The first Thorn mystery from Edgar Award–winning author James W. Hall: a story of revenge in the Florida Keys that “starts good and stays good, right to the end” (Chicago Tribune). Thorn’s parents died the day he was born, run off the road by a drunk driver on their way back from the hospital. The baby lived, the offender beat the rap, and both went on with their lives—until nineteen years later, when Thorn took revenge, hunting down his parents’ killer and taking his life in a vain attempt to bring back those who had been lost. Two decades later, Thorn remains scarred by his crime. He lives in Key West, selling fishing flies and keeping an eye on Kate Truman, the woman who adopted him. But now he has lost her, too, to a pair of brutal murderers whom the police have no hope of tracking down. Thorn knows the Keys, and he will find them—but before he can take revenge, he must confront the horror of the first time he killed. The first in the series featuring Thorn, who “may remind you of John D. MacDonald’s immortal Travis McGee . . . or perhaps Lee Child’s Jack Reacher” (TheWashington Post Book World), this intense thriller is filled with both danger and emotional depth. Elmore Leonard has called James W. Hall’s debut novel “a beauty.”

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. "A terrific read with a gritty and tangible sense of place, a hero who's a cross between Davy Crockett and Philip Marlowe, and a lyrical, almost poetic touch in scenes both sexual and violent." ― Orlando Sentinel "Provocative and suspenseful . . . a worthy and brilliant successor to Under Cover of Daylight." ― Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger "James Hall's writing is astringent, penetrating, and unfailingly gripping." ― Dean Koontz "Menacing . . . brilliantly written!" ― USA Today "James W. Hall's lyrical passion for the Florida keys, his spare language and unusual images haunt us long after the story has faded." ― New York Times Book Review "Explosive . . . suspenseful . . . action galore." ― Worcester Telegram & Gazette

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...

From James W. Hall, the highly acclaimed best-selling author of Hard Aground, Mean High Tide, and Bones Of Coral, comes a stunning and superbly rendered new thriller in which the most deadly animals in the jungle are the ones that kill for money. With one poacher's bullet, a young woman's life is tragically, brutally taken—and her mother's is shattered forever. Thus begins Gone Wild, James W. Hall's electrifying new novel, which penetrates the lush, sultry jungles of Africa and Malaysia to explore the mercenary slaughter of animals-and to expose the savagery and humanity in us all. Gone Wild brings back Thorn, the haunting, quixotic hero last seen in the best-seller Mean High Tide . And in a novel filled with the author's signatures exotic locales, vise-tightening suspense, steamy sexuality, hypnotic prose—Hall introduces a bold new one of the toughest, most complex female characters in modern fiction. Allison Farleigh's desperate struggle to save the endangered orangutans from poachers—and to uncover the truth about her daughter's murder—give the novel its passion and its fire. And the shocking international conspiracy she exposes in the process gives Gone Wild its relentless, heart-pounding tension. A mesmerizing journey into the heart of darkness, Gone Wild is one of those rare thrillers that not only makes you sweat—it makes you think. From the Hardcover edition.

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...

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 doing cutting-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.

It comes out of nowhere—an airliner silently dropping from the sky into the torpid shallows of Florida's Blackwater Sound. Thorn witnesses the crash and pulls the survivors to safety, soon finding himself thrust into the media spotlight as a reluctant hero—and consumed by an elaborate conspiracy born out of the psychotic fantasies of a prominent Florida family. But their link to the doomed Rio-bound flight only touches the surface of a private world of murder, power, and revenge. And it's luring Thorn and crime-scene photographer Alexandra Rafferty dangerously close to the harrowing family secret that should have perished in the flames...

Before Thorn fell in love with crime-scene photographer Alexandra Rafferty, he was involved with Anne Joy, a beautiful woman who abandoned a violent life to forge a new, happier one in the Florida Keys. But her past includes her sadistic brother Vic, now a wealthy rogue businessman who specializes in the hijacking of pleasure boats and who delights in cruelly murdering their owners. Vic is obsessed by his sister and will do whatever it takes to drive his sister's lovers away-even murder. When Vic decides that he must possess the land on which Thorn's beloved home is built, nothing will stand in his way-not even the life of a little girl, the daughter of Thorn's closest friend.

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.

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.

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).

