Every year, as the anniversary of 9/11 inches closer on the calendar, Kit Capriol scans the memorials published in the New York Times. It's a simple thing to look up a name and phone number, to reach out to surviving family members who might still be yearning for connection with their lost loved one...to offer assistance. After her husband went down in the North Tower, Kit scraped by as an actress, barely supporting herself and her daughter. But now Zoey is in the hospital, bills are due, and the acting work has dried up. Becoming a medium is almost too easy for someone used to pretending for a living—and desperate clients aren't hard to come by.

Now, though, something has changed. The séances Kit holds in her apartment are starting to feel unsettlingly real, and the intriguing man she met at a local bar could be more complicated than he seems. As the voices of the dead grow louder in her head and the walls of her apartment close in, Kit realizes that despite her daughter's absence, she hasn't been quite as alone as she thought...

The husband of Manhattan actor Kit Capriol, the protagonist of this superior thriller from Smith (If She Were Dead), died on 9/11 before learning Kit was pregnant with their first child. The joy of her daughter Zoey’s birth gave Kit a new chance at happiness, but 14 years later, Zoey suddenly collapsed on a subway platform and hit her head. The resulting brain trauma left the girl in a seemingly irreversible coma. Three years after that tragedy, Kit, who’s short on work and has trouble paying the rent and hospital bills, has turned to scouring the obituaries pages for notices marking the anniversary of a death. She then cold calls surviving loved ones and offers to help them connect with the departed. As Kit fakes messages from the beyond, she begins to suspect that she may be getting some real communications from the dead. Meanwhile, her scam attracts the attention of the NYPD, placing her in legal jeopardy. Smith expertly keeps the plot twists coming and maintains uncertainty about exactly what’s going on. Fans of Sarah Waters’s Affinity will be enthralled.

—STARRED review from Publishers Weekly

THE SUMMONING is just his ninth novel, but it may be the one that truly puts him on the map…. It is one of the most unique books I have read this year.

—The Bookreporter

J.P. Smith’s latest thriller is an exquisite labyrinth of plot twists that will leave the reader questioning the line between life and death long after the final clue is revealed. Vivid characters, a complex and engaging storyline, and Smith’s signature gift of sharing with his readers something far more profound than a finely-crafted page-turner, makes The Summoning one of his finest works.

—Traci Medford-Rosow, USA Today bestselling author of Unblinded.

I love a story with a touch of paranormal, and The Summoning delivers in a suspense novel starring Kit, an out-of-work actress who survives by faking seances for family members of 9/11 victims…until the voices of the dead grow real. A dark and murky slow-burn that will take you by surprise.

—Kimberly Belle, international bestselling author of Dear Wife and Stranger in the Lake.

Available in France as La Médium in Gallimard’s Série Noire imprint, and as a Folio paperback.

Longlisted for the 2021 Massachusetts Book Award.

A conversation about The Summoning can be found here.

Amelie and Janet are in love with the same man: Janet's husband.

One knows it; the other doesn't. Or does she?

As bestselling novelist Amelie Ferrar knows, an affair with a married person is like a work of fiction: a kind of spy story with its rules and customs, negotiations and compromises, and many private rituals. But like any spy story, there will inevitably be a betrayal: something will slip, someone else will find out, someone may even die.

As Amelie falls deeper into her obsession with the man she loves—and his wife—the line between the fiction she writes and the reality she lives begins to blur…and the twisted ending to this story is one that not even she could have seen coming.

“Part love story, part exploration into the difficulties of marriage and part psychological thriller, Smith’s latest masterpiece dazzles and delights with plot twists and turns down to the very last sentence. Literally.”

—Traci Medford-Rosow
USA Today bestselling author of Unblinded: One Man’s Courageous Journey through Darkness to Sight and Inflection Point: War and Sacrifice in Corporate America.

“Popular author Amelie Ferrar, the protagonist of this taut, twisted thriller from Smith (The Drowning), is always thinking ahead, envisaging her next plot twist. Though Amelie has relied tangentially on her personal life for inspiration, she finds herself at a crossroads: she thought she was happy—immersed in a two-year affair with a married man, Ben—but she wants more. Her daughter’s in college, her ex-husband’s new wife is expecting, and she feels untethered and alone. Unfortunately, Ben doesn’t feel the need for any changes and has no intention of leaving his wife. Stranger still, Ben’s wife has reached out to Amelie as a friend and confidant. Is it coincidence, karmic comeuppance, or perhaps something more sinister? As Amelie plots the future, on the page and off, she begins to lose control of her narratives with such unexpected and dangerous results as betrayal and death. Smith does a masterful job blending multiple story lines. Readers will find plenty of action, intrigue, and surprises.”

