Michael Gruber Books In Order

Tropic of Night

Not since The Secret History has a novel so flawlessly married the ferocious intensity of an unforgettable thriller with the depth, daring, and nuance of our most celebrated literary fiction. Tropic of Night is a virtuoso performance an unforgettably accomplished novel, a masterpiece of electricity and ambition. Jane Doe was a promising anthropologist, an expert on shamanism. Now she’s nothing, a shadow: after faking her own suicide, she’s living under an assumed identity in Miami with a little girl to protect. Everyone thinks she’s dead. Or so she hopes. Then the killings start, a series of ritualistic murders that terrifies all of Miami. The investigator is Jimmy Paz, a Cuban American police detective. There are witnesses, but they can recall almost nothing of the events, as though their memories have been erased as if a spell has been cast on each of them. Equally bizarre is the string of clues Paz uncovers: a divination charm, exotic drugs found in the bodies of the victims, a century old report telling of a secret place in the heart of Africa. These clues point Paz inexorably toward the fugitive, Jane Doe, and force Jane to realize that the darkness she has fled is seeking her out, hunting her down. By the time her path intersects with Jimmy Paz’s, the two will be thrust into a cataclysmic battle between good and an evil unimaginable to the Western mind.

Valley of Bones

The setting is Miami. Rookie cop Tito Morales arrives at the Trianon hotel to investigate a routine disturbance call and, to his shock and horror, watches as a wealthy oil man plunges ten stories and impales himself on a nearby fence. Soon Morales is joined by detective Jimmy Paz, famous throughout the city for solving or at least providing a plausible solution to the so called Voodoo Murders that left Miami burning months earlier.

Together Paz and Morales enter the hotel and discover in the dead man’s room a most unusual suspect, an otherworldly woman by the name of Emmylou Dideroff. She emerges from a prayerlike state and says she wants to confess and asks for a pen and several notebooks.

What Emmylou writes is nothing like what Paz expects; he enlists psychologist Lorna Wise in an effort to make sense of things that go beyond Emmylou’s explanation of the murder: details of childhood abuse, of other crimes committed, of regular communion with saints and with the devil. Is she mentally disturbed? Does she really believe herself to be an instrument of God? And why is it that so many people including Paz’s biological father are suddenly interested in the contents of these notebooks and in preventing them from becoming public?

Emmylou’s ‘confession’ leads Jimmy Paz, Lorna Wise, and Tito Morales down a series of unexpected and dangerous turns that forces them each to confront questions about faith, love, and the possibility of the miraculous.

Performed by Kate Forbes and Jonathan Davis

Night of the Jaguar

Deep in the jungles of Colombia, an American priest is shot dead in his makeshift church.

A few weeks later an Indian shaman arrives in South Florida, armed only with a bag of totems and the fearsome power of his vengeful god.

As a Miami Homicide Detective, Jimmy Paz saw terrible things that defied rationality. Now retired, he’s put the darkness behind him. But suddenly he, his wife, and their young daughter are being haunted by horrific dreams& 8212terrifying visions of a giant jungle cat. And when affluent Miami businessmen begin dying gruesomely in their fortress like homes& 8212with the footprints of a massive animal found at the crime scenes& 8212the baffled police must turn to Paz, who has experience with the impossible. Paz cannot refuse, for he’s tied to this case by a shocking secret from his past. And what he loves most may be the next thing devoured in this nightmare of carnage and sacrifice.

The Witch’s Boy

A wondrous journey through the realms of magic

They call him Lump. Ugly, misshapen more goblin than human child abandoned as an infant and taken in by a witch, he is nursed by a bear, tutored by a djinn; his only playmates are the creatures of the forest, whose language he learns to speak.

But when Lump inevitably stumbles into the human world, his innocence is no match for the depths of people’s cruelty, which turns his heart to stone, and fuels a vengeance that places him and his witch mother in deadly peril. Yet these disasters also send Lump on a journey of self discovery, to realms deep within the earth and far beyond mortal imagination.

In this stunning fantasy debut, Michael Gruber has created a world that is at once deceptively familiar and stunningly original, a world of cruelty, beauty, legend, truth, and above all, wonder. Readers will delight in the author’s ingenious retelling of classic fairy tales and will marvel at the stunning new tale of a boy raised by a witch, a cat, a bear, and a demon.

