iles
comes his latest tour-de-force thriller -- an unforgettable
plunge into a world of sex, violence, marital betrayal,
medical malpractice, and Southern intrigue...all of
which takes place in the span of one furious, terrifying
day.
In Third Degree, Greg Iles takes us to the idyllic
town of Athens Point, Mississippi to probe beneath
the surface of the modern American marriage--where
the appearance of perfection conceals a soul-searing
conflict of unnerving intensity and violent possibility.
Packed with the story-telling brilliance and twisting
suspense that mesmerized readers of True Evil,
Turning Angel, and Blood Memory, Iles's
newest novel delivers a powerful, revelatory reading
experience.
Laurel Shields, thirty-five, and mother of two, awakens
to find that her husband, Warren, a prominent local
physician, is not in bed with her. Creeping out to
the kitchen of their palatial home, she sees him through
the doorway of his study, wildly pulling books from
the shelves. Two weeks earlier, Warren and his
partner were informed by the IRS that their medical
practice was being audited; since then the stress on
Dr. Shields has steadily ratcheted up. But Laurel has
problems of her own. Quickly returning to the bedroom,
she locks herself in the master bath, opens a pregnancy
kit, and fearfully tests herself. PREGNANT announces
the digital readout. Laurel closes her eyes as
though absorbing news of a death, then quickly hides
the evidence. Summoning all her strength, she walks
out to the kitchen to carry out the acting performance
of her life. Later that morning, Laurel returns
home and is surprised to find her husband's car still
parked in the driveway. The house has a strange stillness
to it. In the den she finds Warren sitting on the sofa
in the same clothes he wore the previous day. His face
is pale and unshaven, his eyes hollow with fear. Then
come the children, innocent of it all...
So begins the most terrifying day in the history of
a marriage, one that in less than five hours will make
the Shields house the vortex of a nerve-wracking siege.
While a nervous ring of armed men await their chance
to storm the suburban home, inside the house the clock
ticks down on exposure of Laurel's terrible secret.
But she is not alone in her lies. Before the siege
is through, this terrifying drama will pull in desperate
characters from the town and drive Dr. Shields, his
wife, and her lover to the very brink of sanity and
survival.
Rich with Southern atmosphere, and perceptively laced
with the tacit deceptions and psychological cracks found
in nearly all American marriages, Third Degree delivers
another knock-out, page-turning read from Greg Iles, "the
poster boy of southern gothic thrillers" (Kirkus
Reviews), and proves again that Iles is today the
unparalleled master of the suspense novel.
"If you wanted to kill your spouse and get away
with it, you had to do something truly ingenious: something
that wouldn't even be perceived as murder. And that
was the service that Andrew Rusk had found a way to
provide. Like any quality product, it did not come
cheap. Nor did it come quickly. And perhaps most important
of all, it was not for those with weak constitutions.
Demand was high, of course, but few people were truly
suitable clients. It took a deep-rooted hatred to watch
your spouse die in agony, knowing that you had brought
about that pain. But on the other hand, some people
bore up remarkably well."
With these words, New York Times bestselling author
Greg Iles returns to his trademark Southern milieu
in this terrifying thriller, an unnerving tale of evil
lurking beneath the veneer of idyllic suburban life.
Brimming with the masterful suspense and intense psychological
drama that made Turning Angel, Blood Memory, and The
Quiet Game bestsellers, True Evil tells the chilling
story of a divorce attorney who may be orchestrating
the deaths of his clients' spouses, bringing new meaning
to the phrase "'til death do us part."
Dr. Chris Shepard is thirty-six years old, newly married,
and well on his way to a perfect life. Or so he believes.
But that future is forever cast into doubt the day
Special Agent Alexandra Morse walks into his office
and drops a bombshell: Dr. Shepard's beautiful new
wife is plotting his murder. Shepard is so shocked
that he almost throws Agent Morse out of his office.
Yet once he is alone, doubt begins to gnaw at him.
Paranoia magnifies the small cracks in his marital
relationship, and soon he can have no peace unless
he knows the truth. When Agent Morse reappears, Chris
agrees to act as bait to help her unravel the divorce
lawyer's scheme, which may already have cost nine unsuspecting
spouses their lives.
At the center of the mystery lies a maddeningly simple
question: If these people really were murdered, why
can't the FBI prove it? Rigorous autopsies have uncovered
no forensic evidence of foul play, and the police believe
no crimes have occurred. As Dr. Shepard and Agent Morse
struggle against an invisible adversary, Shepard realizes
that he's working with a desperate woman. The reason:
the killer's last known victim was Alex Morse's sister,
who from her deathbed accused her husband of murder
and extracted a vow that Alex save her ten-year-old
nephew from his father. This has driven Alex to risk
both her life and her career to fulfill that vow. But
Chris Shepard soon feels desperation of his own. As
he probes his wife's hidden past, he is confronted
by the probability that the woman he loves wants him
dead.
