First Thrills: Volume 1: Short Stories

by Lee Child, Lee Child (Editor), Michael Palmer, Daniel Palmer, Karen Dionne

Overview

New York Times bestselling author Lee Child and the International Thriller Writers, Inc. present a collection of remarkable stories in First Thrills.

From small-town crime stories to sweeping global conspiracies, this is a cross section of today's hottest thriller-writing talent. This original collection is now split into four e-book volumes, packed with murder, mystery, and mayhem!

First Thrills: Volume 1 contains stories six original stories by:

Lee Child
Michael Palmer and Daniel James Palmer
Karen Dionne
J.T. Ellison
Ryan Brown
Rip Gerber
Sean Michael Bailey

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429948982
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/07/2011
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	32
Sales rank:	129,024
File size:	506 KB

About the Author

LEE CHILD is the number-one internationally bestselling author of more than a dozen Reacher thrillers, including the New York Times bestsellers The Enemy, One Shot, The Hard Way, and the number-one bestselling novels 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 the Nero Awards for Best Novel. Child, a native of England and a former television director, lives in New York City.

DANIEL JAMES PALMER holds a master's degree in communications from Boston University, and is a musician, songwriter, and software professional. His debut thriller novel, Delirious, was published in early 2011. He lives with his wife and two children in one of those sleepy New England towns.

MICHAEL PALMER (1942-2013) wrote internationally bestselling novels of medical suspense, including The First Patient, The Second Opinion, The Last Surgeon, A Heartbeat Away, Oath of Office and Political Suicide. His book Extreme Measures was adapted into a movie starring Hugh Grant and Gene Hackman. His books have been translated into thirty-five languages.

KAREN DIONNE is the internationally bestselling author of the psychological suspense novel The Marsh King's Daughter, which won the Crimson Scribe Award from Suspense Magazine. Dionne co-founded the online writers community Backspace, and organized the Backspace Writers Conferences in New York City and the Salt Cay Writers Retreat.

J.T. ELLISON (The Cold Room) is the bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Taylor Jackson series. She was recently named Best Mystery/Thriller Writer of 2008 by the Nashville Scene. She lives in Nashville with her husband and a poorly trained cat.

As an actor, RYAN BROWN has held contract roles on The Young and the Restless and Guiding Light. He has also appeared on Law&Order: SVU, and starred in two feature films for Lifetime Television. His first novel, Play Dead, a comic supernatural thriller, was published in May 2010, and his short story "Jeepers Peepers" appeared in ITW's 2010 Young Adult Anthology Fear: 13 Stories of Suspense and Horror.

RIP GERBER'S first thriller, Pharma, was a bestseller in Germany in 2007. Rip received his biochemical degree from the University of Virginia and his master's from Harvard Business School. Rip lives in San Francisco, California.

SEAN MICHAEL BAILEY is the pen name for the New York Times bestselling author of crime nonfiction who went from the dark side to the darker side to write the thriller 1787.

LEE CHILD is the number-one internationally bestselling author of the Jack Reacher thrillers, including the New York Times bestsellers The Enemy, One Shot, The Hard Way, and the number-one bestselling novels 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 the Nero Awards for Best Novel. Child, a native of England and a former television director, lives in New York City.

Michael Palmer (1942-2013) wrote internationally bestselling novels of medical suspense, including The First Patient, The Second Opinion, The Last Surgeon, A Heartbeat Away, Oath of Office and Political Suicide. His book Extreme Measures was adapted into a movie starring Hugh Grant and Gene Hackman. His books have been translated into thirty-five languages.

Palmer earned his bachelor's degree at Wesleyan University, and he attended medical school at Case Western Reserve University. He trained in internal medicine at Boston City and Massachusetts General Hospitals. He spent twenty years as a full-time practitioner of internal and emergency medicine. In addition to his writing, Palmer was an associate director of the Massachusetts Medical Society Physician Health Services, devoted to helping physicians troubled by mental illness, physical illness, behavioral issues, and chemical dependency.

He lived in eastern Massachusetts.

DANIEL PALMER is the author of several critically-acclaimed suspense novels, including Delirious and Desperate. After receiving his master's degree from Boston University, he spent a decade as an e-commerce pioneer. A recording artist, accomplished blues harmonica player, and lifelong Red Sox fan, Daniel lives in New Hampshire with his wife and two children, where he is currently at work on his next novel.

DANIEL JAMES PALMER holds a master's degree in communications from Boston University, and is a musician, songwriter, and software professional. His debut thriller novel, Delirious, was published by Kensington Publishing in early 2011. He lives with his wife and two children in one of those sleepy New England towns.

