John Darnton Books In Order

Neanderthal

Not since Jurassic Park has a novel so enthralled readers everywhere. Now, enter the world of Neanderthal…
The expedition of the century…
uncovers the find of the millennium…
Neanderthal. In the remote mountains of central Asia, an eminent Harvard archeologist discovers something extraordinary. He sends a cryptic message to two colleagues. But then, he disappears. Matt Mattison and Susan Arnot once lovers, now academic rivals are going where few humans have ever walked, looking for a relic band of creatures that have existed for over 40,000 years, that possess powers man can only imagine, and that are about to change the face of civilization forever.

The Experiment

In an isolated laboratory, a test subject discovers a human corpse with its heart removed…
In New York City, a journalist investigates a homicide victim with its face and fingerprints removed…
Drawn together by medicine and murder, these two men are about to make a discovery that will change everything they think about science, nature, and themselves…
They share the same face. ‘Thrills and Haunts.’ Patricia Cornwell’One of the summer’s scariest novels.’ New York Daily News’As compelling as Robert B. Parker’s Spenser or Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta…
complex and original…
absorbing.’ New York Times’A Roaring…
X Files Like Tale.’ Talk ‘Thrilling.’ John Sandford’Chilling.’ People’Relentless.’ Houston Chronicle’Timely.’ Publishers Weekly ‘Harrowing.’ Rocky Mountain News’Satisfying.’ Entertainment Weekly’You’ve Got To Read It.’ Library Journal Hot Picks A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

Mind Catcher

Newsday called John Darnton’s Neanderthal ‘hair raisingly believable’ and The New York Times called The Experiment ‘complex and original and wholly engaging…
a world where fiction pales before the unbelievable truth.’ Now the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author has done it again, in a story almost beyond imagining. New York City: A thirteen year old boy named Tyler lies in a hospital, his brain damaged in a tragic accident. By his bedside, his father stands helplessly, as two very different scientists take charge of the boy’s fate. One is a neurosurgeon, whose unorthodox experiments use computers to control a patient’s physical responses during surgery. The other is a researcher with experiments of his own, experiments so secret he can breathe them to nobody: his attempts to find the spark of human consciousness…
and capture it forever. Together, they will produce a result beyond anything they could have conceived, sending Tyler far beyond the frontiers of medical science into an astonishing netherworld a place no living person has gone before and from which one desperate person will try to bring him back…
. A spellbinding novel of science, technology, and the very stuff that makes us human, Mind Catcher is an unforgettable journey into the possibilities of the mind of man…
and his soul.

The Darwin Conspiracy

In this riveting new novel, best selling author John Darnton transports us to Victorian England and around the world to reveal the secrets of a legendary nineteenth century figure. Darnton elegantly blends the power of fact and the insights of fiction to explore the many mysteries attached to the life and work of Charles Darwin.

What led Darwin to the theory of evolution? Why did he wait twenty two years to write On the Origin of Species? Why was he incapacitated by mysterious illnesses and frightened of travel? Who was his secret rival? These are some of the questions driving Darnton’s richly dramatic narrative, which unfolds through three vivid points of view: Darwin s own as he sails around the world aboard the Beagle; his daughter Lizzie s as she strives to understand the guilt and fear that struck her father at the height of his fame; and that of present day anthropologist Hugh Kellem and Darwin scholar Beth Dulicmer, whose obsession with Darwin and with each other drives them beyond the accepted boundaries of scholarly research. What Hugh and Beth discover Lizzie s diaries and letters lead them to a hidden chapter of Darwin s autobiography is a maze of bitter rivalries, petty deceptions, and jealously guarded secrets, at the heart of which lies the birth of the theory of evolution.

With The Darwin Conspiracy, John Darnton again delivers a stunning tapestry of history and imagination, a galvanizing novel.

Black and White and Dead All Over

A keenly intelligent, delightfully mordant novel that blends fact and fiction with the same deft hand that was at work in John Darnton’s best selling Neanderthal. Bad news is brewing in the inner sanctum of the New York Globe, the city s long standing newspaper of note, whose back is to the wall. Readership, advertising, and circulation are plummeting along with the paper s vaunted standards and the cost cutters have their knives out. But trouble of a wholly different kind begins one rainy September morning when a powerful editor is found murdered in the newsroom, with the spike that he d wielded to kill stories hammered into his chest. The problem for Priscilla Bollingsworth, the young, ambitious female NYPD detective assigned to the case besides the fact that the mayor is breathing down her neck is that there are too many suspects to choose from. She teams up with Jude Hurley, a clever, rebellious reporter, and together they navigate the ink infested waters whose denizens include the paper s resentful old guard, scheming careerists, a bumbling publisher, a steely executive editor, and a rival newspaper tycoon named Lester Moloch. But the waters thicken considerably when more bodies turn up, dead all over. Armed with the firsthand knowledge he has acquired through forty years in journalism, John Darnton conjures up the cynicism and romanticism of the profession and gives us a cunning, pitch perfect portrait of the declining if not yet murderous newspaper industry. Black and White and Dead All Over is a satirical mystery that entertains from first to last.

Almost a Family

From the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and best selling author: a beautifully crafted memoir of his lifelong chase after his father’s shadow. John was eleven months old when his father, Barney Darnton, a war correspondent for The New York Times, was killed in World War II, but his absence left a more profound imprint on the family than any living father could have had. John s mother a well known Times reporter and editor tried to keep alive the dream of raising her two sons in ideal surroundings. When that proved impossible, she collapsed emotionally and physically, financially destitute and too hungover to get out of bed most days. But along the way she created a myth of the father that John took as his own, following his father s footsteps into the same newsroom. Decades after his father s death, John and his brother, the historian Robert Darnton, began delving into the past to uncover secrets about their parents. The Barney they uncover is radically different from the man they imagined: a hero who gave his life for his family, his country, and the fourth estate. Intensely moving and vividly descriptive of America from the Jazz Age to the present, Almost a Family describes a family in which love and devotion were built on an often dazzling framework of deception.