Political Fiction

“A stellar novel of action, adventure, and intrigue.” —Steve Berry, New York Times bestselling author The presumed president-elect has been assassinated. The fate of the United States is at stake. And Detective Jim Murphy of the Chicago PD is to blame. Serving as extra security in a parade for the apparent presidential winner, he succumbs to a moment of distraction. That indelible lapse allows an assassin to take down the president-elect. His shame is made even more profound now that Bryan, his rivalrous brother from the Justice Department, has come to Chicago to investigate the ...

In Empires of Trust, Professor Thomas F. Madden explores surprising parallels between the Roman and American republics. By making friends of enemies and demonstrating a commitment to fairness, the two republics - both "reluctant" yet unquestioned super-powers - built empires based on trust. Madden also includes vital lessons from the Roman Republic's 100-year struggle with "terrorism."

She died when she was barely nineteen. At least that’s what Bobby Maynard had believed for the last twenty years. As a newly elected United States senator, Bobby keeps finding clues that suggest Reagan Velasco may still be alive. The backrooms of Washington hold answers to the despair that has haunted him since youth. However, Bobby soon learns that those backrooms hold secrets so dangerous, poking around could cost his life. When the beautiful Kennedy Karr emerges from the shadows of Washington’s underworld, she becomes an unlikely ally. But that relationship, too, could be deadly. ...

The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late 20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits 100 years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light.

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

Daniel Petrovich, formerly part of the Department of Defense's infamous Black Flag program, protects a secret buried in the deepest vaults of the Pentagon. Blackmailed into executing one final mission for his previous commanding officer, Daniel's carefully constructed "life" rapidly disintegrates into a relentless federal manhunt - and a "24-style" race against the clock to suppress the shocking truth about his past. To survive, he'll release the darkest side of his concealed identity. A dark side with few boundaries - and even fewer loyalties.

On the evening of March 9, 1566, David Rizzio, the private secretary of Mary, Queen of Scots, was brutally murdered. Dragged from the chamber of the heavily pregnant Mary, Rizzio was stabbed 56 times by a party of assassins. This breathtakingly tense novella dramatizes the events that led up to that night, telling the infamous story as it has never been told before.

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days. The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes.

May 2024: When an Iranian helicopter carrying the president crashes near the Azerbaijan border, the official story blames pilot error. But someone’s lying—and ex-CIA operative Michael Wolfe is about to find out why. Pulled back into the shadows by the suspicious death of a former colleague, Wolfe uncovers a hidden list locked in a bank vault. A list of names that includes his... and his wife’s.

"An unbeatable military thriller that's explosive and one you don't want to end." –BestThrillers.com After CIA contract pilot, Duncan Hunter eliminated virtually every man from the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist List, it’s time for celebration and some down time. Hunter’s counterterrorism successes in Africa and the Middle East have propelled the CIA Director and America's most decorated military man, Bill McGee, to national prominence. At the annual Pumpkin Papers Irregulars Dinner, McGee announced he will seek the Office of the President. The chief financier of terrorism and the ...

On the Swiss border with Austria in 1938, a police captain refuses to enforce a law barring Jewish refugees from entering his country. In the Balkans half a century later, a Serb from the war-blasted city of Vukovar defies his superiors in order to save the lives of Croats. At the height of the Second Intifada, a member of Israel's most elite military unit informs his commander he doesn't want to serve in the occupied territories.

Beautiful Souls explores the flipside of the banality of evil, mapping out what impels ordinary people to defy the sway of authority and convention.

Dan Starkey is a young journalist in Belfast, who shares with his wife, Patricia, a prodigious appetite for drinking and dancing. Then Dan meets a beautiful and apparently impoverished student. And then, terrifyingly, she is murdered. Is it because she was not exactly who she claimed to be? Is it the IRA? A Protestant extremist group? A jealous lover? Before long, Dan is a target himself.…

Vaelin Al Sorna, warrior of the Sixth Order, called Darkblade, called Hope Killer. The greatest warrior of his day, and witness to the greatest defeat of his nation: King Janus' vision of a Greater Unified Realm drowned in the blood of brave men fighting for a cause Vaelin alone knows was forged from a lie. Sick at heart, he comes home, determined to kill no more. Named Tower Lord of the Northern Reaches by King Janus's grateful heir, he can perhaps find peace in a colder, more remote land far from the intrigues of a troubled Realm.

The terror and purges of Stalin's Russia in the 1930s discouraged Soviet officials from leaving documentary records, let alone keeping personal diaries. A remarkable exception is the unique diary assiduously kept by Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London between 1932 and 1943. This selection from Maisky's diary grippingly documents Britain's drift to war during the 1930s, appeasement in the Munich era, negotiations leading to the signature of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact....

Ha Jin displays his impressive storytelling gifts in this richly textured examination of contemporary China in 1989. Professor Yang, a respected literature scholar, suffers a stroke and is confined to a hospital bed. Now Jian Wan, Yang’s brightest student and future son-in-law, must suspend his rigorous studies to care for his mentor. Jian dutifully keeps watch as Yang begins raving madly, often pleading with unseen tormentors. Has Yang lost his grip on sanity, or is he no longer capable of hiding deeply buried, painful secrets?

Russia and America face each other across the northern border of Afghanistan. World War 3 is about to break out and no one is backing off. And all because a team of academics in New York postulated how to extract the vast untapped mineral wealth of Afghanistan. Steve Case is in the middle of it, and his position is looking very precarious. Will the Taliban find him before the Americans get him out? Or is he doomed, as is the rest of the world?

On the eve of Keith Jefferson’s retirement, Aliens invade the Earth with one demand, that they be worshipped. Keith worshipped no one. And having lost his pension and other financial instruments when the banks and other financial institutions exploiting the invasion kept everyone’s assets because they could, Keith vowed revenge and became a one-man resistance movement in a world that complacently accepted the alien leaders as, just some other people they didn’t vote for who now were in charge.

THERE'S A TIME TO RUN, AND A TIME TO FIGHT. On the run after his brothers-in-arms betrayed him in the Middle East, the former Delta Force commando has hidden in plain sight in, of all places, the art world. Turns out Dak’s particularly lethal set of skills translates well to hunting down stolen relics across the globe. The money he earns from his eccentric young benefactor means he can afford to lay low and keep moving. Good thing, too, because his former commanding officer, Col. Cameron Tucker, still wants him dead. And has doubled his efforts to track Dak down. In a last, desperate ...

2022 Winner - American Fiction Award for Medical Thrillers 2022 Finalist - American Fiction Award for Political Thrillers National Indie Excellence Award Finalist in two categories: Political Thrillers and Medical Thrillers “Since finishing Escaping Mercy I have been left with a feeling of emptiness that only brilliant novels succeed in achieving when they end. Polakoff has been undoubtedly successful in creating an immersive storyline with likeable characters, and placing me into a world I thoroughly enjoyed reading.” Leigh – Reedsy Discovery. "The book itself is a marvelous work ...

When a prominent conservative politician is killed inside his lakeside cabin, authorities have no suspect in sight. And two more seemingly different deaths might be linked to the same murderer. From a quiet DC suburb to the corridors of power to a deserted island hideaway in Maine, Will; his CIA director wife, Kate; and the FBI will track their man, set a trap - and await the most dangerous kind of quarry: a killer with a cause to die for....