—Publishers Weekly

“In clear prose, Smith spins out a sensuous, sinuous psychological thriller that compels attention to the final line.”

—ALA Booklist

If She Were Dead can be found at most bookstores, or from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Based on a true story. Mine.

When I was eight years old, spending eight weeks in a summer camp in Upstate New York, a swimming counselor told us to jump into the deep water. I couldn’t swim, and had a profound fear of that deep water. But, assuming that I’d immediately take to it as though I were an Olympic swimmer, he instead threw me in, and when I began to panic and drown he took hold of me and swam me out to a raft, only to tell me that I’d either have to swim back on my own or stay there and die. That memory became the beginning of the novel called The Drowning. Because that’s when I disappeared.

***

Every seven years, a boy disappears from Camp Waukeelo.

Who will be next?

It doesn’t take long for a little boy to disappear. Joey Proctor can’t swim, but that doesn’t stop camp counselor Alex Mason from leaving him out on a raft in the middle of the lake in a fit of rage. Alex only meant to scare the kid, teach him a lesson. He didn’t mean to forget about him. But now Joey is gone…and his body is never found.

More than twenty years later, Alex is a success. The proof is there for anyone to see, in the millions of dollars he makes, his lavish house, his beautiful wife and daughters. And no one knows what happened that summer at camp. At least, no one should know. But it looks like Joey Proctor may be back to take his revenge…

“An overbearing alpha male gets his comeuppance in this smart, creepy thriller from Smith. One summer day, when Alex Mason was an arrogant swimming counselor at Camp Waukeelo in the Berkshires, he left timid eight-year-old Joey Proctor behind on a raft in the middle of a lake. Joey inexplicably vanished, but Alex lied well enough to avoid blame. Twenty-one years later, he’s a famous New York real estate developer with a lovely family and a glamorous lifestyle. Then increasingly serious intrusions from his guilty past suggest that someone—or something—remembers Joey’s panic and wants Alex to share it. As it turns out, the immature, violent side of Alex’s nature doesn’t need much prodding to reveal itself. Smith nicely balances the borderline-supernatural events with Alex’s mundane struggles as his blustering defenses crumble. Sharp, clear prose is a plus. This is a remarkably adept performance.”

—STARRED review, Publishers Weekly

“Alex Mason has it all: a lavish lifestyle, a beautiful family, a thriving career. He’s built his life around the certainty that no one would discover what really happened twenty years ago at an idyllic summer camp. He’s wrong. The Drowning is an edge-of-your-seat read.”

—Kaira Rouda, bestselling author of Best Day Ever and What Comes Around

“How many times have you started reading a book, and realized—you could not put it down? Isn’t that the best? And that’s exactly what happened to me with JP Smith’s THE DROWNING. I sat in the chair for hours, I mean not moving, and so much for making dinner. We had pizza, courtesy of JP Smith.”

—Award-winning mystery-writer and investigative reporter for ABC news in Boston, Hank Phillippi Ryan.

“J.P. Smith has hit this one out of the park. Great characters, a plot that will draw you from the first to the last page and destined to be a must read book of 2019.”

— Strand Magazine

***Currently in development at ChapkaTV and La Belle Ouvrage as a film or limited series on French television.***

Read The Kid on the Raft for my half of the story: https://shorturl.at/uTUZ2

The Drowning can be found at most bookstores, or at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

A Barnes & Noble Bestseller

Also available in French as Noyade from Gallimard’s Série Noire imprint, and as a Folio paperback.

Nick Copeland has lost his mind only twice in his forty-eight years—once in college on a bad acid trip, and once at this very moment, as the mountain of bills he’s been hiding from his family finally topples. But Nick’s chance meeting with an old friend, Rob Johnson, pulls on the memory wires. Rob—who’s already lost his wife and job—seems resigned to a life of basic cable and Chinese takeout. Suddenly, the answer to their problems arrives: two airtight jars of high-grade heroin they’d buried under the football field of their old college campus.

