Private Politics

Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) was a German businessman, journalist philosopher, historian, political scientist, and revolutionary socialist. Engels developed Marxism together with Karl Marx. In 1848, Engels coauthored The Communist Manifesto (originally the Manifesto of the Communist Party) with Marx.

How did former Chicago cop Jim McGill become the first PI to live in the White House? He married Patricia Darden Grant, the first woman to become a US president...not long after he solved the murder of her first husband. Winning an election was one thing. Finding work after moving to Washington was another. McGill decided to be his own boss and took out a private investigator's license. That wasn't a politically correct occupation, but then McGill refused to allow himself to be addressed as the First Gentleman. He nicknamed himself The President's Henchman.

In the early hours of a quiet weekend morning in Manhattan's Diamond District, a brutal triple murder shocks the city. Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs quickly take the case. Curiously, the killer has left behind a half-million dollars' worth of gems at the murder scene, a jewelry store on 47th street. As more crimes follow, it becomes clear that the killer's target is not gems but engaged couples themselves.

King George V predicted that his son, Edward VIII, would destroy himself within a year of succeeding to the throne. In December 1936 he was proved right, and the world’s press revealed the king was abandoning his throne to marry Wallis Simpson. A life spent in the shadow of his charismatic elder brother left the new king, George VI, magnificently unprepared for the demands of ruling the kingdom and empire. Drawing on personal accounts from the royal archives, Deborah Cadbury uncovers the very private conflict.

When the body of a radical protestor is found floating in one of Bologna's underground canals, it seems that most of the city is ready to blame the usual suspects: the police. But when private investigator Daniel Leicester, son-in-law to the former chief of police, receives a call from the dead man's lover, he follows a trail that begins in the 1970s and leads all the way to the rotten heart of the present-day political establishment.

North Korea is one of the most troubled societies on earth. The country's 24 million people live under a violent dictatorship led by a single family, which relentlessly pursues the development of nuclear arms, which periodically incites risky military clashes with the larger, richer, liberal South, and which forces each and every person to play a role in the "theater state" even as it pays little more than lip service to the wellbeing of the overwhelming majority.

This is the memoir of James C. Hormel - a man who grew up feeling different not only because his family owned the Hormel “empire” and lived in a 26 bedroom house in a small Midwest town, but because he was gay at a time when homosexuality was not discussed or accepted. Outwardly he tried to live up to the life his father wanted for him - he was a successful professional, had married a lovely woman, and had children - but as volatile changes in the late 1960s impeded on the American psyche, Hormel realized that he could not hide his true self forever.

For the first time ever, the intimate thoughts and political decisions of Abraham Lincoln’s entire presidency - day by day. In a startlingly innovative format, journalist Stephen A. Wynalda has constructed a painstakingly detailed day-by-day breakdown of president Abraham Lincoln’s decisions in office - including his signing of the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862; his signing of the legislation enacting the first federal income tax on August 5, 1861; and more personal incidents like the day his 11-year-old son, Willie, died.

When 12-year-old Valentina fails to return from a visit to her father in Moscow, alarm bells start ringing. Her rich and powerful family know there's one man they can depend on to bring her back safe: former SAS major Ben Hope. But what starts off as an apparently straightforward case of parental child abduction quickly takes on more sinister dimensions as Ben travels to Moscow and starts to investigate the whereabouts of Valentina and her father, Yuri, a man with a hidden past not even his ex-wife knows about.

The year is 1995, and an energetic senator wants to disarm, perhaps even eliminate, the CIA. To accumulate the evidence necessary to persuade the Senate, he needs the cooperation of Blackford Oakes, now retired. He wants from Oakes an account of his covert activity 10 years earlier, when Oakes served as chief of covert activities for the CIA. But, what will the frustrated senator do to compel cooperation from Blackford Oakes?

In America’s collective consciousness, Pat Nixon has long been perceived as enigmatic. She was voted “Most Admired Woman in the World” in 1972 and made Gallup Poll’s top ten list of most admired women fourteen times. She survived the turmoil of the Watergate scandal with her popularity and dignity intact. The real Pat Nixon, however, bore little resemblance to the woman so often described as elusive, mysterious and “plastic” in the press. Pat married Richard Nixon in June of 1940. As the couple rose to prominence, Pat became Second Lady from 1953-1961 and then First Lady from 1969-1974.

Jack Sommers was just an ordinary accountant from Chicago - that is until his wife passed away, his young daughter was kidnapped, and he became the main suspect in an $88 million embezzlement case. Now Jack is on the run, hoping to avoid the feds long enough to rescue his daughter, Sophie, from her maternal grandfather, a suspected terrorist in Palestine.

Hired to protect a visiting American woman, Private Johannesburg's Joey Montague is hoping for a routine job looking after a nervous tourist. After the apparent suicide of his business partner, he can't handle much more. But this case is not what it seems - and neither is his partner's death.

Private is the most elite detective agency in the world. But when kidnappers threaten to execute a royal family member in front of the queen, Jack Morgan and his team have just 24 hours to stop them. Or heads will roll, literally.

Life is good for ex-SAS soldier and rescue specialist Ben Hope. He’s found love, peace and happiness at last.... That is, until a man he’s never seen before sits beside him on a plane and makes him a proposal that turns his whole world upside down. Now Ben must embark on a deadly mission to eliminate a former SAS comrade, the enigmatic, elusive and highly capable Jaden Wolf. If Ben fails, the people he cares about will die as punishment.

To his many thousands of fans, ex-SAS officer Ben Hope stands tall as a hero, a warrior, a protector of the innocent, a defender of those in need, relentless in his pursuit of those who exploit or do evil to others. But Ben Hope is also a man with flaws and weaknesses that we can all recognise all too well. That’s what makes Ben Hope not only one of the best-liked thriller heroes of modern fiction, but the one that readers say they feel they know as though he were a real, living person and more than a character on a page.

Over the past two generations, U.S. leaders deregulated big business on the faith that it would yield a better economy and a freer society. But the opposite happened. Americans lost stable, well-paying jobs, Wall Street dominated industry to the detriment of the middle class and local communities, and corporations began to subject us to total surveillance, even dictating what we are, and aren’t, allowed to think. The corporate titans and mega-donors who aligned themselves with this vision knew exactly what they were getting: perfect conditions for what Sohrab Ahmari calls “private tyranny”.

In Grace and Power, New York Times best-selling author Sally Bedell Smith takes us inside the Kennedy White House with unparalleled access and insight. Having interviewed scores of Kennedy intimates, including many who have never spoken before, and drawing on letters and personal papers made available for the first time, Smith paints a richly detailed picture of the personal relationships behind the high purpose and poiltical drama of the 20th century's most storied presidency.

A series of grisly murders pits lawyer Sean Drummond against a financially-stretched mega-corporation desperate for a contract, and a foreign intelligence organization undaunted by the prospect of killing anyone opposing its aims.

My name is Sara Eden. My name is Sara Eden. My name is Sara Eden. My name is Sara Eden. This is all Sara Eden knows about herself. She was found at the age of 10, abandoned in a vat of water - a homemade sensory-deprivation chamber. Someone had placed her there - trapped for days in the dark, with only a cassette player taped to her head repeating again and again, 'My name is Sara Eden'. There were a handful clues: a battered cassette player, a cheap necklace, a few scraps of paper. And a Polaroid of a stranger with a handwritten note: 'Don't trust this man'.