HighBridge will publish the audio edition of Thomas H. Cook’s new novel, A Dancer in the Dust, which will release this fall in print from Mysterious Press. It will be narrated by the estimable Ray Chase. Cook’s most recent book, Sandrine’s Case, is a well-deserved finalist for the 2014 Edgar Award for Best Novel, but as great as that book is (and it’s terrific), I think A Dancer in the Dust is even better. Cook returns to themes he explored with great success in The Crime of Julian Wells, notably the human (particularly male) capacity for false confidence bordering on arrogance that can lead to disastrous unintended consequences for others (particularly female others). As in Julian Wells, genocide provides the macro manifestation of such consequences, and as in that novel and Sandrine’s Case, it is the hubris of men who think they are in control and know what is best for others that is the germinal condition of both private tragedy and the larger devastations. No one mines the depths of human anguish that result from self-delusion with more acuity and poignancy than Thomas Cook. A Dancer in the Dust may be his masterpiece.