James W. Hall Books In Order

Under Cover of Daylight

Thorn has captivated readers with each of his haunting appearances in James Hall’s South Florida thrillers. A dark, brooding hero who understands the passions that drive men to violence, Thorn faced down a hijacker in Buzz Cut and hunted brutal killers in both Gone Wild and Mean High Tide. But it is Hall’s first novel that reveals the dark mystery of Thorn’s past, and explains why he is one of the most intriguing and complex characters in crime fiction. At nineteen, Thorn committed a crime that would haunt him for the rest of his life he stalked and murdered the drunk driver who killed his parents. With that one act of vengeance, Thorn set off a chain of events that would plunge him into a nightmare of betrayal and revenge in a novel that is James Hall’s darkest and most emotionally powerful work to date. This unique reader’s edition of Under Cover of Daylight, complete with a special Introduction, will be remembered as a genuine classic of crime fiction the stunning debut novel that started it all, by the writer The New York Times hailed as the unrivaled ‘master of suspense.’

Tropical Freeze

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.

Mean High Tide

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…

Gone Wild

Hunting a pair of psychopathic poachers who killed her daughter, conservationist Allison Farleigh turns to Thorn, a Florida renegade, for help, only to find that she has become the hunters’ next target. NYT. PW.

Buzz Cut

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…

Red Sky at Night

It was truly a crime against innocents. Eleven dolphins, part of an experiment in healing, are found slaughtered in their saltwater tanks. When Thorn investigates, he triggers a vicious attack that leaves him paralyzed from the waist down, plagued by unrelenting pain. Now Thorn, a Florida renegade who has lived a life of fierce freedom, is starting over in a wheelchair, bitter enough to drive his lover away, desperate enough to seek miracles on the fringes of medical science where his childhood friend, now a doctor, is doingcutting edge research in a quest for the ultimate painkiller. Bean Wilson was once destined for greatness. Then came the war in Vietnam, a debilitating injury, and a simmering rage. Now Bean is running a pain relief clinic in Key West, assisted by a beautiful six foot tall island girl named Pepper Tremaine, who chews hot chilies like gum and carries a scalpel in her blouse. Under the guise of a respectable research facility, Bean and Pepper are using human beings as lab rats, then feeding the bodies of their failures to the shark churned sea. Within hours of entering the clinic, Thorn can sense the danger. But when he begins to make the bizarre connection between eleven dead dolphins and Bean’s clinic, the stakes are raised. Because Dr. Bean Wilson, a man who knows exactly how an amputated limb can scream with real, unbearable agony, may be on the brink of the most dangerous discovery of all: a cure for human pain. And in a climax that explodes with the kind of secrets that can turn friends into enemies and lovers into strangers, Red Sky at Night races toward a harrowing showdown between Thorn, imprisoned in a wheelchair, and a mad, ruthless doctor who will stop at nothing to cure his own twisted pain.A full throttle thriller of unparalleled suspense, Red Sky at Night is also a powerful human drama. For here are the hurts that afflict the body, mind, and spirit. And here is the wounded love between old friends and rivals: the twisted love between the beautiful, rough hewn Pepper Tremaine and the doctor she worships, and, ultimately, the love risked between Thorn, caught in his bitterness and his rage, and a good woman willing to stay with him to the end.

Blackwater Sound

The Braswell family had everything people would kill for: money, looks, power. But their eldest son, the family’s shining light, died in a bizarre fishing accident. And when he disappeared hauled into the depths by the giant marlin he had been fighting he took with him a secret so corrupt that it could destroy the Braswells. Ten years later, a huge airliner crashes in the steamy shallows off the Florida coast, killing all aboard. Helping pull bodies from the water, Thorn finds himself drawn into a bizarre conspiracy: someone has developed a high tech weapon capable of destroying electrical systems in a powerful flash. The terrorist potential is huge. How are the secretive Braswells and their family owned company, MicroDyne, involved? And what does it have to do with the family’s obsessive hunt for the great marlin that killed their golden boy? With the Braswells, James W. Hall introduces one of the most evil and dysfunctional families in the history of fiction. And, along with Thorn, he brings back favorite characters from his earlier books, including Alexandra Rafferty and her father, Lawton Collins, a retired and increasingly dotty former police investigator whose methods of investigation result in his kidnapping. A story that bristles with all the heat and tension of a tropical Florida summer, Blackwater Sound is destined to rank among the greatest suspense thrillers of the new decade.