From an acclaimed "master of suspense"(New York Times Book Review) comes a thriller in which Thorn must confront an assassin whose victims and methods are taken directly from the script of a popular TV show April Moss writes obituaries for the Miami Herald. Her son, Sawyer, also a writer, has been scripting a cable TV series called "Miami Ops" and has been using his mother's work as a central element of the show's storyline. In "Miami Ops," a serial killer is using obituaries published in the local paper as a blueprint for selecting his next victims. But midway through the season, a copycat appears off-screen, a real-life killer who is using the same strategy to select victims. When this serial killer crosses paths with the reclusive Thorn, he has no choice but to leave his sanctuary in Key Largo and join forces with a young policewoman from Oklahoma who is investigating the murders. In addition to the show's head writer, April's other son, Sawyer's twin brother, works on "Miami Ops" as the lead actor. Could one of them be involved in the killings? Or are they orchestrated by the director of the TV series, an aging mogul who badly needs a hit? And what about the female star of the show, a deliciously strange young woman who seems willing to do anything to promote her career. Thorn walks into this hotbed of entertainment business intrigue totally unprepared for the life-altering shocker he's about to face. This loner from Key Largo has brought down his share of killers, but he's never confronted one that was his own flesh and blood. With the pacing of a thriller, and the lyrical prose for which Hall is renowned, this story pits Thorn against a killer—or killers—whose motives are as elusive as their identities.

The New York Times Book Review calls Edgar Award–winner James W. Hall a "master of suspense" and this new high-stakes thriller Going Dark shows why as Thorn embarks on a mission to save his newfound son Earth Liberation Front, known as ELF, is a loosely knit organization comprised of environmental activists scattered around the country. These extremists take a "by any means necessary" approach to defending the planet. In the last decade ELF has been responsible for close to a hundred million dollars in damage mainly through arson. The FBI ranks them, along with other eco-radicals, as the number one homegrown terrorist threat. Flynn Moss, Thorn’s newly discovered son, has naively fallen in with an ELF cell in Miami which has its sights on Turkey Point, the largest nuclear power plant in the state. This ELF group has concocted a non-violent plan to shut the nuke plant down—nothing more than a huge publicity stunt to call attention to the dangers of nuclear power. But unbeknownst to some in the group, there are other members with a far more violent scheme in mind—to cause a radioactive catastrophe rivaling Chernobyl or Fukushima. With a growing sense of dread about the group’s true intentions, Flynn summons Thorn to help him escape from Prince Key, the remote island off the shores of Miami where the ELF group is camped. Unable to refuse this son he barely knows, Thorn heads off to Prince Key and quickly reaches a frightening realization. There is only one way to save his son’s life. He must join with the eco-terrorists and help them complete their deadly mission.

A year ago Thorn’s son, Flynn Moss, disappeared into the eco-underground, his only contact with Thorn a series of postcards chronicling his exploits. But a postcard arrives unlike the others, a call for help, Thorn jumps into action, setting off for North Carolina. But before Thorn arrives, he’s intercepted by a federal agent who informs him he’s too late—Flynn had been acting as an informant for the FBI, and when his traitorous acts were discovered, he was summarily executed. The agent proposes a scheme to catch Flynn’s killer using Thorn as bait. Thorn, full of rage, accepts the job if only to get his hands on his son’s killer. The mission takes him to a small town where the gang is holed up, planning an attack on a hog farming operation that has been polluting local rivers and spreading illness through the area. Little by little Thorn discovers that nothing he’s been told is true, and the trap they’re setting isn’t for Flynn’s killer, but for his partner, a woman who proves more daring and dangerous than any Thorn’s ever met. She’s on her own crusade of vengeance, and she and Thorn make an uneasy alliance. With her help Thorn uncovers a conspiracy that stretches far beyond this small Carolina town.

A simple favor: Recover 23 stolen landmines filled with VX nerve gas and rescue a young Honduran girl, Dulce, from a band of murderous white supremacists. Most people would say no. Most people aren't THORN. From a Pacific Island base in the past, to the rough back roads of the Arizona-Mexico border, to a tiny town in Michigan called Bad Axe, Thorn follows a dangerous trail that leads to breathtaking suspense. To save the girl and thousands of innocent American lives, Thorn and Sugarman must infiltrate a terrorist cell far from Key Largo. They're way out of their element, but the big question is are they out of their league? If they fall short, the axe could finally fall in BAD AXE.

When a mysterious teenage girl appears at his door, Thorn’s attempt to help her sends him on a journey that leads to a shocking discovery: every calamity in Thorn’s life for the past twenty years—and there’ve been plenty—has been engineered by a powerful enemy. This man known as Trickster has made it his mission to torment Thorn and those around him in deadly ways. But now that sadistic game is about to come to its ultimate conclusion.