UNITED STATES AUTHOR · FICTION · SUSPENSE
Jeff Abbott
Also known as: JEFF ABBOTT
Jeff Abbott (born 1963) is a U.S. suspense novelist. He has degrees in History and English from Rice University. He lives in Austin, Texas. Before writing full-time, he was a creative director at an advertising agency. His early novels were traditional detective fiction, but in recent years he has turned to writing thriller fiction. A theme of his work is the idea of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary danger and fighting to return to their normal lives. His novels are published in several countries and have also been bestsellers in the United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland, Germany, France and Portugal.
A spectre is haunting humanity: the spectre of fear.
— from Fear
Most acclaimed
Panic
Panic began as so many things do in Carp, a dead-end town of 12,000 people in the middle of nowhere: because it was summer, and there was nothing else to do. Heather never thought she would compete in Panic, a legendary game played by graduating seniors, where the stakes are high and the payoff is even higher. She’d never thought of herself as fearless, the kind of person who would fight to stand out. But when she finds something, and someone, to fight for, she will discover that she is braver than she ever thought. Dodge has never been afraid of Panic. His secret will fuel him, and get him all the way through the game, he’s sure of it. But what he doesn't know is that he’s not the only one with a secret. Everyone has something to play for. For Heather and Dodge, the game will bring new alliances, unexpected revelations, and the possibility of first love for each of them—and the knowledge that sometimes the very things we fear are those we need the most.
Run
Since their mother's death, Tip and Teddy Doyle have been raised by their loving, possessive, and ambitious father. As the former mayor of Boston, Bernard Doyle wants to see his sons in politics, a dream the boys have never shared. But when an argument in a blinding New England snowstorm inadvertently causes an accident that involves a stranger and her child, all Bernard Doyle cares about is his ability to keep his children—all his children—safe. Set over a period of twenty-four hours, Run takes us from the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard to a home for retired Catholic priests in downtown Boston. It shows us how worlds of privilege and poverty can coexist only blocks apart from each other, and how family can include people you've never even met. As in her bestselling novel Bel Canto, Ann Patchett illustrates the humanity that connects disparate lives, weaving several stories into one surprising and endlessly moving narrative. Suspenseful and stunningly executed, Run is ultimately a novel about secrets, duty, responsibility, and the lengths we will go to protect our children.
Fear
The publication of Children of the Arbat in 1988 established Anatoli Rybakov as one of the most important Russian authors of the century. Now, in a long-awaited novel - the first since his magnificent international bestseller - Rybakov has written Fear: a stunning account of Stalin's purges. Rybakov brings alive a generation and a nation on the brink of self-destruction with the story of Sasha Pankratov, a young man sent into Siberian exile after a flippant and inadvertently impolitic remark in a school newspaper. No longer the idealistic youth of Rybakov's first novel, but a knowledgeable victim with hard-won wisdom, Sasha is released to make his way across a country where the mass arrests have continued, but the Party faithful - the original creators of the Bolshevik Revolution - are now subject to arrest, torture, trial, and death. In his profound rendering of Stalin's mind and personality, Rybakov proves his extraordinary skills as both historian and craftsman. His depiction of the dynamics of terrorism is equally deft: the psychological molding of a once hopeful generation into fearful, self-protective informers; and, even more devastating, Stalin's conscious twisting of a self-serving but essentially banal bureaucracy into a horde of prosecutorial demons whose zeal and inventiveness surpass Torquemada's inquisitors. At once an epic saga, a chilling exposition of terrorism, and a deeply etched, unmatched portrait of Stalin, Fear confirms Rybakov's stature among the classic historical writers of our time.