True War

Karen Abbott illuminates one of the most fascinating yet little-known aspects of the Civil War: The stories of four courageous women - a socialite, a farmgirl, an abolitionist, and a widow - who were spies. After shooting a Union soldier in her front hall with a pocket pistol, Belle Boyd became a courier and spy for the Confederate army, using her charms to seduce men on both sides. Emma Edmonds cut off her hair and assumed the identity of a man to enlist as a Union private, witnessing the bloodiest battles of the Civil War.

In 1978, CIA maverick Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko were new arrivals on the Washington, D.C., intelligence scene, with Jack working out of the CIA's counterintelligence office and Gennady out of the Soviet Embassy. Both men were assigned to seduce the other into betraying his country in the final days of the Cold War, but instead the men ended up becoming the best of friends. Theirs is a friendship that never should have happened, and their story is chock full of treachery, darkly comic misunderstandings, bureaucratic inanity, and landmark intelligence breakthroughs.

Berlin, 1939. Edith Falkenstein once lived a fairy-tale life. Falling in love with Julius introduced her to a world she had only dreamed of. She wore the finest silk dresses to host parties in their historic mansion home. But those days are a distant memory. Under Nazi rule, her Jewish husband, Julius, has been stripped of everything. Now the couple share a cramped apartment with other destitute families, and the priceless jewels that once adorned Edith’s neck have been sold to buy food on the black market.

Pablo Escobar was a mama’s boy who cherished his family and sang in the shower, yet he bombed a passenger plane and formed a death squad that used genital electrocution. Most Escobar biographies only provide a few pieces of the puzzle, but this action-packed audiobook reveals everything about the king of cocaine.

The Yalu River Boys is the true story of the forgotten men from the forgotten war. Follow a B-29 bomber crew as it battles Russian MiG-15 fighters in the heart of MiG Alley during the Korean War. Learn the heartbreaking truth of the communist prison camp gulags, the cruelty of the North Korean enemy, and the propaganda attacks from friend and foe. Marvin King joined the US Air Force in peacetime but soon found himself in the midst of jet-age aerial combat, captured and taken into China, and later subjected to the abject horror of a place in North Korea known only as The Caves.

The life of the vibrant Schwartz Family changes completely overnight. The sudden illness of Noa, the family's youngest daughter, forces them to attain a great sum of money for an urgent operation, and they are at a loss. Daria, the oldest sister, is the only one who believes that the not so distant past of the intricate Hungarian family holds an old secret that could lead the way to save her little sister's life. Armed with great determination, Daria goes on a cross-continent journey to investigate the Schwartz dynasty's origins.

Six raids that changed the course of history. Operation Judgement: one of the most spectacular efforts of World War Two, where obsolete British biplanes attacked the Italian fleet in Taranto. Operation Archery: the first true combined operation carried out by all three British forces. This successful raid persuaded Hitler that the Allies were planning a full-scale invasion. Operation Biting: a cross-Channel raid into France that was the first major attack by the British Airborne Division and its first battle honour. Operation Gunnerside: a dramatic demolition assault on Hitler's atomic bomb plant in Norway....

The loss of British bombers over Occupied Europe began to reach alarming levels in 1941. Could it be that the Germans were using a sophisticated form of radar to direct their night fighters and anti-aircraft guns at the British bombers? British aerial reconnaissance discovered what seemed to be a rotating radar tower on a clifftop at Bruneval, near Le Havre. The truth must be revealed. The decision was taken to launch a daring raid on the Bruneval site to try and capture the technology for further examination.

A no-nonsense, gritty, in-your-face, full-of-action story of the daring adventure of SAS man Nigel "Spud" Ely's journey into war with the United States Marine Corps and his subsequent arrest by British police.

In the last years of her life, Teresa Lim's mother, Violet Chang, had copies of a cherished family photograph made for those in the portrait who were still alive. The photo is mounted on cream card with the name of the studio stamped at the bottom in Chinese characters. The place and date on the back: Hong Kong, 1935. Teresa would often look at this photograph, enticed by the fierceness and beauty of her great-aunt Fanny looking back at her. But Fanny never seemed to feature in the told and retold family stories. Why? she wondered.

