Brad Thor, master of suspense and #1 New York Times bestselling author is back with his highest-voltage thriller to date in which Navy SEAL turned covert Homeland Security operative Scot Harvath must race to locate an ancient secret that has the power to stop militant Islam dead in its tracks. June 632 A.D.: Deep within the Uranah Valley of Mount Arafat in Mecca, the Prophet Mohammed shares with his closest companions a final and startling revelation. Within days, he is assassinated. September 1789: U.S. Minister to France Thomas Jefferson, who is charged with forging a truce with the violent Muslim pirates of the Barbary Coast, makes a shocking discovery—one that could forever impact the world’s relationship with Islam. Present day: When a car bomb explodes outside a Parisian cafÉ, Scot Harvath is thrust back into the life he has tried so desperately to leave behind. Saving the intended victim of the attack, Harvath becomes party to a perilous race to uncover a secret so powerful that militant Islam could be defeated once and for all. But as desperate as the American government is to have the information brought to light, there are powerful forces determined that Mohammed’s mysterious final revelation continue to remain hidden forever. What Jason Bourne was to the Cold War, Scot Harvath is to the War on Terror. In The Last Patriot, readers will be engrossed as Harvath once again takes them on a whirlwind tour through international cities and nail-biting suspense where the stakes are higher than they have ever been before.About the AuthorBrad Thor is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Lions of Lucerne, Path of the Assassin, State of the Union, Blowback, Takedown, and The First Commandment. He currently lives in Chicago. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. CHAPTER 1 Rome, ItalyMonday Evening The Italian Centre for Photoreproduction, Binding, and Restoration of State Archives, also known as the CFLR, was located in an unassuming postmodern office building three blocks from the Tiber River at 14 Via Costanza Baudana Vaccolini. It boasted one of the world's leading archival preservation facilities, as well as a young deputy assistant director named Alessandro Lombardi who was eager to begin his evening. "Dottore, mi scusi," said Lombardi. Dr. Marwan Khalifa, a distinguished Koranic scholar in his early sixties with a handsome face and neatly trimmed beard, looked up from the desk he was working at. "Yes, Alessandro?" The Italian adopted his most charming smile and asked, "Tonight, we finish early?" Dr. Khalifa laughed and set down his pen. "You have another date this evening?" Lombardi approached and showed the visiting scholar a picture on his mobile phone. "What happened to the blond woman?" Lombardi shrugged. "That was last week." Khalifa picked his pen back up. "I suppose I can be done in an hour." "An hour?" exclaimed Lombardi as he pressed his hands together in mock prayer. "Dottore, if I don't leave now, all of the good tables outside will be gone. Please. When the weather is this nice, Italians are not allowed to work late. It's state policy." Khalifa knew better. No matter what the weather, there were always people working late in the CFLR building -- maybe not in the Research and Preservation department, but there was almost always a light burning somewhere. "If you want to leave your keys, I'll lock up the office when I go." "And my time card?" asked Lombardi, pressing his luck. "You get paid for the time you work, my friend." "Va bene," replied the young man as he fished a set of keys for the department from his pocket and set them on the desk. "I'll see you in the morning." "Have fun," said Khalifa. Lombardi flashed him the smile once more and then made his way toward the exit, turning off any unnecessary lights along his way. Dr. Khalifa's desk was a large drafting-style table, illuminated by two adjustable lamps. His time as well as Lombardi's was being paid for by the Yemeni Antiquities Authority. In 1972, workers in Yemen had made a startling discovery. Restoring the aging Great Mosque at Sana'a, said to have been one of the first architectural projects of Islam commissioned by the prophet Mohammed himself, the workers uncovered a hidden loft between the mosque's inner and outer roofs. Inside the loft was a mound of parchments and pages of Arabic texts that at some point had been secreted away, and were now melded together through centuries of exposure to rain and dampness. In archeological circles, such a discovery was referred to as a "paper grave." Cursory examinations suggested that what the grave contained were tens of thousands of fragments from at least a thousand early parchment codices of the Koran. Access to the full breadth of the find had never been allowed. Bits and pieces had been made available to a handful of scholars over the years, but out of respect for the sanctity of the documents, no one had ever been permitted to study the entire discovery. No one that is, until Dr. Marwan Khalifa. Khalifa was one of the world's preeminent Koranic scholars and had spent the majority of his professional career building relationships with the Yemeni Antiquities Authority and politely petitioning it to allow him to review the find. Finally, there was a changing of the guard and the new president of the Antiquities Authority, a significantly younger and more progressive man, invited Khalifa to study the entirety of what the workers at Sana'a had uncovered. It didn't take long for Khalifa to realize the magnitude of the find. As Yemen didn't have the proper facilities to preserve and study the fragments and as the Yemeni government was absolutely opposed to Khalifa taking the items back to the United States, an arrangement was made for the complete contents of the grave to be transferred to the CFLR in Rome where they could be preserved and studied before being returned to Yemen. With the blessing of the new Antiquities Authority president, Khalifa oversaw the entire process, including the technical side which included such things as edge detection, document degradation, global and adaptive thresholding, color clustering, and image processing. His anticipation grew as each scrap was preserved and he was able to begin assembling the pieces of the puzzle. A significant percentage of the parchments dated back to the seventh and eighth centuries -- Islam's first two centuries. Khalifa was handling pieces of the earliest Korans known to mankind. This only made the inconsistencies he discovered from standard Koranic texts even more exciting. A billion-and-a-half Muslims worldwide believed that the Koran they worshiped today was the perfect, inviolate word of God -- an exact word-for-word, perfect copy of the original book as it exists in Paradise and just as it was transmitted, without a single error, by Allah to the Prophet Mohammed through the Angel Gabriel. As a textual historian, Khalifa was fascinated by the inconsistencies. As