Political Crime

In 930 CE, a revered group of scholars pen the first sanctioned Bible, planting the seed from which other major religions will grow. But in 1953, half the manuscript goes missing while being transported from Syria. Around the same time, in the foothills of the Dead Sea, an ancient scroll is discovered - and promptly stolen. Six decades later, both parchments stand at the heart of a geopolitical battle between foreign governments and radical extremists, threatening the lives of millions.

It begins at the airport, where Jack is waiting to meet his old high school buddy, Keith Ingraham, a high-powered banker based in Hong Kong, coming to Miami for his young daughter's surgery. But their long-awaited reunion is abruptly derailed when the police arrest Keith's wife, Isabelle, in the terminal, accusing her of conspiring to kill the man who raped her in college. Jack quickly agrees to represent Isa but soon discovers that to see justice done, he must separate truth from lies.

Lawyer Arthur Beauchamp is facing the most explosive trial of his career: the defence of seven boisterous environmentalists accused of sabotaging an Ontario plant that pumps out a pesticide that has led to the mass death of honeybees. The story zigzags between Toronto, where the trial takes place, and Arthur’s West Coast island home, where he finds himself arrested for fighting his own environmental cause: the threatened destruction of a popular park. The Toronto trial concludes with a tense, hang-by-the-fingernails jury verdict.

After more than a decade of being in prison for the brutal murder of two Stirling University students, Colin Sanderson has been released after his conviction was found to be unsafe. Returning home to a small village not far from Stirling, Sanderson refuses police protection, even in the face of a death threat. But the PR firm that has scooped him up to sell his story does know of a protection expert in Stirling. They want Connor Fraser.

A year ago, Danny Ryan lost his wife and son in a car accident. He's still reeling from the tragedy when Michael Cohen, his friend and fellow journalist, drives into the pond in front of his house with a bullet through his gut. With Michael's death ruled a murder, Danny must work to get his name crossed off the list of suspects, and that means digging into Michael's last article, an exposé of the twisted side of Philadelphia politics.

A small number of people, motivated by an insatiable greed for power and wealth, and backed by a pinstripe army of enablers, have driven the world to the brink of destruction. Patrick Alley, co-founder of Global Witness and the author of Very Bad People, introduces us to some of the world's worst warlords, grifters and kleptocrats who can be found everywhere from presidential palaces to the board rooms of some of the world's best known companies. Pitted against them, the book also follows the people unravelling the deals, tracking the money and going undercover at great risk.

"The Black Mask" is a gripping tale that follows the lives of two sisters, Fatima and Angeles, who witness the brutal assassination of their parents. Driven by the desire for justice, Fatima becomes a politician determined to eradicate corruption in the government. Meanwhile, Angeles transforms into the vigilante known as THE BLACK MASK, a formidable figure fighting against corrupt politicians from the past to the present.

Having abandoned corporate law, David Adams is now the voice of justice for the city of Austin’s vulnerable outcasts. His new client is Parker Barnes, a trembling twelve-year-old runaway and foster-care poster boy arrested for petty theft. Dealt a rough hand in life, he reminds David of his own childhood. This should be a simple, if heartbreakingly familiar, case. Until the FBI muscles in. Parker is also a suspect in the murder of a federal witness. No matter how desperate Parker’s denial, David fears there’s so much more to the kid’s hard-luck story than he’s letting on.

Chief Warrant Officer Thomas Crocker of SEAL Team Six's Black Cell is in Las Vegas after conducting a training exercise in the desert with new members of the team. Lounging by the pool at Caesars Palace, he witnesses an argument between hotel security guards and three Asian men in corporate attire that quickly turns physical. Giving chase, he soon corners the businessmen, who claim to be Chinese diplomats under the protection of diplomatic immunity.

Jack Steele survived the first Gulf War. As a captain and tank commander, he saw the dark side of human conflict. A linguist, he speaks Russian, German, French, and Bosnian; he is the perfect man to execute the deadly mission. Except that he is the last to know it, and death might ultimately be his only escape. War rages in former Yugoslavia. It’s a place few UN peacekeepers know or understand. But Steele must fulfill his promise to his brother and discover the true meaning and location behind the Sarajevo Protocol to save millions of lives and stop World War III in Europe.

