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. Conducting a class on historical evil, 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 Eddie’s investigation leads him to Great Oaks and to Jack’s own father, 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 even well-intentioned men.
There is more than one author with this name on Goodreads.
Thomas H. Cook has been praised by critics for his attention to psychology and the lyrical nature of his prose. He is the author of more than 30 critically-acclaimed fiction books, including works of true crime. Cook published his first novel, Blood Innocents, in 1980. Cook published steadily through the 1980s, penning such works as the Frank Clemons trilogy, a series of mysteries starring a jaded cop.
He found breakout success with The Chatham School Affair (1996), which won an Edgar Award for best novel. Besides mysteries, Cook has written two true-crime books including the Edgar-nominated Blood Echoes (1993). He lives and works in New York City.
Awards Edgar Allan Poe – Best Novel – The Chatham School Affair Barry Award – Best Novel – Red Leaves Martin Beck Award of the Swedish Academy of Detection – The Chatham School Affair Martin Beck Award of the Swedish Academy of Detection – Red Leaves Herodotus Prize – Fatherhood
My third read by Thomas H. Cook and wow, what a terrific book. Just a genuinely great novel from the first sentence to the last, this one really showcases the talent the author has for words, crafting them just so to express the deepest desires and the most secret of thoughts in such a way that the reader is taken into the mind of the characters. Escapist literature of a sort, I suppose. The title originally put me in mind of something military, which I was glad to know wasn't the case at all, Delta here is strictly geographical. The book is a stunning meditation on class differences, nature of human evil and culpability or the weight of guilt more precisely. Cook did an excellent job with the descriptions and characters on both sides of the invisible fence. The famous adage about good intentions has never been more accurate than in this case of a young wildly idealistic teacher from a wealthy old money southern family deciding to help out his student, a boy from the opposite economic status and social standing, son of a convicted killer. Secrets surface and as secrets tend to, they sweep over like a tide, violent tide in this case. The suspense element in the plot is prominent throughout, but doesn't necessarily make this a suspense novel. From the beginning, the reader is aware of a tragedy, but it is revealed in measured ruminative increments, chapter by chapter until its very tragic end. As with all his books, there is kindness and intelligence and world weariness here, along with Cook's usual erudition and eloquence. This was a great story, sad, smart, thought provoking, exceptionally well written, consistently interesting and genuinely moving. Highly recommended.
Wow. I just read the final page, and I must say, this book was extraordinarily good!! This one is a keeper; I can't keep them all, because space just won't allow for that, but I do like to hang onto some of my favorites that I might like to reread again some day.
I don't remember how I discovered this author, but he has become a top favorite of mine. Master of the Delta is the third (and, by far, the best!) of his that I've read, following Red Leaves and Into the Web. And luckily, I have nine more of his paperbacks on my bookshelves, anxiously waiting to be read!
But on to my review. Master of the Delta is a complex suspense novel that takes place in the Mississippi Delta (hence the title) in the spring of 1954. Jack Branch, in his mid-20's, teaches a specialty class on evil at the local high school. When he assigns his students a term paper on an evil figure of their choosing, young Eddie Miller decides to delve into the life of his own father, who was dubbed the "Coed Killer" for killing a local girl when Eddie was just a kid. The novel has many literary and historical references tied into the class Jack is teaching, most of which I wasn't too familiar with, but which were pretty interesting all the same.
But now I won't say anything else!, because you should just read the book and let the story unfold on its own. It's a good one, very well-written, and I highly recommend it.
Having read the book a while back, I sort of knew what to expect, but I managed to forget enough key plot points in almost two years to make this experience almost fresh. I've gone back to reread my review of the original and all I said still stands. This is a really excellent book, exceptionally well written with terrific erudition and great humanity. The audio book reader did a thoroughly competent job bringing to life the Mississippi of 1950s via its well intentioned yet conflicted narrator. Very enjoyable listening experience. Highly recommended.
I always say Thomas H. Cook is a mystery writer and he is…but I think he is also so much more than that. Master of the Delta is my 8th outing with Cook and it didn’t disappoint, even though some of the themes were familiar. The novel has the propulsive energy of a mystery, a book with a thread of whodunit twined with a ribbon of ‘is this going to end like I think it’s going to end?’ And of course – nothing is ever quite what it seems. But Cook operates on another level and this is where I think he excels.
