The Fate of Katherine Carr (2009)

by Thomas H. Cook

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Showing 1-5 of 9 (next | show all)

Loved it. A wonderful, bizarre mystery. (

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pidgeon92 | Apr 1, 2013 |

Just a comment - not a review.
A very weird book. Unsatisfying. (

)

dablackwood | May 25, 2011 |

A great thriller which whilst reading makes you want to keep your own children within sight at all times..it gives you an insight into the horror of life's cruelties.. (

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ilurvebooks | Dec 9, 2010 |

I found this book extremely boring and confusing! (

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marsap | Sep 20, 2010 |

Thomas Cook has written a complex story-within-a-story-within-a-story that examines the nature of evil. George Gates is a newspaper reporter of human interest stories whose only son was brutally murdered at the age of eight by a person who was never apprehended. He becomes interested in, and begins to explore, the case of Katherine Carr, a woman who disappeared twenty years earlier. Added to the poignancy is a child dying of progeria, whom he befriends. Together, they explore Katherine Carr's story. Supernatural elements blend with random facts throughout this novel. (

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pdebolt | Mar 6, 2010 |

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thingScore 75

Every Thomas H. Cook novel is a subtle mind game, but The Fate of Katherine Carr is positively haunting.

added by Shortride | editThe New York Times, Marilyn Stasio (Jul 5, 2009)

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The Fate of Katherine Carr

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Publishers Weekly's Best Books: 2009 (Fiction)

Epigraph

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;
All Discord, Harmony not understood
All partial Evil, universal Good.
- ALEXANDER POPE, An Essay on Man

Dedication

For Susan M. Terner, without whom, truly, this book would not have been written

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They strike at heat, she said, and so there is no escape.

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Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0151014019, Hardcover)

George Gates used to be a travel writer who specialized in places where people disappeared—Judge Crater, the Lost Colony.Then his eight-year-old son was murdered, the killer never found, and Gates gave up disappearance. Now he writes stories of redemptive triviality about flower festivals and local celebrities for the town paper, and spends his evenings haunted by the image of his son’s last day.

Enter Arlo MacBride, a retired missing-persons detective still obsessed with the unsolved case of Katherine Carr. When he gives Gates the story she left behind—a story of a man stalking a woman named Katherine Carr—Gates too is drawn inexorably into a search for the missing author’s brief life and uncertain fate. And as he goes deeper, he begins to suspect that her tale holds the key not only to her fate, but to his own.

(retrieved from Amazon Sat, 12 Jan 2013 10:17:12 -0500)

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"George Gates was once a travel writer fascinated by places where people disappeared - the busy corner in New York City where Judge Crater was last seen, the ghostly bramble of the Lost Colony. Then his eight-year-old son vanished on a rainy afternoon. His body was later found, but his killer never, and Gates lost his taste for things that disappear. Now he writes trivial stories about flower festivals and local celebrities, and spends his evenings haunted by the image of his son's last day." "Enter Arlo McBride, a retired missing-persons detective who still ponders the case of Katherine Carr, a woman who vanished twenty years before, leaving nothing behind but a short story about an eerie stranger who opened her to love ... and a dark pursuit.". "As Gates is drawn ever more deeply into Katherine's story, he is equally compelled to reconstruct the last days of its author's life, the inner world into which she disappeared before she vanished from the outer one. Inexorably, Gates's inquiry into the fate of Katherine Carr leads to the exploration of his own."--BOOK JACKET.… (more)

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