When four postcards are sent anonymously to the staff of an advice centre, each with the word 'murder' scribbled in a foreign language and the same precise OS map reference, the police are called. DCI Hennessey of the Vale of York police and his team of detectives visit the sinister location and make a chilling discovery: the body of a professional man who had been reported missing ten years earlier. Who sent the postcards, and why so long after the crime? As Hennessey and his team investigate – uncovering more past murders, a case of local authority corruption and two manipulative wives keen to gift-wrap their husbands as murderers in order to benefit financially from their estates – they find themselves drawn into a puzzling and dangerous investigation. Views: 22
Letting go is sometimes the only gift love has left to give. Sera arrives in New York to help Lindál, but a vampeen attack brings her face to face with two men and changes her life forever. Diego Savage lives up to his name. Cynical, rebellious and a womanizer, he doesn't believe in the trinities at all. Only a handful of people know the truth about his scarred heart and terrible past, and it would take a miracle for him to change. A miracle, or someone like Sera with her special gift. Blake Harvey, dedicated NYC police lieutenant, takes one look at the tall, supple woman with the crystal blue eyes and glowing skin and knows his life is about to change in ways he can't even define, but his body is already responding to with a power that is hard to deny. The bonding has begun... Warning: This story features two super hot alpha heroes, multiple sex scenes, including anal sex, MM sexual play, and MMF sex. Do not read this book if frank sexual language and sex scenes offend you.No non-humans were harmed except for large numbers of Grimoré, who died with satisfactory squeals... Sera's Gift is the third book in the Destiny's Trinities series:Book 1: Beth's AcceptanceBook 2: * Mia's ReturnBook 3: * Sera's Gift Views: 22
The road away from home always seems to lead back to our mothers "I'll never be the kind of woman who wears pearls with her apron while cooking meat loaf for her husband. But when I was a kid, my mother, Babs, prepared me to be the next June Cleaver - teaching me lessons that belonged to another era. Another world, practically. My mother's world. But what can you expect from a woman whose biggest aspiration was to be Cotton Queen? I couldn't wait to leave home and get away from her. But now, well...let's just say life hasn't turned out quite like I'd planned. And heaven help me, I'm going home." - Laney Hoffman, Cotton Queen, 1975 Views: 22
“Tara Maya is definitely a talented writer and that was clear from the first story in this anthology.†When she says 'speculative' fiction, Tara really means it. She has some very interesting and thought-provoking speculations on future (and past and fictional) tech and society in this anthology. The fun thing is that she explains how she developed the stories in the notes after each story. Views: 22
This is a short story (about 30 pages) that takes place after the end of As Shadows Fade, the fifth book in the Victoria Gardella Vampire Chronicles series. It includes Victoria Gardella, Max Pesaro, and Sebastian Vioget. ***Please note: There will be spoilers for the entire series in this short story. Here is the entire series in order: The Rest Falls Away Rises the Night The Bleeding Dusk When Twilight Burns As Shadows Fade Max Stops the Presses (a short story) Views: 22
SMERSH is the award-winning account of the top-secret counterintelligence organisation that dealt with Stalin’s enemies from within the shadowy recesses of Soviet government. As James Bond’s nemesis in Ian Fleming’s novels, SMERSH and its operatives were depicted in exotic duels with 007, rather than fostering the bleak oppression and terror they actually spread in the name of their dictator. Stalin drew a veil of secrecy over SMERSH’s operations in 1946, but that did not stop him using it to terrify Red Army dissenters in Leningrad and Moscow, or to abduct and execute suspected spooks – often without cause – across mainland Europe. Formed to mop up Nazi spy rings at the end of the Second World War, SMERSH gained its name from a combination of the Russian words for ‘Death to Spies’. Successive Communist governments suppressed traces of Stalin’s political hit squad; now Vadim Birstein lays bare the surgical brutality with which it exerted its influence as part of the paranoid regime, both within the Soviet Union and in the wider world. SMERSH was the most mysterious and secret of organisations – this definitive and magisterial history finally reveals truths that lay buried for nearly fifty years.ReviewWhy is a book about SMERSH relevant today? As Mr. Birstein takes pains to point out, "the present Russian government seems intent on whitewashing Stalin's atrocities and the history of the Soviet security services." -- The Washington Times, Feb 28, 2012 Vadim Birstein's SMERSH: Stalin's Secret Weapon has won the inaugural St Ermin's Hotel Intelligence Book of the Year Award 2012. Birstein's title is "a very absorbing, thoroughly readable, extraordinarily detailed account of an organisation that...had a terrible, bloody history " according to the judges.--The Bookseller, 13 June 2012 "Dr. Vadim Birstein has written an authoritative and much-needed new study of the Soviet Union’s feared SMERSH counterintelligence agency…bringing to life the increasingly forgotten harsh reality of the Communist police state."