Master of the Delta is Jack Branch’s story. Branch is a twenty-three year old teacher who has returned to his hometown to teach at Lakeland High School. Branch has had a priviledged upbringing: he grew up at Great Oaks, one of the town’s massive plantation homes. It is 1954.
As a boy I’d 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 dishonour had ever been ascribed.
Branch is a fussy young man – no, fussy isn’t the right word. He’s cocky. He believes his own hype. I don’t mean to say that he is without merit, but his youthful arrogance is partly to blame for events that haunt him for the rest of his life.
And that’s one of the cool things about Master of the Delta (and Cook’s novels in general). Cook always manages to weave past and present together seamlessly so Branch’s story is told as it unfolds, but also from the vantage point of Branch as a much older man – someone who is, from this vantage point at least, able to see his own character flaws.
Branch is teaching a course on evil through the ages and he discovers that one of his students, Eddie Miller, is the son of Luke Miller, the Coed Killer – a man who had killed a local girl and subsequently been killed in jail. Branch encourages Eddie to write a paper about his father. He feels it will help Eddie get out from under the weight of his awful heritage. So Eddie starts to research the father he barely remembers, but when this research reaches into his own life, Branch’s age and inexperience begin to show.
Really, Master of the Delta is a book about fathers and sons, about the part luck plays in how our lives turn out, about kindness and cruelty. It is a book that has something to say about teachers and books and as a teacher who loves books, I enjoyed that. I truly believe Cook is a masterful observor of human life – our weaknesses and our strengths. He might wrap it all up in a mystery, but I can’t think of anyone who does it better than he does.
The flashback is the weakest of all foreshadowing, and it is the device that ruined this book for me. It's a shame too, because Thomas H. Cook uses other foreshadowing as well--hints about the deadliest sin being pride, allusions to the consequences similar characters faced in great literary works. The flashbacks were confusing at best and disruptive to the pace of the story at worst. I don't mind so much if the entire story is a flashback set within a frame story, or if there are flashbacks to a single period of time. But in this case, Cook employs flashbacks to several different periods in the protagonist's life, and this detracted from my enjoyment of the book.
Most of the characters were flat, without much to recommend them. There are a few exceptions, of course--the main character is three-dimensional, if increasingly paranoid. Eddie Miller has depths to him, the exploration of which becomes one of the central pillars of the plot. In a way, the flatness of the material antagonists, such as Dirk Littlefield, serve as a counterpoint to the turmoil within the main character, emphasizing that the true tragedy is a psychological one, preying on the mind and not the body.
My overall impression of this book is that Cook deftly plays on his themes. The struggle is interesting, if not very intense, although toward the end I felt a distinct lack of sympathy toward the protagonist. However, the book itself felt slow, and the prose style was mediocre. While it was not a waste of time, I'm not sorry that I'm finished it either.
Masterful writer, and this novel excels in his ability as a wordsmith. Subtle and sublime nuance in nearly every interaction of the characters with minute detail of all the feelings of a young man and his relevant self-identity in some context to that moment's nuance.
It's prose that is close to poetry at points. And the location feel of placement is nearly perfect.
But saying all that this is the least favorite of all the Cook books I have read so far.
Mainly, I think, it was the subject matter and the protagonists in this one. A very male story, as the great majority of Cook's are. Yes. But these particular characters and the coming of age and realizations? I just couldn't warm to it. Or even connect in any regard. My prejudice? Possibly, as this is a story of a complete "haves" family. "Haves" in the sense of social aristocracy, literary and educational influences, economic choices etc.
My Sicilian mother's image popped into my head several times within long passages of angst in this book. Just popping in there and saying "Save us from those who are constantly crying with a loaf of bread under each arm."
In my desperation for a good read, I reverted to an old childhood habit and pulled a book at random from the library shelves. Like one panning for gold, I unexpectedly had found the mother lode. Thomas Cook is a talented writer who weaves an intense and thought provoking tale of evil, blood lines and life's paths that are shaped by circumstance of birth. The story is set in a small town southern high school of the 50's, but Cook skillfully weaves a tapestry of events that span generations. It is a tale of the low born versus those born of wealth and power. A tale of murder, deceit,love and the random cruelty of life with an ending that is revealing and poignant.