He has adopted her son and given her everything he has
to give, and yet somewhere out there, a killer with the
brilliance to outwit the top forensic scientists in the
world is closing in on him.
Turning Angel marks the long-awaited return of Penn
Cage, the lawyer hero of The Quiet Game, and introduces
Drew Elliott, the highly respected doctor who saved
Penn's life in a hiking accident when they were boys.
As two of the most prominent citizens of Natchez, Drew
and Penn sit on the school board of their alma mater,
St. Stephen's Prep. When the nude body of a young female
student is found near the Mississippi River, the entire
community is shocked -- but no one more than Penn,
who discovers that his best friend was entangled in
a passionate relationship with the girl and may be
accused of her murder.
On the surface, Kate Townsend seems the most unlikely murder victim imaginable.
A star student and athlete, she'd been accepted to Harvard and carried the hope
and pride of the town on her shoulders. But like her school and her town, Kate
also had a secret life -- one about which her adult lover knew little. When Drew
begs Penn to defend him, Penn allows his sense of obligation to override his
instinct and agrees. Yet before he can begin, both men are drawn into a dangerous
web of blackmail and violence. Drew reacts like anything but an innocent man,
and Penn finds himself doubting his friend's motives and searching for a path
out of harm's way.
More dangerous yet is Shad Johnson, the black district attorney whose dream is
to send a rich white man to death row in Mississippi. At Shad's order, Drew is
jailed, the police cease hunting Kate's killer, and Penn realizes that only by
finding Kate's murderer himself can he save his friend's life.
With his daughter's babysitter as his guide, Penn penetrates the secret world
of St. Stephen's, a place that parents never see, where reality veers so radically
from appearance that Penn risks losing his own moral compass. St. Stephen's is
a dark mirror of the adult world, one populated by steroid-crazed jocks, girls
desperate for attention, jaded teens flirting with nihilism, and hidden among
them all -- one true psychopath. It is Penn's journey into the heart of his alma
mater that gives Turning Angel its hypnotic power, for on that journey he finds
that the intersection of the adult and nearly adult worlds is a dangerous place
indeed. By the time Penn arrives at the shattering truth behind Kate Townsend's
death, his quiet Southern town will never be the same.
Forensic Odontologist, Cat Ferry is losing her sanity.
After several panic attacks during the police investigation
of a serial killer, Cat is suspended. Plagued by nightmares,
depression, alcoholism and an unplanned pregnancy,
Cat retreats to her family estate in Mississippi. Instead
of sanctuary, she discovers a frightening family secret.
When her case becomes intertwined with her own family
history, Cat has to fight to save her sanity and her
life.
In the heart of North Carolina’s Research Triangle
stands a corporate laboratory much like the others
nearby. But behind its walls, America’s top scientists
work around the clock to attain the holy grail of the
twenty-first century - a supercomputer that surpasses
the power of the human mind.
Appointed by the president as ethicist to Project
Trinity, Dr. David Tennant finds himself in a pressure
cooker of groundbreaking science and colossal ambition.
When his friend and fellow scientist is murdered, David
discovers that the genius who runs Project Trinity
was responsible and that his own life is in danger.
Unable to reach the president, and afraid to trust
his colleagues, David turns to Rachel Weiss, the psychiatrist
probing the nightmares that have plagued him during
his work at Trinity. Rachel is skeptical of David’s
fears, but when an assassin strikes, the two doctors
must flee for their lives.
Pursued across the globe by ruthless National Security
Agency operatives, David and Rachel struggle to piece
together the truth behind Project Trinity and the enormous
power it could unleash upon the world. As constant
danger deepens their intimacy, Rachel realizes the
key to Trinity lies buried in David’s disturbed
mind. But Trinity’s clock is ticking . . .
Mankind is being held hostage by a machine that cannot
be destroyed. Its only hope - a terrifying chess game
between David and the Trinity computer, with the cities
of the world as pawns. But what are the rules? How
human is the machine? Can one man and woman change
the course of history? Man’s future hangs in
the balance, and the price of failure is extinction.
In Sleep No More, Greg Iles returns to the territory of
some of his best-loved works, the steamy and hypnotic small
town Mississippi where Iles himself grew up. In this new
novel, John Waters is a husband and father happy with his
lot in life, though he has not always felt that way. Years
earlier he escaped an obsessive love affair, which he feared
might consume him. The woman in question disappeared after
Waters married, and later he heard that she was killed in
New Orleans. But now, Waters has an uneasy feeling that she
has resurfaced to trouble him - and entice him - once again.
