The Paul Cleave Collection #1 - Blood Men, Collecting Cooper, and The Laughterhouse

Blood Men, winner of the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel of 2011: Edward Hunter has it all—a beautiful wife and daughter, a great job, a bright future… and a very dark past. Twenty years ago, a serial killer was caught, convicted, and locked away in the country’s most hellish of penitentiaries. That man was Edward’s father. Edward has struggled his entire life to put the nightmares of his childhood behind him. But a week before Christmas, violence once again makes an unwelcome appearance into his world. Suddenly he’s going to need the help of his father, a man he hasn’t seen since he was a boy. Is Edward destined to be just like him, to become a man of blood?

Collecting Cooper, a Suspense Magazine Best Book of 2011: People are disappearing in Christchurch. Cooper Riley, a psychology professor, doesn’t make it to work one day. Emma Green, one of his students, doesn’t make it home. When ex-cop Theodore Tate is released from a four-month prison stint, he’s asked by Green’s father to help find Emma. After all, Tate was in jail for nearly killing her in a DUI accident the year before, so he owes him. Big time. What neither of them knows is that a former mental patient is holding people prisoner as part of his growing collection of serial killer souvenirs. Now he has acquired the ultimate collector’s item—an actual killer. Meanwhile, clues keep pulling Tate back to Grover Hills, the mental institution that closed down three years ago. Very bad things happened there. Those who managed to survive would prefer keeping their memories buried. Tate has no choice but to unearth Grover Hills’ dark past if there is any chance of finding Emma Green and Cooper Riley alive.

The Laughterhouse: Theodore Tate never forgot his first crime scene—ten-year-old Jessica found dead in "the Laughterhouse," an old abandoned slaughterhouse with the S painted over. The killer was found and arrested. Justice was served. Or was it? Fifteen years later, a new killer arrives in Christchurch, and he has a list of people who were involved in Jessica’s murder case, one of whom is the unfortunate Dr. Stanton, a man with three young girls. If Tate is going to help them, he has to find the connection between the killer, the Laughterhouse, and the city’s suddenly growing murder rate. And he needs to figure it out fast, because Stanton and his daughters have been kidnapped, and the doctor is being forced to make an impossible decision: which one of his daughters is to die first.

"An intense adrenalin rush from start to finish." —S.J. Watson

"A bloody noir thriller, one often descending into a violent abyss reminiscent of Thomas Harris, creator of Hannibal Lecter." —Kirkus Reviews

"A wonderful book.... The final effect is that tingling in the neck hairs that tells us an artist is at work." ­—Booklist, starred review