Off the Chart

Passion and intrigue heat up the Florida Keys as Thorn and Alexandra Rafferty face down a brutal killer bent on destroying everything they hold dear In the widely acclaimed Blackwater Sound, James W. Hall brought together his two protagonists the dark, hardbitten Thorn and the feisty Miami cop Alexandra Rafferty. But before Alexandra came into Thorn’s life, there had been Anne Joy, a beautiful woman escaping from her violent past in the languid life of the Florida Keys. That past includes Anne’s sad*istic brother Vic, now a modern day pirate whose murderous crew is terrorizing the Gulf Coast. Vic is obsessed with his sister and will do whatever it takes to drive Anne’s lovers, past and present, away from her even murder. This obsession puts Vic on a collision course with Thorn and everything Thorn values, including the daughter of his closest friend. From the lushness of the Florida Keys to a nightmare climax on the tropical coast of Central America, Off the Chart is vintage James W. Hall.

Magic City

A novel based on real events and newly declassified documents, Magic City is to Miami what L.A. Confidential and Chinatown were to Los Angeles. It evokes a time in our nation’s history when powerful men were willing to do whatever they thought necessary to achieve their goals.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 suddenly appears on display at a trendy Miami gallery opening, the photograph is burned in an act of arson that sets off a modern day murder spree, reaching from the quiet neighborhoods of Miami to the back corridors of the White House. What the killer didn’t know is that there is one remaining copy. When it falls into Thorn’s hands, he and everyone he loves become the target of madmen and trained killers, each of whom has his own powerful motive to see the photograph destroyed forever and its mysteries kept hidden. To find retribution for the death of a loved one, Thorn joins forces with a dangerous enemy to solve a maddening puzzle. At its center are two families from very different worlds with their own dark secrets. Unraveling this dangerous riddle shakes the foundation of his bond with both Alexandra and his closest friend, and sends him on a deadly journey. But cover ups have a way of disintegrating over time, especially when someone like Thorn is pounding on the door. Magic City is an epic crime thriller exposing the past of a city in a time capsule of a novel.

Hell’s Bay

Master of suspense James W. Hall’s Hell s Bay sends Thorn deep into the wilds of South Florida, in a story with all the haunting atmosphere of Deliverance and the sheer terror of Cape Fear.

Descended from pioneer stock, the Bateses are an aristocratic Floridian family with vast holdings in real estate and mining. When matriarch Abigail Bates is discovered drowned in the Peace River, a chain of events is set into motion, embroiling Thorn with a family he never knew he had and a fortune he doesn t necessarily want.

Thorn is leading a fishing expedition into the isolated lakes and mangrove swamps of Hell s Bay when Abigail s son and beautiful granddaughter arrive, claiming Thorn as a long lost relative and asking him to solve the woman s murder. Little do they know that the killer is already on their trail. Soon their houseboat becomes a precarious island of safety in a landscape of escalating violence. What does the killer want? And why is their predator so enraged, determined to kill them all no matter what the cost?

As Marilyn Stasio said in The New York Times, If violence can be poetic, Hall has the lyric voice for it. In this tour de force of fear and suspense, Hall shows how one family s dark past comes back to haunt its most remote member and may ultimately cost him his life.

Silencer

A father’s murder and a son’s ruthless betrayal are at the heart of the new novel by this ‘master of suspense’ Publishers Weekly

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, kidnaps him and drags him to a game preserve, surrounded by herds of exotic and very dangerous animals. He is entrapped in a sinkhole-a geological 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 1930’s, 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 Hall is ‘the king of the Florida-gothic noir’ Dennis Lehane.

Bones of Coral

Paramedic Shaw Chandler knows Miami’s nitty gritty all too well. But when a routine suicide call uncovers his long lost father, it’s anything but routine and it appears it’s anything but suicide. Then Shaw’s mother falls victim to financial fraud, leaving Shaw with no choice but to return home to Key West and into the arms of his old flame soap opera actress Trula Montoya. Trula’s got her own skeletons and reasons for returning to Key West. Rekindling her relationship to Shaw can only complicate her life. But Trula and Shaw are about to learn that they can no longer run from their secrets or the past as they discover a lethal conspiracy and science run amok. And when a psychotic, rhyming killer is added to the mix, they must stop an evil that could spell doom to all.

