Stephan Talty – författare

Before the Second World War, Herbert Cukurs was a world-famous aviator and a hero in his hometown of Riga, Latvia. During the war he joined the SS, led a militia and was responsible for the genocide of 30,000 Latvian Jews. By the 1960s the man who became known as the Butcher of Riga was living in South America. And Mossad were coming for him.In 1965, a statute of limitations on Nazi war crimes threatened to expire and Germany was seeking to reintegrate concentration camp commanders, pogrom leaders and executioners. The global hunt for Nazi criminals was stepped up, and a target was painted on the back of Cukurs. Yaakov Meidad, the Mossad agent who had kidnapped Adolf Eichmann three years earlier, was called into action once more, leading to an astonishing undercover operation that saw Meidad travel to Brazil in an elaborate disguise before befriending Cukurs and earning his trust.Uncovering a little-known part of Holocaust history and telling the story of one of the most daring operations in the history of the Israeli intelligence community, The Good Assassin is a thrilling story of a forgotten monster and the twenty-year quest to bring him to justice, told by a master of narrative non-fiction.

Henry Morgan, a twenty-year-old Welshman, arrived in the New World in 1655, hell-bent on making his fortune. Over the next three decades, his exploits in the Caribbean in the service of the English became legend. His daring attacks on the mighty Spanish Empire on land and sea changed the fates of kings and queens. His victories helped shape the destiny of the New World. Morgan gathered disaffected English and European sailors and soldiers, hard-bitten adventurers, runaway slaves, cutthroats and sociopaths and turned them into the fiercest and most feared army in the Western Hemisphere. Sailing out from the English stronghold of Port Royal, Jamaica, 'the wickedest city in the New World', Morgan and his men terrorised Spanish merchant ships and devastated the cities where great riches in silver, gold, and gems lay waiting to be sent to the King of Spain. His last raid, a daring assault on the fabled city of Panama, helped break Spain's solitary hold on the New World for ever. Awash with bloody battles, political intrigues, and a cast of characters more compelling, bizarre and memorable than any found in a Hollywood swashbuckler, EMPIRE OF BLUE WATER brilliantly re-creates the passions and the violence of the age of exploration and empire. What's more, it chillingly depicts the apocalyptic natural disaster that finally ended the pirates' dominion.

It was only the first lie...As the snow drives down and the full force of a Buffalo winter makes itself felt, a man's body is found. Barely recognisable, the only clues the police have are the '1' carved into the victim's face and the killer's sinister calling card, a plastic toy monkey. This is 'The County' - the 27th county of Ireland - a city cocooned in secrets, suspicion and blood feuds, where the residents will do anything to protect their own. And for Detective Absalom Kearney, this case is her one chance to prove to a community more fiercely secretive than ever, that even the most heinous of murderers can be stopped.But as her investigation develops and the killer starts sending her cryptic messages, Absalom finds herself in a race not only to halt them but also to stop The County's residents exacting their own form of justice. Because at the heart of this community there is the darkness peculiar to those forgotten by society, and this darkness will affect Absalom's life in ways she could never have imagined...

EVERYONE FEARS HANGMAN...When serial killer Marcus Flynn last haunted North Buffalo's streets, horror rippled in his wake. Though imprisoned, his legacy - and the mysterious fate of his last victim - lives on. Now the monster who condemned innocents to death has escaped and is poised to strike again. In a city gripped by fear, homicide cop Absalom Kearney is the only one who can stop Hangman's second reign of terror.Abbie must lead the desperate manhunt to track a relentless predator because with each passing hour the deaths are mounting up and Hangman's noose is getting tighter...

In the Spring of 1993, federal agents raided the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. A 51-day standoff ensued. Known as the Waco Siege, it has become a founding myth of the extreme wing of American conservatism, invoked by militiamen, gun rights advocates, and the alt-right.The leader of the evangelical sect, an extreme form of Seventh-Day Adventism, was David Koresh. Born Vernon Howell, he was a preacher, interpreter of the Bible, and obsessed with the coming of the Apocalypse. A charismatic but highly volatile man, he was a former victim of sexual abuse who himself became a sexual predator on a large scale, exploiting many of the women in his compound.Koresh is Stephan Talty’s extraordinary, meticulous narration of the events that led up to the Waco Siege. Drawing on new sources, FBI negotiation tapes, and interviews with family and friends, this definitive biography explores how Koresh grew from a young man to a cult leader, and investigates why the siege has become an enduring symbol for radical opponents of the democratic state.