A woman he meets casually stuns him with a smile and a secret
only this former lover would know. But when this alluring
stranger is suddenly murdered, Waters's quiet life is enveloped
in a whirlwind of guilt and suspicion, revealing the shadowy
sides of love and friendship, and the terror that can result
when passion becomes obsession.
Jordan Glass, a photojournalist on a well-earned vacation,
wanders into a Hong Kong art museum and is puzzled to find
fellow patrons eyeing her with curiosity. Minutes later,
she stumbles upon a gallery containing a one-artist exhibition
called "The Sleeping Women," a mysterious series
of paintings that has caused a sensation in the world of
modern art. Collectors have come to believe that the canvases
depict female nudes not in sleep but in death, and they command
millions at auction. When Jordan approaches the last work
in the series, she freezes. The face in the painting seems
to be her own.
This unsettling event hurls her back into a nightmare she
has fought desperately to put behind her-for, in fact, the
face in the painting belongs not to Jordan but to her twin
sister, murdered one year ago. At the urging of the FBI,
Jordan becomes both hunter and hunted in a duel with the
anonymous artist, a gifted murderer who knows the secret
history of Jordan's family, and truths that even she has
never had the courage to face.
This explosive suspense thriller gets off to a blistering
start: the kidnapping of a little boy--in eight breathless
pages--that culminates with the child's safe return and the
disappearance of the successful kidnappers. That sets the
stage for the book's centerpiece, the abduction of little
Abby Jennings, daughter of Will, a successful physician,
and Karen, a slightly dissatisfied suburban woman who's wondering
where the passion in her marriage went. The criminals' modus
operandi is established early on. They target the progeny
of Mississippi doctors, demand a reasonable (to an affluent
M.D.) ransom, release the child after it's paid, and promise
the victim parents that if they ever breathe a word of the
incident to anyone, their kids will be taken again and killed.
The kidnappings are carefully set up, targeted to take place
when one parent is out of town at a medical meeting or convention,
thus ensuring the cooperation of the other. And the victim
is held by a sweet, slightly retarded but humongous and powerful
man whose loyalty to his cousin, the mastermind, is unquestioned.
24 Hours is a version of the locked room school of kidnap
mysteries and a very good one indeed, especially when Will
turns the tables on the kidnapper and takes control of the
situation. Abby's diabetic condition (she needs lifesaving
injections on a regular basis) notches the suspense up one
last turn. It's a well worked-out plot, the pacing is terrific,
and the characters likable and attractive.
Penn Cage is no stranger to death. As a Houston prosecutor
he sent sixteen men to death row, and watched seven of them
die. But now, in the aftermath of his wife's death, the grief-stricken
father packs up his four-year-old daughter, Annie, and returns
to his hometown in search of healing. But peace is not what
he finds there.
Natchez, Mississippi, is the jewel of the antebellum South,
a city of old money and older sins, where passion, power,
and racial tensions seethe beneath its elegant facade. After
twenty years away, Penn is stunned to find his own family
trapped in a web of intrigue and danger.
Determined to save his father from a ruthless blackmailer,
Penn stumbles over a link to the town's darkest secret: the
thirty-year-old unsolved murder of a black Korean War veteran.
But what drives him to act is the revelation that this haunting
mystery is inextricably bound up with his own past. Under
a blaze of national media attention, Penn reopens the case,
only to find local records destroyed, the FBI file sealed,
and the town closing ranks against him.
Penn joins forces with Caitlin Masters, a beautiful young
newspaper publisher, on a quest that will lead from the bayous
of the South to the highest reaches of the U.S. Government.
His need to right a terrible wrong pits him against the FBI,
the powerful judge who nearly destroyed his family, and his
most dangerous adversary: a woman he loved more than twenty
years before, and who haunts him still. His crusade for justice
will ultimately lead him into a packed Mississippi courtroom,
where he fights a battle that could end a decades-old silence
and force the truth to be spoken at last.
A riveting story of conspiracy, murder, and hard-won justice,
The Quiet Game lays bare one of the most shameful chapters
in American history by solving the abiding mystery of one
man's past. It is Greg Iles at his unparalleled best.
By day, Harper Cole trades commodities from his farmhouse
in the isolated Mississippi Delta. But at night, Harper serves
as system operator for E.R.O.S., a highly exclusive, sexually
explicit on-line service whose clients range from the glitterati
of Hollywood to the literati of New York. Shielded by a guarantee
of absolute anonymity, these clients pour their secrets into
the digital confession box of E.R.O.S. Only "sysops" like
Harper - the high priests of the system - know and see all.