Admittedly, I've not read Cooke for some time. This book, for the most part, I found filled with overblown prose and supercilious narrator. But then, that could well be what Thomas H. Cook was weaving in his story. I listened through to the end and the last disk had much garbling that ruined the ending - so much so that I'll need to find the book and read what I missed. However, there were parts at the end of the story that felt familiar to me - the favored stranger - when Cook talked about the narrator's father's relationship with the young protege.
Perhaps more stars may be appropriate after I've again read the last 2 chapters.
Ugh....this book was really great until the greatness wore off, and the ending came. Even after I rationalized all the reasons why he would've done what he did...I was still unsatisfied. See my lovely bones review for my opinion on this type of book, but regardless, I couldn't put it down the whole time, and I think his theme of evil and what makes a person so was interesting, but the book is loaded with story lines that never seem complete and ambiguous references to things that in the end don't seem to matter, so sorry...disappointed.
Reading Thomas H. Cook invariably involves a journey to the darkness of the human soul. Here we travel with Jack Branch, scion to the plantation rich in the Mississippi Delta and teacher at the local high school, to the land of evil. In a special class he teaches, he explores the most notorious of evil-doers and then finds himself immersed in the evil around him. It is a heart-breaking story resulting in wasted and reduced lives, so human a tale that one feels grief personally. Cook's a master of this stuff!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
This is my 12th Cook book in the past few weeks and I think this was one of the very best. I wonder why he is so obsessed with evil, torture and serial killers? He is obviously brilliant, but I’d love to know his relationship with his own father. Was he the one who instilled gloom, doom, death and despair into all of Mr Cooks writing?
In spite of the subject matter, the author is a master of the poignant style of storytelling that one seldom experiences in contemporary writing.
My second Cook book with lots of food for thought (excuse the play on words:), totally different, but delivered in his same crisp prose. As mentioned on page 12, "...on the way to failure at something great, one often succeeds at something good," works well for the plot, if not necessarily for the outcome:( I've quickly become a fan of Mr. Thomas H. Cook.
This is the story of Jack Branch, a high school teacher currently teaching a class on evil. When he finds out one of his students is the son of the locally infamous Coed Killer, he decides to take the student under his wing. Jack gives an assignment to the class to write a term paper on someone who is evil, and suggests to Eddie that he write about his own father.
Although the storyline was good and carried me along, I had one big problem with the ending: Why did the trial cover so much of Jack's mentoring of Eddie and his term paper? It didn't end up having much at all to do with the actual crimes committed. The entire book which was about this term paper, and Eddie's father, and hints of a secret between Eddie and Jack's father, only to have it all come to absolutely nothing. And I never did figure out if Jack's father was telling the truth about the story of Pip in "The Book of Days" or not. Good storytelling, great characterization, but in the end didn't make much sense.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Trust the tale, not the teller. Jack Branch would have a reader believe he is a great son, teacher, mentor, lover, friend. Certainly every story he tells is intended to convince a reader of this; however, it just ain't so. The truth is much simpler.. Jack is a terrible teacher (what a bore with all those lecures), a dutiful if dimwitted son (his father really would like to go into that nursing home), a rotten mentor, and an out and out liar. Jack tells his story in a coy manner meant to suggest gravitas. Something wicked this way happened (1954 South), and Jack suggests that he is at the center of the tale and responsible for the many tragedies it engenders. The truth is he is more like Zelig in trying to insert himself into everything important in the town. If you are interested in how first person narrators twist stories to benefit themselves, this is an interesting take on the genre.
Master of the Delta by Thomas H. Cook (2009) is a very good crime fiction centering on a teacher from a wealthy background in the 1950's teaching high school kids from the poor side of town called The Bridges in Mississippi. One of his students is the son of a murderer who was killed in jail...and the plot builds from there. The book contains all the elements of Cook's writing, that being the best prose of this current era, seamless-fractured-time-lines, strong character development...Cook is just a great writer. The story was a page turner, but, I felt the ending, while concluding logically, lost a little of it's steam. It was almost like Cook finished the book off to get started on his next one...and...I felt the narrator/protagonist was kind of a wimp. But, I recommend Master of the Delta especially for the Cook completest...4.0 outta 5.0
Meh. Narrator has a gratingly condescending tone, perhaps supposed to show regret? The narrative is full of pompus literary references and ridiculously long metaphors. There are some well crafted sentences, so I know the author can turn a phrase but the flashbacks are inconsistent and not smooth. It's really all over the place and the story progresses rather slowly. The feeling of doom and story building ultimately led to a let down in my opinion. I so WANTED to like it, it just could have been executed better by a different author. I felt like this was a draft or first novel.
