J. S. Wasko

Just After Sunset - call it dusk, call it twilight, it's a time when human intercourse takes on an unnatural cast, when nothing is quite as it appears, when the imagination begins to reach for shadows as they dissipate to darkness and living daylight can be scared right out of you. It's the perfect time for Stephen King.

Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a horrific accident when he was seven, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself—and his dad. When Charlie is seventeen, he meets a dog named Radar and her aging master, Howard Bowditch, a recluse in a big house at the top of a big hill, with a locked shed in the backyard. Sometimes strange sounds emerge from that shed.

Billy Summers is a man in a room with a gun. He’s a killer for hire and the best in the business. But he’ll do the job only if the target is a truly bad guy. And now Billy wants out. But first there is one last hit. Billy is among the best snipers in the world, a decorated Iraq war vet, a Houdini when it comes to vanishing after the job is done. So what could possibly go wrong?

In this tense thriller, Christian Gillette, CEO of Everest Capital, is approached by a shadowy group representing vast wealth and vague motives. They're a politically conservative alliance interested in a partnership with Gillette's company. Then he's contacted by a charismatic liberal politician named Jesse Wood, who is about to announce his candidacy for president; Wood and his advisors want Gillette to run for vice president. But he's skeptical of both offers.

Having survived his rise to chairman of Everest Capital, Christian Gillette is perched atop the financial industry. Now an ambitious deal-maker named David Wright has caught his eye. But everything comes to a halt when a shadowy man offers new information about Gillette's father and his mysterious death. As he becomes more entangled with the stranger, he feels his grip on Everest weakening - and realizes his life is once more in danger. When all signs begin to point to Wright, what's a chairman to do?

President Wood has a mission for Christian Gillette. There are secret negotiations going on with senior capitalists in post-Communist Cuba concerning the US, and the President wants Gillette to handle it. It is clear, however, that the trail cannot lead back to the Oval Office. Seeing no option but to accept the mission, Gillette heads to Florida with bodyguard Quentin Stiles, leaving his capable protegé Allison Wallace in charge. They are soon 1,000 miles apart and both in grave danger.

Brash, brilliant, handsome Nicholas Deketomis has built a highly successful career as a lawyer, protecting the rights of the innocent while winning multibillion-dollar lawsuits from the powers that be. "Deke" may have come from the wrong side of the tracks, but he's built a wonderful life for his close-knit family. His wife and two children live in a beautiful house in a seaside community along the Florida Panhandle. But their comfortable life is endangered.

Recently engaged and deeply ensconced in her third year of surgical residency in Chicago, Emily Hartford gets a shock when she is called home to Freeport, Michigan, the small town she fled a decade ago after the death of her mother. Her estranged father, the local medical examiner, has had a massive heart attack. At the hospital, she finds her father in near total denial of the seriousness of his condition. He insists that the best thing Emily can do to help him is to take on the autopsy of a senator's teen daughter whose sudden, unexplained death has just rocked the sleepy town.