Returning to the scene of the crime-that-never-happened seems like a cinch—that is, until Nick takes a trip down Memory Lane and a sharp right turn on Law Enforcement Drive. This is not the beads-and-bellbottoms of their youths, but maybe the Stones were right, anyway: you can’t always get what you want.

Tarantino meets Mamet in this action-packed trip from the prolific literary novelist J.P. Smith.


"Old pals Nick and Rob are headin' back to college. But not to resume their studies: they're pushing 50 now, with careers and families, and they're both unemployed, laid off from well-paying jobs. Then one of them remembers an episode from their younger, more adventurous days, when they were known, occasionally, to partake of some not-entirely-legal substances. It turns out they know where to find two mason jars of a definitely illegal substance buried on their old college campus. The plan: dig the stuff up, sell it, make a quick profit. The plan's execution: well, let's just say it doesn't go entirely-or even mostly-as they thought it would. Like Donald Westlake's The Ax (1997), which features an out-of-work family man driven by desperation to find an extreme solution to his problem, Smith's novel depends on the reader's willingness to accept that an ordinary person will do some very uncharacteristic things to keep his life from imploding. A solidly constructed and nicely written comic thriller."
— Booklist

Airtight can be purchased at most online booksellers, and through independent bookshops.

What does grief taste like? What does it weigh? How does it quietly curve around your heart, begging long-kept secrets to become unburied?

When history professor Jill Bowman learns of her husband’s gruesome murder in a seedy motel room, she knows he had no business being there—not serious, sincere Peter, the man she’d known in the most intimate ways a person can be known.

Enveloped in grief, Jill struggles to piece together what could have happened that night and slowly uncovers Peter’s secrets. But her search reveals dark parts of herself as well…secrets she’d never known she was keeping. The self-discovery forces her to reexamine her relationships with her family, her students, her mentally ill daughter, and the detective handling Peter’s case—to whom she finds herself inexorably drawn.

At once a shadowy, erotically charged thriller and a heartbreaking portrait of grief, Breathless explores the subtle and precious intricacies of a life upended by sudden death.


"Though Breathless, the fifth novel from the Massachusetts-based Smith, is a bona fide mystery, its thoughtful prose reads like one of Anita Brookner's introspective explorations. These are sentences you reread to savor even as you race eagerly after Jill to plumb that place she describes as 'between silence and word...the beguiling landscape of memory.'"
—People Magazine

“In Breathless...J.P. Smith does a stunning job of putting himself—and the reader—in the mind of a woman facing shattering revelations surrounding the violent death of her husband.”
—Boston Herald

Originally published by Viking Penguin in 1995.

Breathless can be purchased at most online booksellers, and through independent bookshops.

Divorced American academic David Reid teaches English by day and spends his free time writing mystery novels that nobody reads. In London he meets his new editor, Kate. Blonde and beautiful, she is also mysterious and aloof—and soon captivates David.

The feeling seems mutual and the two are soon wed, but Kate quickly spirals into a deep sadness. In less than two years, she leaves David and heads to New York City. Just as the shock of her absence sets in, David receives a call announcing Kate’s instant death under a subway train.

Was Kate trying to return to David when she was killed? Was it an accident? A suicide? A murder? The more David learns, the less he wants to know—especially when he discovers Kate had been having an affair with French novelist Marc Rougemont, whose work she was allegedly translating.

As David searches for the truth about his wife, he becomes fixated on two paintings of women by Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, for whom David and Kate shared a passion that bordered on obsession. Was his wife as unknowable as the subjects of these cryptic, beautifully rendered portraits?

“The Discovery of Light, J.P. Smith’s fourth novel, may be his most ambitious work so far. Smith characteristically provides a compelling, suspenseful plot featuring attempted murder, deception, suicide and adultery. But he adds another dimension in his new book: a counterplot about the nature of art and the creative spirit that is a homage to painter Jan Vermeer.... But writing a compelling, intricately woven novel of suspense and human relations does not suffice for Smith – he takes this a step further. ‘None of us deserves the banality of real life,’ he concludes on the last page. ‘For us there is only the richness of art.’ ”
—The Boston Globe

“Smith is masterful, maintaining a surface as smooth and inscrutable as Vermeer’s, toying with puzzles of perception, imagination, and truth. An arresting, erudite, and wonderfully eerie performance.”

—Booklist

Originally published by Viking Penguin in 1992.