When six female clients inexplicably drop off the network,
Harper suspects that something is amiss. But when a world-famous
New Orleans author - and E.R.O.S. client - is decapitated
in her mansion, Harper breaks the code of silence and contacts
the police. They are as shocked as Harper to learn that all
six women have been brutally murdered, each with a different
weapon, and in a different city. And each time the killer
has claimed the same bizarre trophy.
Horrified to find himself the prime suspect in the murders
he reported, Harper is swept into a secret manhunt led by
the FBI's investigative Support Unit. While the FBI uses
the technology of the future and the psychology of the past
to trap the brilliant killer, Harper realizes that he alone
stands a chance of luring the elusive madman into the open.
Carrying out a daring on-line impersonation, he places everything
he has and loves directly in the killer's path. As their
secret dialogue unfolds, Harper discovers that the murderer
is driven by a fear that haunts us all. But to make a weapon
of this weakness, Harper must confront a secret of his own,
one that could destroy his marriage and ultimately his life.
When a young Atlanta physician attends the funeral of the
grandparents who raised him, he is approached by a silver-haired
rabbi who claims to have known his grandfather well. Returning
together to the family home, they open his grandfather's
safe. There they discover four mysterious objects - the relics
of a man haunted by something he did one winter night in
1944 - an act that brought him unparalleled honors, but left
wounds in his soul that would never heal. As the story of
these secret souvenirs unfolds, the grandson's concept of
honor is stretched to the breaking point and his notion of
heroism redefined forever.
In January 1944, four people held the fate of the world
in their hands. They were not statesmen or generals, but
an American doctor, a German nurse, a Zionist killer, and
a young Jewish widow.
At the command of Winston Churchill, these four strangers
are brought together in a place almost beyond imagination.
It is a small SS-run concentration camp serving as the incubator
for a weapon of staggering lethality - a weapon U.S. General
Omar Bradley later admitted could have wiped out the D-day
invasion force on Omaha Beach. What they are forced to do
in the name of victory - and survival - demonstrates with
terrible clarity that in a world where all is at stake, war
has no rules.
Black Cross explodes the myth of World War II as "the
Good War." It is a novel of transforming power, in which
healer must become destroyer and a young killer is tempered
by love into a savior.
Peopled with men and women as compellingly human as the
historical figures who manipulate them, Black Cross will
pull you into a steadily tightening web of danger and deception
that seems impossible to resolve until the explosive final
chapters.
A long-buried Nazi secret erupts into a nerve-shattering
nightmare, as fact meets fiction in this explosive international
thriller.
In 1941, Rudolf Hess, Hitler's fanatical Deputy Fuhrer,
shocked the world by flying on a seemingly mad peace mission
to Britain. He was captured there, and after the war, spent
the rest of his life behind the forbidding walls of Berlin's
Spandau prison.
In 1987, with that sole remaining prisoner's death, Spandau
is razed, and the strangest, most mysterious chapter of World
War II is closed forever...Or is it?
The answer to this question is a decisive and deadly no
for Berlin police sergeant Hans Apfel. In the rubble of Spandau,
Hans discovers a sheaf of tattered papers in a hollowed brick.
It is the half-mad diary of Prisoner #7, known to the world
as Rudolf Hess. And it holds the first shocking revelation
of why Hess flew to Britain, and the terrifying dimensions
of Hitler's boldest, most brilliant move at the height of
his evil genius.
Thus the most vicious and momentous competition in the annals
of international espionage is set in motion. In a Germany
moving toward unity, in a Soviet Union falling part, and
an Israel facing destruction, the most skilled players of
the post-glasnost era will stop at nothing to seize the Spandau
papers. Brutal violence, global intrigue, treason, and terror
turn innocent bystanders into desperate combatants - in a
world where nations battle for supremacy and trust is another
word for suicide.
With unforgettable characters - including Sgt. Hans Apfel
and his estranged father, forced to ally themselves against
impossible odds; Hans' kidnapped wife, fighting to save her
unborn child; and a driven Israeli agent whose country's
survival depends on the contents of the Spandau diary - this
riveting thriller moves relentlessly across time and around
the globe. Its pulse-pounding action ranges from Germany
to South Africa, from England to Israel, from a World War
II conspiracy to its long-delayed but inescapable endgame
- a Nazi dream that will not die. Greg Iles has written a
brilliant epic novel that rips open the last great secret
of World War II.
