The Crime of Julian Wells

A famous writer is dead. Suicide? Punishment? Or Justice?

Julian Wells was a writer of dark non-fiction works that detailed some of the worst crimes of the 20th Century. Was it this exploration of man's inhumanity to man that caused him to take his own life?

When his body is found in a boat drifting in a pond in Montauk, New York, his best friend, the literary critic Philip Anders, begins to reread his work in order to prepare a eulogy. This rereading, along with other clues, convinces the critic that his friend has committed a terrible crime, and that it was as punishment for this crime that Wells took his own life.

Anders' investigation sparks an obsession with unravelling the mystery of the man he thought he knew. His journey towards understanding leads him from Paris to Budapest, spans four decades, and takes him deeper and deeper in to the heart of darkness that was Julian Wells...

With THE CRIME OF JULIAN WELLS, Thomas H. Cook, one of America's most acclaimed suspense writers, has written a novel in the grand tradition of the twisty, cerebral thriller. Like Eric Ambler's A COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS and Graham Greene's THE THIRD MAN, it is a mystery of identity, or assumed identity, a journey into the maze of a mysterious life.

When famed true-crime writer Julian Wells' body if found in a boat drifting on a Montauk pond, the question is not how he died, but why?

The death is obviously a suicide. But why would Julian Wells have taken his own life? And was this his only crime? These are the questions that first intrigue and then obsess Philip Anders, Wells' best friend and the chief defender of both his moral and his literary legacies.

Anders' increasingly passionate and dangerous quest to answer these questions becomes a journey into a haunted life, one marked by travel, learning, achievement and adventure, a life that should have been celebrated, but whose lonely end points to terrors still unknown.

Spanning four decades and traversing three continents, THE CRIME OF JULIAN WELLS is a journey into one man's heart of darkness than ends in a blaze of light.