New York Times Bestseller: Three former friends bound by ambition, fame, and a dark secret reunite in this spellbinding saga from the author of Blood and Money.
They were the princes of their high school in Fort Worth, Texas. Valedictorian Kleber Cantrell became a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who befriended the famous and exposed the notorious. Mack Crawford, teenage Adonis and University of Texas football hero, used his good looks to jumpstart an acting career. And T.J. Luther, voted “most popular” by the senior class, fell into a lurid life of crime but found God in prison and reinvented himself as the nation’s leading right-wing televangelist, his message of faith masking an all-consuming desire for power and revenge.
The different routes Kleber, Mack, and T.J. took to celebrity share common signposts: personal upheavals, ruinous marriages, petty jealousies, and blind ambition. Now, on the eve of their twenty-fifth high school reunion, their separate paths will cross to devastating effect—because these three friends have something else in common. It happened in an isolated cabin in the Texas woods on the night they graduated. They vowed never to speak of it again, but they always knew there would be a terrible price to pay . . .
A unique blend of fiction and autobiography, Celebrity is an “enthralling” tale of suspense from an Edgar Award–winning author whose journalism career gave him a front-row seat to the tumultuous lives of the rich and famous (TheBoston Globe). A six-month national bestseller, it was the basis for a television miniseries starring Ned Beatty, Hal Holbrook, and James Whitmore
Thomas Thompson (1933–1982) was a bestselling author and one of the finest investigative journalists of his era. Born in Forth Worth, Texas, he graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and began his career at the Houston Press. He joined Life as an editor and staff writer in 1961 and covered many major news stories for the magazine, including the assassination of John F. Kennedy. As Paris bureau chief, Thompson reported on the Six-Day War and was held captive by the Egyptian government along with other Western journalists. His first two books—Hearts (1971), about the rivalry between two famous Houston cardiovascular surgeons, and Richie (1973), the account of a Long Island father who killed his drug-addicted son—established Thompson’s reputation as an originator, along with Truman Capote, of the “nonfiction novel.” In 1976, Thompson published Blood and Money, an investigation into the deaths of Texas socialite Joan Robinson Hill and her husband, John Hill. It sold four million copies in fourteen languages and won the Edgar Award and the Texas Institute of Letters prize for best nonfiction book. To research Serpentine (1979), an account of convicted international serial killer Charles Sobhraj, Thompson flew around the world three times and spent two years in Asia. His other books include Lost! (1975), a true story of shipwreck and survival, and the novel Celebrity (1982), a six-month national bestseller. Among numerous other honors, Thompson received the National Headliner Award for investigative reporting and the Sigma Delta Chi medallion for distinguished magazine writing.