Hard Aground

450 years ago a treasure ship went down. In Miami, the heat hasn’t let up yet…
Hap Tyler tailboards on Biscayne bay, hears voices, seduces young women, and lives on the edge of history in his family’s old money mansion amid Miami’s pastel glitz. But while Hap stumbles around in the shadow of his more successful older brother, Daniel, a tangled web of deception and greed is being spun around him a web that leads Daniel to his death. Trying to solve his brother’s murder, Hap collides with a 450 year old secret: the disappearance of $400 million in a sunken Spanish plunder. Daniel’s upscale girlfriend is close to digging up the treasure, an avaricious senator has already tasted it, and a stone cold killer will stop at nothing to bring it home. For Hap a dark and bloody vein of Florida and family history has been opened. And the only way to close it is through a modern ritual of violence and truth. From the Paperback edition.

Body Language

When Alexandra Rafferty was thirteen, she was raped by the boy next door. But it didn t stop there. He continued to threaten her; she pulled out her daddy’s handgun and, never meaning to, shot him dead. When her father, a cop, found her, he promised no one would ever find out. The secret is a lot to live with, and it has influenced Alexandra s life. Now on the Miami PD, she lives with her father, who has Alzheimer s, and struggles with an empty marriage to her husband. The current case she is involved with a serial rapist who murders his victims holds a gruesome fascination for her, since it seems to mirror her past and she increasingly starts to see herself in the bodies left behind. Her marriage is tested by her obsession with her work and her ill father, but even more by her husband s secret agenda: Stan has been having an affair, and has staged what he believes will be the perfect crime. Alexandra finds herself on the run from her husband, from the people who are after her husband, and from a killer whose vow for vengeance places Alexandra in mortal danger.

Rough Draft

When her parents were murdered, Hannah Keller was 3,000 miles away, on leave from her job with the Miami Police Department. Her family’s only survivor on that deadly day was Hannah’s six year old son Randall. While fishing on the dock behind his grandparents’ house, the boy glimpsed the killers, and later discovered his grandparents’ bullet riddled bodies. Five years later the trauma of that day still haunts the boy. He lives in terror that the killers will return for him. Hannah is no longer a cop but now works full time as a novelist, and is trying to do whatever she can to heal her son’s wounds. But when she receives a coded message apparently from her parents’ killers, the entire episode explodes again. Teaming up with a maverick FBI agent from the Miami field office, Hannah begins to track the killer. As she moves deeper into the labyrinth, she discovers, to her horror, that she and her son are being used as pawns in an elaborate scheme a trap designed to catch one of the world’s deadliest assassins. Hannah and Randall become entangled in a bitter feud, a burning vendetta, and the mind of a bloodthirsty professional killer. In his most exciting novel yet, Jim Hall brings events to a breathtaking conclusion.

Forests of the Night

In the tradition of James Dickey’s Deliverance and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, bestselling author and award-winning poet James W. Hall has written a literary novel that is also an intricate, suspenseful mystery-a story blending the macabre and the historic, the genteel and the aberrant, the violent and the heroic. With his signature mix of brooding atmosphere and compelling action, Hall takes readers deep into America’s own Heart of Darkness.

Policewoman Charlotte Monroe has cop instincts. Scratch that. There isn’t a name for the gift she has, something that borders on psychic, an ability to read people’s faces and body language like the morning headlines-to size up their intentions and act before they do.

It’s a real ability that the FBI is trying to teach to its agents. The bureau is spending millions so they’ll know the difference between a slightly raised eyebrow and a faint twitch of the lip. But Charlotte’s a natural with god-given abilities, and the Feds want her in the worst way, maybe even to the point of blackmail.

Still, Charlotte’s gift fails to prepare her for the stranger who shows up on her doorstep with a chilling warning for her husband, a mysterious note scrawled in Cherokee hieroglyphics and a promise of things to come: ‘You’re Next.’