For the first time, learn what really happened inside the walls of Hotel des Mille Collines. In Inside the Hotel Rwanda, survivor Edouard Kayihura tells his own personal story of what life was really like during those harrowing days within the walls of that infamous hotel and offers the testimonies of others who survived there, from Hutu and Tutsi to UN peacekeepers. Kayihura writes of a divided society and his journey to the place he believed would be safe from slaughter.

Hungary, 1944. Almost half a million Jewish Hungarians are deported to Auschwitz. Among the few surviving Hungarian Jews from this era were young men who, like Ervin Wolf, were forced into the brutal Labor Service where they were cut off from the outside world and forced to endure inhumane brutalities and servitude. Once freed, a new oppression took hold as communist rule under Stalin turned friends to foes, enveloped the nation in fear and suspicion, and tested everyone’s character and strength.

Susan Tate Ankeny was sorting through the belongings of her late father - a World War II bombardier who had bailed from a burning B-17 over Nazi-occupied France in 1944 - when she found two boxes. One contained her dad's Air Force uniform, and the other an unfinished memoir, stacks of envelopes, black-and-white photographs, mission reports, dog tags, and the fake identity cards he used in his escape. Ankeny spent more than a decade from that moment tracking down letter writers, their loved ones, and anyone who had played a role in her father's story.

Organized crime is perhaps the most fascinating phenomenon of our time. From Al Capone, who boldly claimed his bootlegging activities were a public service, to the flamboyant Teflon Don, the criminals of the underworld have garnered headlines and captured our imagination with their violent and extravagant lifestyles.

Europe, 1939. Hanne is an adolescent boy, born into a wealthy family from Belgrade. Realizing the Nazi threat is advancing toward the Balkans with giant strides, his parents are prepared to do anything to save their son’s life. The road to survival, however, is not easy. Just as Europe’s gates are about to shut down, Hanne and 1,100 other youths sail away on the Danube River. On board the ship, under appalling living conditions, Hanne falls in love with Inge, a young German Jewish girl.

George Blake was the last remaining Cold War spy. As a senior officer in the British Intelligence Service who was double agent for the Soviet Union, his actions had devastating consequences for Britain. Yet he was also one of the least-known double agents, and remained unrepentant. In 1961, Blake was sentenced to 42 years imprisonment for betraying to the KGB all of the Western operations in which he was involved, and the names of hundreds of British agents working behind the Iron Curtain. This was the longest sentence for espionage ever to have been handed down by a British court

With his brother dead, Eddie Richardson feels free to detail the story of a vicious family feud that provoked extravagant acrimony. No Handcuffs unravels the mysteries of decades of crime and political incident. The story of a turbulent era, it rivals the most imaginative fiction in its portrayal of gangland life with all its chanciness and rawness and careless disregard for any obstacle on the way to its target: the big money.

Yuri Bezmenov was among the first Soviet whistleblowers to attract attention on a global scale, and interest in his story has recently been revived thanks to his surprising cameo in the teaser trailer for Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War in August 2020. This came despite the fact he was far from the first ex-KGB agent or Russian to pull back the curtains on the Russian government and reveal the harrowing “truths” they were once sworn to harbor.

Mayhem goes a long way toward answering questions that still linger about the notorious Boston Marathon bombing, such as: Where were the bombs made? And what had been Tamerlan Tsarnaev's relationship to the FBI? This engaging narrative casts a spotlight on the US government's relationship with the older Tsarnaev brother as his younger brother, Dzhokhar, continues his efforts to have his death sentence commuted.

1918. Timid Emmaline Balakin lives more in books than her own life. That is, until an envelope crosses her desk at the Dead Letter Office bearing a name from her past, and Emmaline decides to finally embark on an adventure of her own—as a volunteer librarian on the frontlines in France. 1976. Kathleen Carre is eager to prove to herself and to her nana that she deserves her acceptance into the first coed class at the United States Naval Academy. But not everyone wants female midshipmen at the Academy, and after tragedy strikes close to home, Kathleen becomes a target.