After escaping the corrupt back rooms of Washington, DC, Mike Ford is again playing a dangerous game - this time the stakes are even higher. Mike's brother is in over his head in a powerful conspiracy to steal a secret worth billions of dollars from the little-known but unbelievably influential trading desk at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In an effort to help, Mike soon finds himself trapped by the dangerous men in charge - and forced to call on all the skills of his criminal past in order to escape.

Why did the US intelligence services fail so spectacularly to know about the Soviet Union's nuclear capabilities following World War II? As Vince Houghton, historian and curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, shows us, that disastrous failure came just a few years after the Manhattan Project's intelligence team had penetrated the Third Reich and knew every detail of the Nazi's plan for an atomic bomb. What changed and what went wrong?

Many tales from the Jazz Age reek of crime and corruption. But perhaps the era’s greatest political fiasco—one that resulted in a nationwide scandal, a public reckoning at the Department of Justice, the rise of J. Edgar Hoover, and an Oscar-winning film—has long been lost to the annals of history. In Crooked, Nathan Masters restores this story of murderers, con artists, secret lovers, spies, bootleggers, and corrupt politicians to its full, page-turning glory.

And on its surface, the Chappaquiddick Incident (as it has infamously become known) was a simple but tragic traffic accident. However, its political fallout caused it to become the most speculated-upon car accident until Princess Diana's fatal ride, some 28 years later: Was Kennedy drunk? Was he trying to conceal an affair by deliberately killing Kopechne? Why did he wait for so long before reporting the accident? And who else was involved?

Heidi Waters, CEO of billion-dollar startup Vitality+, is all the rage in Silicon Valley. Her company’s promises to roll out a neurochemical cure for caffeine-related anxiety are set to change the game, a godsend for anyone who’s ever got the jitters from upsizing their morning coffee order. There’s just one problem. There is no cure. The product doesn’t work.

When the fingers of dead women start showing up in the Supreme Court’s mail, ex-FBI Agent Jeremy Winter is brought back to the Bureau to aid in the investigation. Agent Maggie Keeley, his girlfriend and now boss, leads the search for the serial killer. Together, Jeremy and Maggie learn the five remaining cities on the murderer’s list, but they have no idea when the killer will strike or whom he will target. When they stumble upon a clue at the scene of a young woman’s death, the case focuses on an abandoned ramshackle home in sparsely populated west Texas.

When Baltimore Police Sergeant Wayne Jenkins said he had a monster, he meant he had found a big-time drug dealer - one who he wanted to rob. This is the story of Jenkins and the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), a super group of dirty detectives who exploited some of America’s greatest problems: guns, drugs, toxic masculinity, and hypersegregation. In the upside-down world of the GTTF, cops were robbers and drug dealers were the perfect victims, because no one believed them.

FBI Special Agent Irene Rivers is horrified to learn that because of mistakes made by agents under her command, a murderer and child molester will walk free. But now her worst nightmare has come true: The monster has abducted Irene's own daughters. With nowhere else to turn, she reaches out to an elite Special Forces operator named Jonathan Grave.

Jude Lyon of MI6 has narrowly foiled the traitor Fowle's plot to level London, but the public are demanding answers. Answers the government doesn't have. As the country reels, a new populist political figure carves a stratospheric trajectory—but is he all he seems? In Moscow the President is furious. The world now knows the destructive power of the programme his people had been developing, and as the Russians scramble to understand how it got into Fowle's hands, they start to worry that perhaps it could be used against them.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson insisted that "the policeman is the frontline soldier in our war against crime", and police forces, arms makers, policy makers, and crime experts heeded this call to arms, bringing weapons and practices from the arena of war back home. The Punitive Turn in American Life offers a political and cultural history of the ways in which punishment and surveillance have moved to the center of American life and become imbued with militarized language and policies.