From Publishers WeeklyMiami provides a potent setting for Hall's ( Bones of Coral ; Tropical Freeze ) expertly spun crime thriller, a dark, often funny novel with a powerful kick. The book's plot encompasses both a sunken 17th-century galleon filled with Mayan treasures and a local 19th-century homicide. On Biscayne Bay, somewhat unstable Vietnam vet Hap Tyler makes windsurfers and leads tourists through historic Mangrove House--built by his grandfather, the legendary Commodore Randolph Tyler--where he lives with his brother Daniel, an archeologist. Hours after promising to tell Hap a family secret, Daniel is found dead, apparently of a heart attack. Hap blames Daniel's lover, Marguerite Rawlings, a crusading preservationist who hopes to restore her grandmother's mill on the mid-city site where her forebear, a vehement conservationist, was murdered 100 years before. After learning that Daniel's death was also a murder, Hap and Marguerite join forces against Marguerite's mother, a corrupt U.S. senator who hungers for Mayan artifacts. Hall intertwines the Tylers' and Rawlings' pasts with evocations of rhythmic, dangerous modern Miami, whose residents include a Vietnam hero, his flashy black ex-con girlfriend and a volatile Cuban ex-cop who bulldozes his dreams of fortune in the deftly orchestrated climax. Although a few of the colorful lowlifes occasionally speak a highlife diction, Hall, in the company of Elmore Leonard, Edna Buchanan, John Lutz and Carl Hiassen, gives the Sunshine State the fictional crime stature of L.A. and New York City. BOMC and QPB featured selections; major ad/promo; author tour. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalDaniel Tyler, a Dade County, Florida archaeologist, knows the location of the Carmelita , a 17th-century Spanish shipwreck that went down in Florida waters while carrying $400 million worth of Mayan gold, silver, and gems. He knows, but he's not telling, even through the torture that finally costs him his life. After Daniel's murder, his brother Hap and girlfriend Marguerite team up to find the treasure, competing with some highly motivated bad guys, including Daniel's murderers. Add to this a historical subplot about one of Miami's first murders and another about a large chunk of downtown Miami that reverts back to the descendants of the original 19th-century settler. The fast pace set by the author is given a creditable treatment by reader J. Michael Lee, despite a challenging diversity of characters. Exciting and fascinating as the story is, Hard Aground is also noteworthy for conveying a convincing sense of contemporary as well as historical Miami. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.- Kristen L. Smith, Loras Coll. Lib., Dubuque, Ia.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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.

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.From Library JournalThorn, last spotted in the best-selling Buzz Cut (LJ 5/15/96), must come to grips with his own paralysis?the result of a savage beating?while holed up in a pain clinic run by a mad scientist.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. From BooklistHall's hermit-sleuth Thorn has long been one of the most appealing and complex characters in crime fiction, but here he extends his range still further, taking the Travis McGee^-style genre hero to an altogether new level. Ensconced in his Key Largo beach house, Thorn seems to have carved a lasting separate peace with the modern world until a senseless crime drives the other side of his personality to the fore, the side that says, "There's something broken, and I have to fix it." What's broken this time, though, is Thorn himself, mysteriously paralyzed from the waist down after attempting to confront an apparent prowler. The story begins with the slaughter of several dolphins--killed for their endorphins, the key ingredient in a miracle, pain-killing drug--and extends to Thorn's distant past and his relationship with his best childhood friend, who has been nursing a grudge against Thorn for decades. All of Thorn's unresolved conflicts--Is he running away from the world or trying to save it?--come to the fore here, as Hall makes his hero (and the reader) face simultaneously the pain of powerlessness and the selfishness at the heart of a knight errant's gallantry. And yet, we cheer when Thorn sallies forth one more time, wheelchair-bound but determined to draw on the "white knot of gristle at his stubborn core." Melding the magnetic pull of the archetypal hero on a quest with the flesh-and-blood humanity of a vulnerable man trapped between conflicting needs, Hall masterfully works both ends of the genre street, transforming the beach-bum sleuth into an everyman while at the same time allowing readers to wonder if perhaps we, too, might find a stubborn core of our own, if only we plumbed deep enough. Popular fiction at its absolute best. Bill Ott

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 element: 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.**

In the first Thorn mystery, a troubled soul—Thorn—hunts for the men who killed the woman who raised him 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 men 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. Soon he loses 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.

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 that readers have come to expect from his Thorn series, Hall takes readers deep into America's own Heart of Darkness in Forests of the Night. 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...

Eighteen years ago, a girl shot down a rapist while her father's lawnmower sputtered in the yard outside. Somewhere in the heat and shadows of that day, Alexandra Rafferty took on the burden of her deed, and forged a bond of silence with her cop father. But now Alexandra's husband has left, her father is clinging to his health, and a Miami serial killer is leaving behind death scenes that go beyond the horrific. For Alexandra, her life and work are exploding—exposing the truth about the killer she seeks, the lover she's choosing, and one summer afternoon that has never gone away...Body Language is one of James W. Hall's greatest Thorn mysteries—a heartfelt and gripping thriller.

Thorn tracks the killer of an old friend through the Florida Keys A few months have passed since Thorn tracked down the men who raped and murdered his foster mother—a hunt that left six dead, with Thorn nearly among them. His lover, an attorney worn down by defending the scum of South Florida, has moved out of state, and now Thorn is alone to make a new life from the shambles of the old. But death is not ready to leave him be.   When an old friend, ex-FBI agent Gaeton Richards, vanishes, Thorn has a hunch he can find him. He knows every canal and back alley of Key West, and the name of every scumbag who might know something about the missing cop. The hunt takes him into the heart of organized crime in the Florida Keys—an underworld in which asking questions may cost Thorn his life.