Master of the Delta（ISBN=） 英文原版

“Piercing . . . Consuming suspense almost too concentrated to
bear.” (New York Daily News )PRAISE FOR THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING
“[Dianas] inexorable descent into mania, narrated by her brother
Dave, is as gripping as the mystery itself. A-.” (Entertainment
Weekly )

In 1954 Mississippi, Jack Branch returns to his father’s Delta
estate, Great Oaks, to perform an act of noblesse oblige: teaching
at the local high school.While conducting a class on evil
throughout history, Jack is shocked to discover that his unassuming
student Eddie is the son of the Coed Killer, a notorious local
murderer. Jack feels compelled to mentor the boy, encouraging Eddie
to examine his father’s crime and using his own good name to open
the doors that Eddie’s lineage can’t. But when the investigation
turns in an unexpected direction, Jack finds himself questioning
Eddie’s motives–and his own. As the deadly consequences of Jack’s
actions fall inescapably into place, Thomas H. Cook masterfully
reveals the darker truths that lurk in the recesses of small-town
lives and in the hearts of well-intentioned men.

THOMAS H. COOK was born in Fort Payne, Alabama in 1947.
He is the author of twenty-one novels and two works of
nonfiction. He has been nominated for the Edgar Award seven times
in five different categories, including Best Novel for Red
Leaves, which was also nominated for the British Crime Writers’
Association’s Duncan Lawrie Dagger and won the Barry for Best
Novel. The Chatham School Affair won the Edgar for Best
Novel. He lives in New York City and Cape Cod.

ONE I was badly shaped by my good fortune and so failed to see
the darkness and the things that darkness hides. Until the stark
moment came, evil remained distant to me, mere lecture notes on the
crimes of armies, mobs, and bloodthirsty individuals whose heinous
acts I could thrillingly present to my captive audience of
students. For that reason, it wasnt unusual that I was thinking of
old King Herod that morning, the torment of his final days, his
rotting genitals, how theyd swarmed with worms. It was a vision of
guilt and punishment, of afflictions deserved by an abuser of
power, and I knew that at some point during the coming semester Id
find a place for it in one of my lectures. It was a bright April
morning in 1954, a little less than one hundred years since the
beginning of a conflict that had, by the time it ended, orphaned
half the children of the South. I was twenty-four years old, and
for the last three years had taught at Lakeland High School. At
that time, Lakeland was typically demarcated by race and class,
with a splendid plantation district, where my father still lived,
and a New South section where local tradesmen and shop owners
congregated in modest one-story houses strung together on short,
tree-lined streets. The workers who manned the towns few factories
resided in an area known as Townsend, and which consisted of small
houses on equally small lots, though large enough to accommodate
the vague hint of a lawn. To the east of them lived that class of
people for whom, as goes the ancient story, there has never been
room at the inn, and which was known as the Bridges. A Negro
netherworld made up the east side of town, unknowable as Africa
itself, and with nothing rising from it, at least not yet, save the
fervent voices of its ministers and the singing of its choirs, both
of which, during the long, languid summers of religious revival,
were broadcast by loudspeakers mounted precariously in the trees
gathered round their always freshly painted churches. During these
humid evenings, their voices stretched as far north as the
antebellum mansions where the Deltas eternal rulers sat on their
verandas, sipping iced tea and chuckling at the religious revelries
of the “Nigra” preachers. As a boy Id sat with my father on just
such a veranda, evenings that despite all that has happened since
still hold a storied beauty for me. There was something calm and
sure about them, and it would never have occurred to me that
anything might shatter the sheer stability of it all, a father much
admired, a son who seemed to please him, a family name everywhere
revered and to which no act of dishonor had ever been ascribed. As
a son I could not have imagined a more noble father than my own,
save perhaps that fabled one whod once cut down a cherry tree, then
refused to tell a lie. And so the event my father forever after
called the “incident” took me completely by surprise, though he
never failed to make clear that it had sprung from a long