I was a bit disappointed in this book. Every THC book I've read has been a real page turner with a twist that would shock and surprise. This one just didn't pack an emotional punch. To be honest I didn't feel the main character was particularly interesting so I didn't find his story interesting. His interactions with his father were boring and the character comes across as a snob. While not what I expected, not completely horrible either.
Not bad. Good, unexpected twist at the end. A young teacher in the deep south is from a wealthy plantation family. He teaches at a high school were the poor kids attend. One student is the son of the alleged (never tried, never convicted) "co-ed killer' who was murdered in prison by another inmate before it could go to trial. The teachers decides to mentor the young man, but all his great intentions backfire.
El escritor es pura magia. La novela en sí es irrelevante en comparación a la escritura o el ambiente que crea. Descrito en una palabra, este libro es "nostalgia". Retoma muy bien el estilo de Into the Web, mi favorito.
Another fine book by Cook, though this one is a bit more convoluted in its story and in its composition, and in a manner that is not always entirely successful. Still, fans of Cook will thoroughly enjoy this.
I will add two points. First, the hinge of guilt is on mistake revealed. But unlike many writers with a wide readership, Cook here is subtle enough to simply present it and forbear from telling the readers later that he has done so. That is a nice touch.
Secondly, I have often noted how reading Cook is like peeling an onion layer by layer. This quote it well expresses his manner: ‘But as my father had once said, to every answer we must append “the eternal and yet,’” that hedge against certainty that forces us to admit that life remains guesswork at best.’ so every turn in his plots is always met with an “and yet…”
I must start by saying that I have confused author Thomas Cook with Thomas Perry, author of the Jane Whitefield series and spent too much time trying to figure out how the same author could have such different styles. Now I know!
This book seemed almost too literary to be "pop fiction" as it opened but quickly deteriorated into just another novel that was badly in need of a strong editor. I feel the story went on its rambling path for far too long in a way that was intended to hold the reader's interest but found me saying, "Enough already!" The second half of the book was full of typos and grammar errors which always set my teeth on edge. Too bad.
A mystery set in the Delta of Mississippi in the mid 1950's, Master of the Delta, is the story of a young man who returns to his family home to teach at the local high school. He teaches a class on the history of evil, which brings up the murder of a young girl over a decade ago, and it turns out that one of his students is the son of the murderer, known as the Coed Killer. It is the story of the relationship of fathers and sons, and of the upper class and working class in small Southern towns. The book is full of flashbacks, and foreshadowing, which I found rather confusing.
This book is odd. It was slow to start, and when I thought about throwing in the towel, it picked up some…so I stuck with it. Big mistake! It goes from one time to another all throughout the book (which is fine if it made sense) and at the end I just felt confused. I thought I missed something…but I didn’t. If anyone cares to explain the ending to me, please go ahead! I won’t be reading another from this author.
This is not a story, but many many stories. Told in layers, woven through and upon characters fully painted yet viewed in glimpses. If I'd owned the book, I would keep it. It is one of very few I could reread.
I kept waiting for something to actually happen, and for this book to become worthy of the high ratings it got. Sadly, all of the constant foreshadowing led to very little, and not until the very end.
Described as a mystery, but I see it as a saga of life on the delta. A story told in Cook's slow, ambling prose interspersed with images from the Old South and also the current futures of the characters.
This book is excellent. Not only does the reader need to try to figure out "who did it", but also what they did. Clues and hints are woes out chapter by chapter but it is not until the end that the crucial clues are provided. So much fun to read.
Esta es una de las novelas en las que el lector sabe que ha pasado una tragedia pero no se conoce exactamente cuál. Por eso, uno permanece en vilo todo el tiempo ansioso por tratar de desentrañar el misterio. Final adecuado aunque quizás no el que más me haya encantado.