Wealthy Florida matron Abigail Bates is on a canoe trip down a backwater river when suddenly, from out of nowhere, she is held underwater to drown by a strange and merciless killer…
Thorn is aboard a houseboat in Hell’s Bay when he is confronted by Abigail’s son and alluring granddaughter. Thorn soon learns that they are his long-lost relatives-and that he is about to inherit a great fortune. He’s also about to find out that being a member of the Bates family comes with a price…
As he searches for clues about Abigail’s murder, Thorn’s houseboat becomes a precarious island of safety as he and the others find themselves hunted by an invisible enemy. For someone out there knows much more about the Bates family’s dark past than Thorn does. Someone who has lived a lifetime in their shadow-and has seen the damage their wealth and influence has caused. Someone who is determined to exact revenge on the family…no matter what the cost.

A simple black-and-white photograph taken during the 1964 Cassius Clayndash;Sonny Liston fight on Miami Beach may hold the key to a horrific, politically motivated crime forty-two years earlier. After it mysteriously reappears, the photo is burned in an act of arson that sets off a modern-day killing spree reaching from the quiet neighborhoods of Miami to the back corridors of the White House.
What the killer did not know is that a copy of the photograph still remains. When it falls into Thorn’s hands, he and everyone close to him-including his beloved Alexandra-become the targets of madmen and trained hitmen, each of whom has a powerful motive to see the photograph destroyed…and each of whom will go to murderous lengths to make it disappear forever.

Earl Hammond, the wealthy patriarch of a family of ranchers, lies dead, shot just as he was to donate his Coquina Ranch to the state to preserve it from developers. Spearheading the plan to save this environmental treasure was Thorn, a reluctant heir to a secret family fortune, who now finds himself in terrible danger as well. A pair of deviant brothers, both contract killers, kidnap and imprison him in a sinkhole-a dungeon from which there is no escape.
But Frisco Hammond, the dark sheep of the family, is drawn into the investigation of his father’s murder and Thorn’s disappearance. He suspects the crimes are related. Helping him is his brother’s beautiful, troubled wife, Clare. They uncover a trail that leads back to the 1930s, to a cabal of powerful and rich men with a sinister plan.
Silencer pits brother against brother and wife against husband in a thriller that proves once again that James W. Hall is “a master of suspense” (Publishers Weekly).