The Basement

New York is a city full of strangers. For NYPD detectives Turner and Marcinko, none are harder to figure out than the serial killer on the loose torturing and killing young women. In fact, right now, somewhere in the city, a woman is being held captive in a basement and it is up to the detectives to find her and the killer—before it’s too late.

As pressure mounts on Turner and Marcinko, their prime suspect is screenwriter wannabe Marvin Waller. He is becoming increasingly frustrated by his lack of success and the cops think he might be channeling his anger into murder—but he doesn’t seem to be at all concerned that they are hot on his trail. As Turner and Marcinko close in on Waller they have to wonder: is he the killer? And if he isn’t—who is?

Fusing shifting viewpoints with a growing sense of dread and almost unbearable suspense, the UK’s thriller master Stephen Leather arrives on the shores of the United States with The Basement, his most terrifying work to date.

Like William Goldman’s No Way to Treat a Lady (1964), this is a lean thriller involving a cat-and-mouse game between a killer and the police. The investigators—the antagonistic Turner and the sympathetic Marcinko— have zeroed in on their prime suspect, Marvin Waller, a prolific (but as yet unproduced) screenwriter whose arrogance and lack of cooperativeness seem to confirm their suspicions. But Marvin steadfastly maintains his innocence, at the same time taunting the cops, goading them into actions that work to Marvin’s advantage (although exactly what he’s up to is a mystery to us). Marvin is an intriguing creation—clever, intelligent, and manipulative—and the author keeps us on our toes, trying to figure out if the guy is a killer or just an egomaniac. Some writers might have made the mistake of beefing the story up with multiple subplots, but the novel’s length is exactly appropriate for the story Leather is telling. With a final-act surprise that’s guaranteed to knock readers out of their seats, the novel is impossible to put down. --David Pitt

Stephen Leather is one of the UK's most successful thriller writers. Before becoming a novelist he was a journalist for more than ten years on newspapers such as The Times, the Daily Mail and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. Before that, he was employed as a biochemist for ICI, shoveled limestone in a quarry, worked as a baker, a petrol pump attendant, a barman, and worked for the Inland Revenue. He began writing full time in 1992 and his bestsellers have been translated into more than ten languages. He has also written for television on such shows as “London's Burning,” “The Knock,” and the BBC's “Murder in Mind” series and two of his books, The Stretch and The Bombmaker, were filmed for TV. His ebooks have spent more than six months on the UK Kindle Top 100 and for several months he had four titles in the UK Kindle Top 10. You can find out more from his website, www.stephenleather.com.