Potboiler
A professor with long-dead literary aspirations. His best friend, a thriller writer who out-sells James Patterson, lost at sea. A secret manuscript and answer to all his prayers…
More about Potboiler:
Jesse’s Other Books
Trouble
Jesse Kellerman’s debut thriller wowed the critics. His latest sets the bar even higher.
Young, idealistic, and overworked, Jonah is living the lonely life of a medical student in New York City when he accidentally stumbles across a murder in progress: a woman, being stabbed to death in the middle of the sidewalk. Without thinking, he rushes in to protect her-inadvertently killing her attacker in the process.
Thrust into the media spotlight, crushed by guilt, Jonah quickly learns that heroism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. He receives a shower of unwanted attention-and hostility-from his superiors. The district attorney wants to “interview” him. The family of the dead man wants revenge.
Everything is further upended when the woman whose life he saved shows up at his apartment. What begins as a thank-you drink turns into a wildly passionate love affair. As their relationship deepens, however, Jonah realizes that she isn’t quite the woman she appears to be. His nightmare has only begun, and the price of kindness will turn out to be higher than he could have imagined.
Expertly crafted and chillingly suspenseful, Trouble is a heart-stopper: proof positive that Jesse Kellerman has joined the “first ranks of mystery and suspense writers” (Forbes).
The Executor
Things aren’t going well for Joseph Geist.
He’s broke. His graduate school advisor won’t talk to him. His girlfriend has kicked him out of her apartment, leaving him homeless and alone. It’s a tough spot for a philosopher to be in, and he’s ready to give up when an ad in the local paper catches his eye.
“Conversationalist wanted,” it reads.
Which sounds perfect to Joseph. After all, he’s never done anything in his life except play with words. And the elderly woman behind the ad turns out to be the ideal employer: brilliant, generous, and enchantingly old-world. Before long, Joseph has moved in with her, and has begun to feel quite comfortable in her big, beautiful house.
So comfortable, in fact, that he would do anything to stay there—forever.
From the author of The Genius, a dark parable about the choices we make, and the consequences they bring.
The Genius
The sinister and provocative thriller from crime writing’s freshest new voice.
Ethan Muller is struggling to establish his reputation as a dealer in the cut-throat world of contemporary art when he stumbles onto a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: in a decaying New York slum, an elderly tenant named Victor Cracke has disappeared, leaving behind an enormous trove of original artwork. Nobody can say anything for certain about Cracke except that he came and went in solitude for nearly forty years, his genius hidden and unacknowledged.
All that is about to change.
So what if, strictly speaking, the art doesn’t belong to Ethan? He can sell it—and he does just that, mounting a wildly successful show. Buyers clamor. Critics sing. Museums are interested, and Ethan’s photo looks great in The New York Times.
And that’s when things go to hell.
Suddenly the police are interested in talking to him. It seems that Victor Cracke had a nasty past, and the drawings hanging in the Muller Gallery have begun to look a lot less like art and a lot more like evidence.
Is Cracke a genius? A murderer? Both? Is there a difference? Sucked into an investigation four decades cold, Ethan will uncover a secret legacy of shame and death, one that touches horrifyingly close to home.
Kellerman’s tight, assured prose is electrifying, exhilarating, and compulsively readable. Part confessional, part philosophical inquiry, The Genius is the detective novel reimagined like never before.
Sunstroke
UNSTROKE is the blazingly original debut from the most exciting new voice in crime fiction today–a superbly crafted modern noir filled with secrets, heartbreak, and mordant humor.
Gloria Mendez is thirty-six, single, and hopelessly in love with her oblivious boss, a soft-spoken loner twenty years her senior. Her friends might urge her to look for someone more her age, but Gloria knows the real thing when she sees it.
So when he disappears while on vacation in Mexico, it’s Gloria who goes in search of him. As she follows his trail deep into the desert, she runs face-first into a staggering history of betrayal and death: the wreckage of a hidden past. Carl Perreira was not the man she thought she knew—nor was he anything she could have imagined.
Her journey will teach her as much about herself as it does about Carl. And as she plunges closer to his fleeing shadow, she will find herself fighting not only for the truth, but for her life.
Serpentine, thought provoking, and brimming with edge-of-the-seat suspense, SUNSTROKE is everything a thriller should be. More than a great read, it’s the start of a brilliant career.