The warning becomes more ominous as Charlotte and her husband, Parker, discover the complex truth about this man, including his position on the FBI Most Wanted list and his connection to their family.

When Charlotte’s deeply troubled teenage daughter runs away to join the charismatic outlaw, she follows the two of them into the spectral mists of the Great Smoky Mountains-and to the beating heart of a 150-year-old blood feud that will endanger everything she loves and challenge everything she believes.

Paper Products

A collection of tales full of misfits, eccentrics, die hards and outcasts engaged in mythic struggles with the mundane realities of life.

Hot Damn!

James W. Hall is the critically acclaimed author of eleven crime novels, including Body Language and Blackwater Sound. He’s also published four books of poetry. And several of his short stories have appeared in magazines like the Georgia Review and Kenyon Review. Now, writing in the spirit of Dave Barry and Garrison Keillor, Hall wins a new kind of reader with this collection of essays that run from insightful to opinionated, funny to wise. Hall ponders subjects as diverse as his own love affair with Florida which began on a trip after college from which he never returned, to his equally passionate romance with books. He ponders the nature of summer heat, the writing of Hemingway and James Dickey, television, teaching, politics, fatherhood and much more. In the vibrant and elegant prose which characterize his fiction and poetry, Hall now proves himself a master of the essay as well. AUTHORBIO: A native of Kentucky, James W. Hall has made Florida his home, as well as the setting for his popular suspense thrillers. He obtained his B.A. in Literature from Florida Presbyterian College now Eckerd College in 1969, an M.A. in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University in 1970, and a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Utah in 1973. For the last 29 years, he has taught literature and creative writing at Florida International University, where his students have included Dennis Lehane, Barbara Parker, and Vicki Hendricks. After publishing four books of poetry three with the Carnegie Mellon University Press and several works of short fiction in such magazines as the Georgia Review and Kenyon Review, Hall began writing crime novels in 1986 with Under Cover of Daylight. His published thrillers include Under Cover of Daylight 1987, Tropical Freeze 1990, Bones of Coral 1992, Hard Aground 1993, Mean High Tide 1994, Gone Wild 1995, Buzz Cut 1996, Red Sky at Night 1997, Body Language 1998, and Rough Draft 2000. He lives on the edge of Blackwater Sound in Key Largo, Florida, with his wife, Evelyn, and his dogs, Travis and Sofie.

The Putt at the End of the World

‘ Sex. Money. International terrorism. And, of course, the ultimate question: Can a compact backswing save the world? Now, in the tradition of Naked Came the Stranger and Naked Came the Manatee, a clubhouseful of acclaimed authors pass the baton or the six iron to create an ensemble tour de force of suspense, romance, and hilarity on the links. Golf is not a team sport. But who says fiction can’t be? Get ready. The gallery is hushed and the approach shot nears. The birdie has landed…
The Putt at the End of the World Fore? No, nine! That’s right. Nine literary grand masters each contribute a chapter and together bring you a full round robin of characters, not to mention a blistering drive of a story line that beats par with every page. Alfonzo Zamora is the venerable Mexican Senior player who’s just discovered he’s going blind. Billy Sprague is the country club pro with a swing as elegant as an eagle in flight except when money’s on the line. Rita Shaughnessy is the hard drinking, hard loving, hard luck golfer on the women’s pro tour. All three receive an invitation from multibillionaire Phillip Bates, founder of Macrodyne Software. To inaugurate his dazzling new course in Scotland, Bates is spending millions to host a tournament starring the superpro trio. The gala will welcome world leaders in the name of global peace and the universal language of golf. Launching Bates’s new, revolutionary computer operating system, the weekend volley will also attract a long scorecard of wild and unanticipated guests, including the world’s most elusive environmental terrorist, a Spanish caddie named Humpy who inspires bogeys, a caddish pro who can’t pass the Rorschach test, a sexy male female counterterrorist team who keep driving into traps of their own making, a certain naked golfer making a bid for his hole in one, and enough plastique to end the world as we know it…
. Will things get rough in the rough? Will the green run red? Where is the mysterious nineteenth hole? And in an apocalyptic final play that will determine the fate of the world, ecoterrorists will converge on the course for an explosive putt to end all putts. The ‘Good Walk’ has never been more fun!’