First Thrills: High-Octane Stories from the Hottest Thriller Authors »

Lee Child is the author of thirteen Jack Reacher thrillers, including the New York Times bestsellers Persuader, The Enemy, One Shot, The Hard Way, and #1 bestsellers Bad Luck and Trouble and Nothing to Lose. His debut, Killing Floor, won both the Anthony and the Barry awards for Best First Mystery, and The Enemy won both the Barry and Nero awards for Best Novel. Foreign rights in the Jack Reacher series have sold in forty territories. All titles have been optioned for major motion pictures.

New York Times bestselling author Lee Child and the International Thriller Writers, Inc. present a collection of remarkable stories in First Thrills.  Showcasing many of the organization's bestselling authors as well as rising stars in the genre, here are twenty-five brand-new, never-before published, stories packed with murder, mystery, and mayhem.

*A cunning criminal thinks he can use a child to take the rap for his crimes.

*A hospital intern turned body-snatcher.

*A priest who comes face to face with his wife’s murderer on death row.

*A confederate soldier comes home to his love, but changed by more than just the war….he comes back wrong.

*The discovery of a flying saucer in the deep sea brings one man to the brink of a massive revelation.

*A dying man’s last request proves to his ex-wife that he’s still rotten to the core. 

*A clandestine operative finds himself caught in a wicked game of confusion . . . but who is calling the shots?  

 No matter what type of thriller you read, you’ll find something here that will entertain you . . . and perhaps a new writer you’ll cherish for years to come.

Publishers Weekly

Child, the creator of the Jack Reacher series (Gone Tomorrow, etc.), offers a mixed bag in this anthology of 25 original stories by members of ITW (International Thriller Writers), divided between fledgling authors and established names such as Gregg Hurwitz, Stephen Coonts, and Heather Graham. Daniel James Palmer and Michael Palmer’s “The Dead Club,” in which a greedy doctor joins a betting club that gambles on when unidentified patients will expire, does the best job at making the genre work in short form. Child, by contrast, misses the mark with the less than gripping “The Bodyguard,” an account of how the narrator became an ex-bodyguard. Of the newcomers, Rip Gerber’s “Last Supper,” about a grieving widower’s plot for revenge, is well-paced and compelling, while Ryan Brown’s supernaturally tinged “Suspended” isn’t. Other contributors include Ken Bruen, John Lescroart, and Karin Slaughter. Steve Berry, ITW’s current president, provides an afterword. (June)