J.T. ELLISON (The Cold Room) is the bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Taylor Jackson series. She was recently named Best Mystery/Thriller Writer of 2008 by the Nashville Scene. She lives in Nashville with her husband and a poorly trained cat.
RIP GERBER'S first thriller, Pharma (Random House), was a bestseller in Germany in 2007. Rip received his biochemical degree from the University of Virginia and his master's from Harvard Business School. Rip lives in San Francisco, California, and does make a run to the market when asked. Over forty varieties of mushrooms and one hundred cooking terms are mentioned in his story. Happy Hunting!
SEAN MICHAEL BAILEY is the pen name for the New York Times bestselling author of crime nonfiction who went from the dark side to the darker side to write the thriller 1787.

Hometown:

Birmingham, England

Date of Birth:

1954

Place of Birth:

Coventry, England

Education:

Sheffield University

Website:

http://www.leechild.com

Table of Contents

The Bodyguard / Lee Child
The Dead Club / Michael Palmer&Daniel James Palmer
Calling The Shots / Karen Dionne
Killing Carol Ann / J. T. Ellison
Suspended / Ryan Brown
Last Supper / Rip Gerber
Invisible / Sean Michael Bailey

Interviews

The Fan Letter by Lee Child

They say the past is another country, and in my case it really was: provincial England at the end of the fifties and the start of the sixties, the last gasp of the post-war era, before it surrendered to the tectonic shift sparked by the Beatles. My family was neither rich nor poor, not that either condition had much meaning in a society with not much to buy and not much to lack. We accumulated toys at the rate of two a year: one on our birthdays, and one at Christmas. We had a big table radio (which we called "the wireless") in the dining room, and in the living room we had a black and white fishbowl television, full of glowing tubes, but there were only two channels, and they went off the air at ten in the evening, after playing the National Anthem, for which some families stood up, and sometimes we saw a double bill at the pictures on a Saturday morning, but apart from that we had no entertainment.

So we read books. As it happens I just saw some old research from that era which broke down reading habits by class (as so much was categorized in England at that time) and which showed that fully fifty percent of the middle class regarded reading as their main leisure activity. The figure for skilled workers was twenty-five percent, and even among laborers ten percent turned to books as a primary choice.

Not that we bought them. We used the library. Ours was housed in a leftover WW2 Nissen hut (the British version of a Quonset hut) which sat on a bombed-out lot behind a church. It had a low door and a unique warm, musty, dusty smell, which I think came partly from the worn floorboards and partly from the books themselves, of which there were not very many. I finished with the children's picture books by the time I was four, and had read all the chapter books by the time I was eight, and had read all the grown-up books by the time I was ten.

Not that I was unique - or even very bookish. I was one of the rough kids. We fought and stole and broke windows and walked miles to soccer games, where we fought some more. We were covered in scabs and scars. We had knives in our pockets - but we had books in our pockets too. Even the kids who couldn't read tried very hard to, because we all sensed there was more to life than the gray, pinched, post-war horizons seemed to offer. Traveling farther than we could walk in half a day was out of the question - but we could travel in our heads ... to Australia, Africa, America ... by sea, by air, on horseback, in helicopters, in submarines. Meeting people unlike ourselves was very rare ... but we could meet them on the page. For most of us, reading - and imagining, and dreaming - was as useful as breathing.

My parents were decent, dutiful people, and when my mother realized I had read everything the Nissen hut had to offer - most of it twice - she got me a library card for a bigger place the other side of the canal. I would head over there on a Friday afternoon after school and load up with the maximum allowed - six titles - which would make life bearable and get me through the week. Just. Which sounds ungrateful - my parents were doing their best, no question, but lively, energetic kids needed more than that time and place could offer. Once a year we went and spent a week in a trailer near the sea - no better or worse a vacation than anyone else got, for sure, but usually accompanied by lashing rain and biting cold and absolutely nothing to do.

The only thing that got me through one such week was Von Ryan's Express by David Westheimer. I loved that book. It was a WW2 prisoner-of-war story full of tension and suspense and twists and turns, but its biggest "reveal" was moral rather than physical - what at first looked like collaboration with the enemy turned out to be resistance and escape. I read it over and over that week and never forgot it.

Then almost forty years later, when my own writing career was picking up a head of steam, I got a fan letter signed by a David Westheimer. The handwriting was shaky, as if the guy was old. I wondered, could it be? I wrote back and asked, are you the David Westheimer? Turned out yes, it was. We started a correspondence that lasted until he died. I met him in person at a book signing I did in California, near his home, which gave me a chance to tell him how he had kept me sane in a rain-lashed trailer all those years ago. He said he had had the same kind of experience forty years before that. Now I look forward to writing a fan letter to a new author years from now ... and maybe hearing my books had once meant something special to him or her. Because that's what books do - they dig deeper, they mean more, they stick around forever.