—Richard R. Valcourt, Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence From the Inside FlapSMERSH, an acronym of "Death to Spies", is primarily known to readers in English as James Bond's sinister opponent in several of Ian Fleming's spy novels. Yet SMERSH was a real organization and just as diabolical as its fictional counterpart. No information was available on the super-secret organization until the fall of the Soviet Union, and its importance to Second World War history is almost completely unknown to scholars and history readers alike. Ostensibly a military counter intelligence organization dedicated to fighting Nazis, SMERSH spent considerable time and effort terriying its own servicemen including author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was arrested for writing a letter to a fellow office. Its activities also often strayed into the politcal phere, exemplified by the arrest of many political leaders and foreign diplomats in Eastern Europe, including the famous rescuer of Hungarian Jews Raoul Wallenberg at the end of the Second World War. While it was formally part of the Defense Commissariat, SMERSH was not under the control of the military hierarchy. In reality it was a secret service independent of the other Soviet security organizations, the NKVD and the NKGB. Its head, Viktor Abakumov, a shadowy and powerful figure whose biography is revealed here for the first time, reported directly to the dictator Joseph Stalin on a daily basis. Based on a huge number of documents and memoirs available only in Russian, the book details all the known activities of SMERSH: its clever 'radio games', which used captured German officers to lure German intelligence into trapsits mass vetting of Soviet troops who had been prisoners of the Germansits arrest and persecution of Red Army generalsits infiltration of Nazi spy schoolsits participation in military tribunals and 'Special Board' of the NKVDits participation in the Nuremberg trials and the 'Sovietization' of Eastern Europeits investigation into Adolph Hitler's death and the discovery of his body.The book also includes many archival documents translated by Dr. Birstein and includes a number of charts and figures that are extremely useful for understanding the complexities surrounding SMERSH. Views: 22
A secret that could cause scandal!Jilted at the altar, Shefali Khanna should be humiliated. Instead she takes the opportunity to start again. Top of the priority list: do not tumble headfirst into another relationship!But even moving from the city to the country can't keep Shefali out of trouble--especially when she catches the eye of local celeb Neil Mitra! There is no way she can risk a scandal already! He might be gorgeous, but he's totally off-limits...right?Extra bonus: included is The Wedding Dress Diaries by Aimee Carson, the prequel to our fab new quartet! Views: 22
31st August 1997 Rose Wilson is fourteen, but looks sixteen. Pimped out by her 'boyfriend' and let down by a person she thought she loved, she has seen more of the darkness in life than someone twice her age. On the night of Princess Diana's death - a night everyone will remember - Rose snaps and commits two terrible crimes. Her life seems effectively over. But then a defence lawyer takes pity and sets out to do what he can to save her, regardless of the consequences. Now DI Alex Morrow is a witness in the case of Michael Brown - a vicious, nasty arms dealer, more brutal and damaged than most of the criminals she meets. During the trial, while he is held in custody, Brown's fingerprints are found at the scene of a murder in the Red Road flats. It was impossible that he could have been there and it's a mystery that Morrow just can't let go. Meanwhile, a privileged Scottish lawyer sits in a castle on Mull, waiting for an assassin to kill him. He has sold out his own father, something that will bring the wrath of the powerful down upon him.ReviewPRAISE FOR GODS AND BEASTS: "Mina deftly stitches [the story lines] together in time for a powerful climax...Mina again plumbs the depth of the grungy Scottish metropolis, capturing political posturing, class differences, and familial dynamics with equal aplomb... Morrow [is] fast become one of the most intriguing cops in crime fiction. Fans of smart, character-driven procedurals will want to snatch this one up." (Library Journal) "Excellent...Mina ups the stakes by taking us into the dark, beating heart of modern Glasgow, where the real deals are struck and the spoils divided." (Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)) "[A] thoughtful look at how good people can go bad." (New York Times Book Review Marilyn Stasio) About the AuthorDenise Mina is the author of Gods and Beasts, The End of the Wasp Season, Still Midnight, Slip of the Knife, The Dead Hour, Field of Blood, Deception, and the Garnethill trilogy, the first installment of which won her the John Creasey Memorial Prize for best first crime novel. She also writes for the popular graphic novel series Hellblazer. Mina lives in Glasgow. Views: 22
In Being Oscar,one of America’s most celebrated criminal defense attorneys recounts the stories and cases of his epic life. The Mafia’s go-to defender, he has tried an estimated 300 criminal cases, and won most of them. His roster of clients reads like a history of organized crime: Meyer Lansky, Nicky Scarfo, and “Lefty” Rosenthal, as well as Mike Tyson and boxing promoter Don King, along with a midget, a dentist, and a federal judge.After thirty-five years as a defender, he ran for mayor of Las Vegas, and America’s greatest Mob lawyer became the mayor of its sexiest city. He was so popular his image appeared on the $5, $25, and $100 chips. While mayor of Vegas, he starred on the screen in Rush Hour 2 and CSI. He is as large a character in the history of organized crime as any of his clients and as legendary a figure in the history of Las Vegas as the entrepreneurs (his friends and clients) who built the city. This is his astonishing story—the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.About the AuthorOscar Goodman, the former mayor of Las Vegas, is now the official spokesperson for the city, a director emeritus of The Mob Museum, and the namesake for the restaurant “Oscar’s Beef, Booze & Broads.” His wife is the current mayor of Las Vegas, serving until 2016. Views: 22