The Discovery of Light was a 1992 Barnes & Noble Discover title. It can be purchased at most online booksellers, as well as through independent bookshops.

Diva meets Blue Velvet, as the publisher described it, The Blue Hour begins when Adam wife, Honnie, suddenly vanishes, and the couple’s friends assume she was just unhappy and skipped town. Wracked with worry and confusion, Adam knows there’s more to the story.

When the realization hits that he doesn’t know his wife well enough to find her, he enlists the help of a brilliant but amoral cop to comb the streets of Paris for her. The deeper their investigation goes, the more Adam learns about Honnie’s past—and the secrets she kept from him. Pimps, prostitution, murder…

In this modern-day version of the Orpheus myth, Adam descends into Paris’s underworld to find the woman he loves. The city’s sex shops, seedy night clubs, and the people who inhabit them simultaneously repel Adam and draw him ever deeper, giving him a painfully clear look into Honnie’s past—and his own soul.

Adam’s grief eventually gives way to his obsession with finding her, driving his sanity to the breaking point. Even if he should find Honnie, has he already lost her forever?

“I enjoyed J.P. Smith’s severe new psychological thriller, The Blue Hour, not least for its dense description of the Paris quotidian. Grim modern violence lies very close to the fringes, but the crux of this roman noir is as ancient as Orpheus and as simple—how does a man live through the loss of the one woman he truly loves?”
—John Fowles (author of The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Magus, and The Collector)

“A tough, smart, unsettling novel about a young man’s tortured reactions to his wife's mysterious disappearance...a skillfully sustained nightmare worthy of a Polanski film.”\—Kirkus Reviews

Originally published by British-American Publishing in 1989.

The Blue Hour can be purchased at Amazon.com.

After fleeing to Paris to escape communist rule, Polish émigré and piano player Jerzy Wozzeck finds it nearly impossible to support his family on his low-paying bistro gigs. So when a friend offers a fat payoff for handling a string of deliveries, Jerzy quickly finds himself in the uneasy employ of an anonymous suit and his sensual assistant. With a couple of flawless jobs under his belt, Jerzy starts living the good life—until, on one such run, he stumbles across a corpse and realizes his benefactors will go to any lengths to protect their operations.

To ensure his loyalty, Jerzy’s patrons ply him with every possible temptation, from the purest drugs to the most willing women—and he begins selling his soul piece by piece to maintain his illusion of prosperity. But when rival crime lords and hit men enter the fray, Jerzy plots to escape his boss’s dirty dealings—only to discover he’s in too deep to get out alive.


“Smith creates a clever suspense yarn with a comic edge. But the fun is spread thin enough to see clearly what lies beneath: the bitter reckonings and hard realities of an émigré’s struggle to succeed.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“Both chilling and funny, the story of an unlucky man in an existential horror show who blunders through with the charm of the Little Tramp. In all, ambitious, intelligent, and quite compelling.”
— Kirkus Reviews

Originally published by Grove Press in 1987.

Body and Soul can be purchased at Amazon.com.

For years, Alex Ostroff churns out unsuccessful, unpublished manuscripts. His rejection is complete when he’s rebuffed by London’s literary set and unceremoniously thrown out of a party by the host. His exasperated literary agent encourages Alex to write what he knows, but the writer is loathe to reveal anything about himself. Alex follows the advice, however, mining his childhood for material.

The son of Russian expatriates, Alex certainly has a compelling past. His parents, glamorous figures living in France under assumed names, worked with a shadowy Frenchman named Felix Dumont in a mysterious import-export business that involved fraud, forgery, blackmail, and murder. Drawing from these memories, Alex’s new novel, Troika, finally lands the struggling author some acclaim.

As his writing career―and the media’s fascination with him―gathers steam, Alex questions much of what his parents have told him. And when he unexpectedly encounters Dumont in London, he learns the dark truth lurking behind the fictions of his life.


“This is a first novel, but J.P. Smith writes like an old pro; his style is urbane, his prose smooth and polished.”
—New York Times Book Review

“...a melancholy but often comic first novel. It’s also an accomplished work of character, which is gradually and indirectly revealed.... J.P. Smith slowly and subtly builds suspense by concentrating on the hero’s life, concerns and shadowy parents.”

—Cleveland Plain Dealer

Originally published in 1985 by John Murray, Ltd. of London, and in the US in 1986 by St. Martin’s Press.

The Man From Marseille can be purchased at Amazon.com.