Crossword - Hardcover

Rawlings, William, Jr.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1891799509 ISBN 13: 9781891799501

Publisher: Harbor House, 2006

Synopsis

A Yankee lawyer semi-retired from a prestigious New York firm. Clues hidden in a series of crossword puzzles. One of America’s leading art auction houses. Missing millions stolen from a Middle Eastern terror group. The planned assassination of Georgia’s senior Senator. They are all woven together in the intricately crafted and fast-moving plot of Crossword, Rawlings’s fourth and arguably best novel.Matt Rutherford (of The Rutherford Cipher) finds himself dragged unwillingly into having to search for the cause of one murder which will result in his own assassination if he fails to solve the puzzle. Joining forces with the brilliant Lisa Li, the two are caught in a life and death struggle between forces of good and evil, neither of which can be trusted.As one reviewer wrote, “The climaxes keep coming.” You’ll be on the edge of your seat until the very end.

About this title

About the Author:

Dr. William Rawlings, Jr. was born and raised in “The Center of the Universe”—Sandersville, Georgia—where he still lives and practices medicine when he’s not busy growing pine trees, traveling, restoring old buildings or writing books. He is married to the former Elizabeth Dunwody of Macon and is the proud father of two girls.“I live on a piece of land that has been in my family for nearly 200 years,” Rawlings notes. “Like my father, his father and generations before, we seem to have settled down and have no particular desire to leave this undistinguished bit of rural clay. Lewis Thomas once wrote that an author’s entire world revolves around the tip of his pen. My world, and my perspective of it, is deeply shaped by who I am and where I live.” At one time, Rawlings planned to stay in academic medicine. Fortunately, he explains, he realized that such a career would have been far too confining. As a child and young adult his maternal Uncle Jesse was his hero and role model. “Exceptionally intelligent, he was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of North Carolina,” Rawlings recalls. “He worked for a several years in the Midwest before coming home to open a hardware and farm equipment business. The truth be told, he had inherited several thousand acres from my grandfather, so much of the time he stayed down on the farm and read. He had me reading Lolita at age 12 with dictionary in hand, and The New Yorker and Scientific American instead of comic books. He taught me to hunt, to drink beer and, with regard to my parents, to remember that, ‘What they don’t know won’t hurt them.’ I had a pleasant childhood.” Concerning why Rawlings chooses to write, he explains, “Southern men tell stories. This is not a unique observation, but one that I arrived at on my own. I have been lots of places and done and seen lots of things. I have lots of stories. Some are fun, some are fascinating, some are almost unbelievable, but they’re true.” “My Professor of Humanities at Emory once said that the difference between a writer and an ordinary man is the writer’s ability to capture in words a moment in time. The measure of the writer’s success is his ability to reproduce the same scene and the same emotions in the mind of the reader as were felt by the writer when he experienced or envisioned that moment. That is my goal. I like to tell stories. It is not much of a stretch to string them all together and call them a plot, or to embellish them a bit and call them a novel.”

About this edition

• Publisher: Harbor House
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1891799509
• ISBN 13: 9781891799501
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 301