Political Crime

'BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL MYSTERY OF 2024' - winner of the Barry Award, presented at the 55th annual Bouchercon, the world’s largest convention of crime fiction and mystery readers TWO PEOPLE ARE WORKING THE CASE. ONE OF THEM IS DEAD. For over thirty years, a man named Harry Black lived quietly in a small town on the Gulf of Thailand. Then, while walking on the beach on his eighty-sixth birthday, he's shot and killed by a sniper firing from half a mile away. Why would someone send a highly skilled sniper to kill an insignificant old man? Maybe he wasn't really as insignificant as everybody...

Gangsters and presidents have long captured the American imagination, but how much does the underworld actually affect presidential power? How deep are their “connections”? As Eric Dezenhall reveals in this eye-opening history, in some instances, one couldn’t have functioned without the other. From Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Richard Nixon to Joseph R. Biden, the mob has done presidential dirty work, including attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, harass America’s enemies, and put our chief executives in office.

The Venona Files are several intercepted communiques between the Soviet Union and American Communists following WWII. Some historians and journalists are starting to regard the Cold-War-era American Communist Party as nothing more than a quaint club of polite if misguided ideologues. In The Venona Secrets, Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel intend to create a new impression of treacherous Americans "who willfully gave their primary allegiance to a foreign power, the USSR."

Canberra political reporter Paul Ryder gets the sack again, this time for sleeping with the wrong woman. Jobs are scarce and he’s forced to become the national political correspondent for a tiny Tasmanian paper with a dwindling circulation. He needs a big story to save his career. Too bad he lives in the world’s most boring city. All seems lost, until murder comes to town and he plunges into a dark world where his press pass won't protect him..

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.

Disease detectives put it all on the line ...to find Patient Zero. Through all the coughing, choking and misery of a killer virus on the loose, can public health officials defeat Chinese secrecy, U.S. drug company interests, and a criminal coverup to stop the disease in its tracks? Or will they be too late? Enjoy acclaimed thriller author Fritz Galt's close-up, clinical look at an unfolding disaster, with a Chinese city in crisis, relationships lost, international criminal justice in action, and a medical community’s desperate search for Patient Zero. “This novel sparkles.” – author...

A leader has fallen, and Alex Cross joins the procession of mourners from Capitol Hill to the White House. Then a sniper's bullet strikes a target in the heart of DC. Alex Cross' wife, Bree Stone, newly elevated chief of DC detectives, must solve the case or lose her position. The Secret Service and the FBI deploy as well in the race to find the shooter. Alex is tasked by the new president to lead an investigation unprecedented in scale and scope. But is the sniper's strike only the beginning of a larger attack on the nation?

It’s a time for celebration. Unfortunately in Twilight Cove, the festivity is masking something ominous... PI Dean Steele has had to solve many strange mysteries throughout his career. This time he is called to the small seaside town to unmask the truth behind a chilling murder. Who would kill a man and tie him up to a parade float? While following clues in this case, Dean stumbles upon an intricate web of secrets. Skeletons that seemed to have shaped Twilight Cove for many generations. Across town at the palatial home of Joseph Palmer, a Gatsby-like figure. The most incredible party in ...

Carlos Ghosn always wanted more. Born in the Amazon, raised by a well-off—if scandalized—family in Beirut, and educated in Paris, Ghosn rose to prominence at Michelin in the United States, Renault in France, and Nissan in Japan. Along the way he earned monikers of Le Cost Killer, for his incisive business savvy, and Mr. 7-Eleven, for the hours he devoted to his work.

Hailed as the "king of sleaze", tabloid editor Dennis Luxford is used to ferreting out the sins and scandals of people in exposed positions. But when he opens an innocuous-looking letter addressed to him at The Source, he discovers that someone else excels at ferreting out secrets as well. Ten-year-old Charlotte Bowen has been abducted, and if Luxford does not admit publicly to having fathered her, she will die.

A victimless murder. A secret plan that could forever change the geopolitical landscape. And a ghost partner she’s supposed to trust. FBI Special Agent Heather Chase is dispatched to a murder scene in the middle of the night, hundreds of miles away. Immediately, she feels something’s off. She finds herself working with a new partner whose name doesn’t even exist in the system. Who is he? Deploying her deep infiltration tactics, Chase discovers a startling secret at the university. She soon realizes she’s chasing the victim instead of the murderer. Ambushed by highly trained ...

If, like Kane, you're a Denied Access Area spy for the CIA, then boundaries have no meaning. Your function is to go in, do whatever is required, and get out again - by whatever means necessary. You know when to run, when to hide - and when to shoot. But some places don't play by the rules. Some places are too dangerous, even for a man of Kane's experience. The badlands where the borders of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan meet are such a place - a place where violence is the only way to survive.

Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, is living out his old age on the family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London, and involved such characters as Alec Leamas, Jim Prideaux, George Smiley, and Peter Guillam himself, are to be scrutinized by a generation with no memory of the Cold War.

A code hidden in plain sight. An American black Ops team that went too far. John Hayes, a disgraced elite soldier, returns from exile and risks everything to get back to his wife and daughter and to take revenge on his accusers with a series of escalating attacks inside the United States. Thomas Byrne is the only man who can stop him. Byrne once fought alongside Hayes as a combat medic, but he gave up the gun.

The world thought Dmitri Melnikov was dead. Especially Quinn. Why would he have believed otherwise, since the bomb intended for Melnikov had nearly killed Quinn and several members of his team? But Melnikov is not dead. He has been taken by someone who wants to shut him up. And the former chess champion isn’t the only one who has been abducted.

Manhattan, 1923. Scandalous flapper Dot King is found dead in her Midtown apartment, a bottle of chloroform beside her and a fortune in jewels missing. Dot’s headline-making murder grips the city. It also draws a clutch of lovers, parasites, and justice seekers into one of the city’s most mesmerizing mysteries.

When truth hides in shadows, only the gifted can reveal it. Rajiv Menon’s world shatters when his beloved sister Susheela is found dead—an apparent suicide. But a mysterious dream from his late grandmother sets him on a path that uncovers a chilling murder and unlocks his supernatural ability to see hidden truths. What begins as a personal quest quickly spirals into a public phenomenon. As political conspiracies, assassination plots, and secret syndicates threaten the very fabric of the state, Rajiv rises from grieving brother to legendary investigator. With the Chief Minister’s trust...

Two brutal murders and millions of missing dollars in the growing UN/Iraq oil-for-food scandal have led Castillo and his team to an estancia in Uruguay, where the man they seek is murdered right before their eyes. Who is responsible? Most likely, the people higher up in the dirty-money chain - those willing to risk anything to keep their secrets from being revealed.

Michael Tanner is on his way home from a business trip when he accidentally picks up the wrong MacBook in an airport security line. He doesn't notice the mix-up until he arrives home in Boston, but by then it's too late. Tanner's curiosity gets the better of him when he discovers that the owner is a US senator and that the laptop contains top secret files. When Senator Susan Robbins realizes she's come back with the wrong laptop, she calls her young chief of staff, Will Abbott, in a panic.

Attorney Dani Rollins is bullish in the courtroom - pushing judges and prosecutors to their limits in defense of the innocent. So when she meets Teddy Thorne, a mentally challenged teen accused of selling drugs, Dani knows she’s got this in the bag. She can easily settle the case with a couple of court appearances. But when prosecutors move for an adult felony conviction, Dani suspects Teddy’s being used as a pawn in a sinister game. As the case moves forward, Dani is certain the judge and district attorney’s office have motivations beyond the crime.