Pegasus Books – serie

Commissioned exclusively for this anthology and featuring the bestselling, always compelling mystery writer Michael Connelly, as well as his broody LAPD police detective Harry Bosch, and such award-winning, A-list talents in the field of crime fiction as Terence Faherty, Gar Anthony Haywood, Dick Lochte, Stuart Kaminsky, and Bill Pronzini, this collection of Hollywood tales sets a literary Klieg light on the most famous intersection in movieland: Hollywood and Vine.

Some crimes cry for vengeance, like the one that washes Rachel Wilson up on a beach, her head bald, her body mutilated. It’s a cry that Agnes Lynn, a hooker gone straight and Rachel’s long- time friend, can’t ignore. Steely and resourceful, with a determination impervious to fear, Agnes aims to settle scores with pimps and porn kings—and unwittingly, blindly, sets herself in the path of the formidable mob boss Viktor Timkin. What she doesn’t plan on, though, are crooked cops, a Saudi weapons dealer, gangland assassins, a turf war, and redfella deviants. What she doesn’t plan on could get her killed.

Veteran defense analyst and Afghanistan expert David Isby provides an insightful and meticulously researched look at the current situation in Afghanistan, her history, and what he believes must be done so that the US and NATO coalition can succeed in what has historically been known as “the graveyard of empires.” Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world with one of the lowest literacy rates. It is rife with divisions between ethnic groups that dwarf current schisms in Iraq, and all the groups are lead by warlords who fight over control of the drug trade as much as they do over religion. The region is still racked with these confrontations along with conflicts between rouge factions from Pakistan, with whom relations are increasingly strained. After seven years and billions of dollars in aid, efforts at nation-building in Afghanistan has produced only a puppet regime that is dependent on foreign aid for survival and has no control over a corrupt police force nor the increasingly militant criminal organizations and the deepening social and economic crisis. The task of implementing an effective US policy and cementing Afghani rule is hampered by what Isby sees as separate but overlapping conflicts between terrorism, narcotics, and regional rivalries, each requiring different strategies to resolve. Pulling these various threads together will be the challenge for the Obama administration, yet it is a challenge that can be met by continuing to foster local involvement and Afghani investment in the region. This paperback edition includes a new 2011 afterword by the author.

By Accident portrays a year in the life of a woman after the accidental death of her teenage son. Laura Lucas is numbed by the loss, a loss that is paralleled in the spate of upscale construction—and attendant destruction—in her starter-home neighborhood. It’s about Laura's relationship with a young tree surgeon who slowly becomes a replacement for her son—but also an object of desire. The story reveals the delicate nexus where solace becomes sex; the role of men and women as unmarried friends; and examines grief in a marriage. It portrays the pain of change and the poignancy of acceptance through Laura's eyes, and occasionally, through the quirky outlook of her ten-year-old daughter. And before the story ends, another brutal, random accident will redefine Laura's life once again.

Few contemporary writers are more revered by Americans than Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel prize-winning author of Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude. And few political leaders are more reviled than Fidel Castro. Yet these two seemingly disparate men are close friends. What could possibly unite these two men in friendship? In Fidel and Gabo, Márquez scholars Ángel Esteban and Stéphanie Panichelli examine this strange, intimate, and incredibly controversial friendship between the beloved author and Cuban dictator, exposing facets of their personalities never before revealed to the greater public. For years, Márquez, long fascinated with power, solicited and flattered Castro in hopes of a personal audience, for he viewed Castro’s Cuba as the model on which Latin American would one day build its own brand of socialism. Upon their first meeting, Castro quickly came to regard Márquez as a genius and still calls him his closest friend and confidant. To this day, Márquez still gives Castro “first look” at all his manuscripts and craves his approval. Fidel and Gabo is a vivid and in-depth look at two of the most influential men of the modern era, their worlds, and the effect this friendship has had on their life and works.

For small-town Iowa lawyer Sam McCain the year 1965 is not a sweet one. His father is gravely ill. His elitist boss is just now coming out of rehab. The brilliant lawyer he'd hoped to start a relationship with has gone back to her husband in Chicago. And first young soldier from Black River Falls returns home from a strange place called Viet Nam. In a coffin. Against this background McCain tries to enjoy himself during the long Labor Day weekend party the town sponsors every year, reuniting with several old friends who appeared throughout the first six novels. Now that they're all in their late twenties some of the old grudges and rivalries seem silly—until two of them are murdered for what seems to be a motive buried in the past. With the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan irritating those over thirty—and the boys in long hair and girls wearing blouses without bras irritating people even more—Sam McCain is forced to realize that his old world, along with the entire country's, is about to end forever.

Battling a new generation of corporate giants and uncovering threats right in our own backyard, Kenneth King’s Germs Gone Wild reveals the massive expansion of America's bio-defense research labs and the culture of deception surrounding hundreds of facilities that have opened since 9/11. King experienced the menace of bio-defense research firsthand when local government and business leaders tried to lure a new facility to his hometown in Kentucky. Researching the safety claims, he not only found many of them to be completely false, but was also horrified by the lack of oversight and the recklessness with which these labs genetically modified pathogens like smallpox, Ebola, and influenza without a care for what happened to the public if there was ever a “leak.” And yet the greed that drove the development of these labs has effectively counteracted any cautionary checks by the government and universities. All have been seduced by the economic gains and corporate stipends that come with compliance and turning a blind eye. But now, the reality of these labs and the germs they manipulate will finally be brought to light, as King examines the controversies surrounding plants from Maryland to Boston and Utah, to the Department of Homeland Security’s dubious National Bio-and-Agro-Facility (NBAF) project, and the precautions—or lack thereof—being taken to protect us all from a deadly pandemic.

For over fifty years, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine has been one of the foremost magazines of mystery and suspense. This celebratory anthology features such bestselling writers as Lawrence Block, Ed McBain, and Jan Burke, just three of the esteemed contributors to have appeared in the magazine’s pages over the past five decades. This impressive anthology reflects the diversity of every issue of the magazine: historicals and police procedurals, cozies and noirs, humor and suspense. From Jim Thompson in the fifties and Donald Westlake in the sixties, to recent stories by S. J. Rozan, Martin Limon, and Rhys Bowen, this anthology documents over a half century of superb storytelling.

Maria-Theresa von Paradis, the only daughter of the secretary of the empress of Austria, was an exceptionally gifted child. By the age of seventeen, she was a full-fledged virtuoso, playing for the royal family, acclaimed for her beauty and talent . . . and because she was blind. Her father, unable to accept her condition despite her soaring musical gifts, enlists the help of Franz Anton Mesmer, the forerunner of the modern practice of hypnotism, where Maria-Theresa discovers the passions and emotions from which her blindness had previously protected her. In the tradition of Sleeping with Schubert and The Cellist of Sarajevo, the novel is moving portrait of courage, loss, the elation of first love—and the pain of lost innocence.

A classic work now back in print for the first time since 1956—and still regarded as one of the groundbreaking books on the subject—this narrative history of Russia was the first to encompass the myth-befogged beginnings of the nation-state, the rise and cataclysmic fall of tsarism, and the Spartan years of the U.S.S.R.Charques emphasizes three points of view: that autocracy has played a dominant role throughout all of Russian history;that serfdom is the fabric of Russia’s social history; and that it is of paramount importance to recognize Russia’s present regime under Putin and Medvedev as the latest phase in along history of oppression.