The Book of Air and Shadows

A distinguished Shakespearean scholar found tortured to death…
A lost manuscript and its secrets buried for centuries…
An encrypted map that leads to incalculable wealth…
The Washington Post called Michael Gruber’s previous work ‘a miracle of intelligent fiction and among the essential novels of recent years.’ Now comes his most intellectually provocative and compulsively readable novel yet. Tap tapping the keys and out come the words on this little screen, and who will read them I hardly know. I could be dead by the time anyone actually gets to read them, as dead as, say, Tolstoy. Or Shakespeare. Does it matter, when you read, if the person who wrote still lives? These are the words of Jake Mishkin, whose seemingly innocent job as an intellectual property lawyer has put him at the center of a deadly conspiracy and a chase to find a priceless treasure involving William Shakespeare. As he awaits a killer or killers unknown, Jake writes an account of the events that led to this deadly endgame, a frantic chase that began when a fire in an antiquarian bookstore revealed the hiding place of letters containing a shocking secret, concealed for four hundred years. In a frantic race from New York to England and Switzerland, Jake finds himself matching wits with a shadowy figure who seems to anticipate his every move. What at first seems like a thrilling puzzle waiting to be deciphered soon turns into a dangerous game of cat and mouse, where no one not family, not friends, not lovers is to be trusted. Moving between twenty first century America and seventeenth century England, The Book of Air and Shadows is a modern thriller that brilliantly re creates William Shakespeare’s life at the turn of the seventeenth century and combines an ingenious and intricately layered plot with a devastating portrait of a contemporary man on the brink of self discovery…
or self destruction.

The Forgery of Venus

Chaz Wilmot is a painter born outside his time. He possesses a virtuosic command of the techniques of the old masters. He can paint like Leonardo, Goya, Gainsborough artists whose works sell for millions but this style of painting is no longer popular, and he refuses to shape his talent to fit the fashion of the day. So Wilmot makes his living cranking out parodies for ads and magazine covers. A break comes when an art dealer obtains for him a commission to restore a Venetian palace fresco by the eighteenth century master Tiepolo, for a disreputable Italian businessman. Once there, Wilmot discovers that it is not a restoration but a re creation, indeed a forgery. At first skeptical of the job, he then throws himself into the creative challenge and does the job brilliantly. No one can tell the modern work from something done more than two hundred years ago.

This feat attracts the attention of Werner Krebs, an art dealer with a dark past and shadier present who becomes Wilmot’s friend and patron. Wilmot is suddenly working with a fervor he hasn’t felt in years, but his burst of creative activity is accompanied by strange interludes: Without warning, he finds himself reliving moments from his past not as memories but as if they are happening all over again. Soon, it is no longer his own past he’s revisiting; he believes he can travel back to the seventeenth century, where he lived as the Spanish artist Diego Rodr guez de Silva Vel zquez, one of the most famous painters in history. Wilmot begins to fantasize that as Vel zquez, he has created a masterpiece, a stunning portrait of a nude. When the painting actually turns up, he doesn’t know if he painted it or if he imagined the whole thing.

Little by little, Wilmot enters a mirror house of illusions and hallucinations that propels him into a secret world of gangsters, greed, and murder, with his mystery patron at the center of it all, either as the mastermind behind a plot to forge a painting worth hundreds of millions, or as the man who will save Wilmot from obscurity and madness.

In Chaz Wilmot, we meet the rarest breed of literary hero, one for whom the reader feels almost personally responsible. By turns brutally honest and self deceptive, scornful of the world while yearning to make his mark on it, Wilmot comes astonishingly alive for the reader, and his perilous journey toward the truth becomes our own.

The Forgery of Venus, a blend of erudition, unflagging narrative brio, and emotional depth, brings us inexorably toward the intersection where genius and insanity collide. Miraculously inventive, this book cements Gruber’s reputation as one of the most imaginative and gifted writers of our time.

The Good Son

New York Times bestselling author Michael Gruber, a member of ‘the elite ranks of those who can both chill the blood and challenge the mind’ The Denver Post, delivers a taut, multilayered, riveting novel of suspenseSomewhere in Pakistan, Sonia Laghari and eight fellow members of a symposium on peace are being held captive by armed terrorists. Sonia, a deeply religious woman as well as a Jungian psychologist, has become the de facto leader of the kidnapped group. While her son Theo, an ex Delta soldier, uses his military connections to find and free the victims, Sonia tries to keep them all alive by working her way into the kidnappers’ psyches and interpreting their dreams. With her knowledge of their language, her familiarity with their religion, and her Jungian training, Sonia confounds her captors with her insights and beliefs. Meanwhile, when the kidnappers decide to kill their captives, one by one, in retaliation for perceived crimes against their country, Theo races against the clock to try and save their lives.