a moderate Muslim who loved his religion, but believed deeply that it was in need of reform, he was overjoyed. The fact that he had found, and was continuing to find, aberrations that differed from Islamic dogma meant that the case could finally be made that the Koran needed to be reexamined in a historical framework. He had always believed that the Koran had been written by man, not God. If such a thing could be proven, Muslims around the world would be able to reexamine their faith with a modern, twenty-first-century perspective, rather than the outdated, unenlightened perspective of seventh-century Arabia. And now it seemed that he had just the proof he needed. It was such a powerful discovery that Khalifa could barely sleep at night. It dovetailed so well with another project his colleague Anthony Nichols was working on back in America, that he felt as if Allah himself was steering his research, that this was His divine will. All Khalifa could think about when he wasn't at work was getting back to the CFLR facility each day to further investigate the fragments. Though on evenings like this Khalifa missed Lombardi's companionship as well as his expertise with the technical equipment, the truth was that he hardly noticed when the young Italian was gone. In fact, he was often so engrossed that he barely noticed Lombardi even when he was standing at the desk right in front of him. Turning to the voluminous collection of information he had stored on his rugged Toughbook laptop, Khalifa pulled up one of the thirty-two thousand images the CFLR had already digitally archived. While he could have crossed the room and retrieved the fragment itself, he often found it unnecessary as accessing the digital images was much easier. Khalifa was working on lining up six slivers of text written in the Hijazzi script when a shadow fell across his drafting table. "What did you forget this time, Alessandro?" the scholar asked without looking up. "I didn't forget anything," responded a deep, unfamiliar voice. "It is you who have forgotten." Dr. Khalifa looked up and saw a man in a long, black soutane with a white collar. It was a common sight throughout Rome, particularly near the Vatican. But while the CFLR did do a certain amount of work with the Holy See, Khalifa had never seen a priest inside the building. "Who are you?" "That's not important," replied the priest as he moved closer. "I would rather discuss your faith." "You must be confused, Father," said Khalifa as he sat up in his chair. "I'm not a Catholic. I'm Muslim." "I know," said the priest softly. "That's why I'm here." In an explosion of black cloth, the priest was suddenly behind Khalifa. One of his large, rough hands cupped the scholar's chin while the other gripped the side of his head. With a powerful snap, the priest broke Khalifa's neck. He stood there for a moment, the corpse clutched tightly, almost lovingly to his chest, then stepped back and let go. Khalifa's head slammed against the table before coming to rest beneath it. The priest dragged the body across the floor and positioned it at the bottom of a set of stairs which led up to a small archival library. From there, it took only moments to set the fire. Two hours later, having showered and changed, the assassin sat in his hotel room and studied Khalifa's laptop. Connecting to a remote server, he had the Koranic scholar's password program cracked within fifteen minutes. From there, one e-mail confirmed everything he needed to know. Marwan, Finally, good news! It appears we have located the book. A dealer named René Bertrand is bringing it to market in Paris at the Antiquarian Book Fair. I will be meeting him there to negotiate the purchase. As you know, my funding is limited, but I have faith that barring an all-out bidding war, the book will be ours! As planned, I will see you next Monday at 9:00 a.m. in the Middle Eastern Reading Room of the Library of Congress -- although now we'll have the book and can begin deciphering the location of the final revelation! Anthony The assassin had had Khalifa under surveillance long enough to know who the sender was and what he was referring to. It was a parallel and potentially more damaging project, which up until this point had appeared stalled. Obviously, things had changed -- and not for the better. The assassin shut down the laptop and spent the next several hours pondering the implication of what he had learned. He then started formulating a plan. When all of the angles had been considered and tested in his mind, he reactivated the computer. Attaching the relevant e-mails between Khalifa a... Views: 59
Brilliant, dazzling, never-before-collected nonfiction writings by "one of America's most daring and talented writers." (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Both Flesh and Not gathers fifteen of Wallace's seminal essays, all published in book form for the first time.Never has Wallace's seemingly endless curiosity been more evident than in this compilation of work spanning nearly 20 years of writing. Here, Wallace turns his critical eye with equal enthusiasm toward Roger Federer and Jorge Luis Borges; Terminator 2 and The Best of the Prose Poem; the nature of being a fiction writer and the quandary of defining the essay; the best underappreciated novels and the English language's most irksome misused words; and much more.Both Flesh and Not restores Wallace's essays as originally written, and it includes a selection from his personal vocabulary list, an assembly of unusual words and definitions. Views: 59
The world's balance of power is about to shift dangerously as the ultimate weapon nears completion in a secret facility in the heart of the desert. Across the globe, operatives from the great nations set a deadly game in motion, covertly maneuvering pawns and kings to achieve a frightening advantage—while terrorists and their hunters prepare for the contest's final, bloody moves. And one man—a razor-sharp master of disguise, deceit, and triple-cross—must somehow do the impossible: steal 200 tons of uranium without any of the other players discovering the theft. The clock is ticking. And the price of failure is Apocalypse. Views: 59
44 SCOTLAND STREET - Book 8The residents and neighbors of 44 Scotland Street and the city of Edinburgh come to vivid life in these gently satirical, wonderfully perceptive serial novels, featuring six-year-old Bertie, a remarkably precocious boy--just ask his mother. From social media to the finer points of human behavior, this latest episode of Alexander McCall Smith's popular 44 Scotland Street series provides an entertaining commentary on a small corner of modern life in Edinburgh where, contrary to received wisdom, the sun nearly always shines.Angus Lordie and Domenica Macdonald are finally tying the knot. Unsurprisingly, Angus is not quite prepared and averting a wedding-day disaster falls to his best man, Matthew. When the newlyweds finally head off on their honeymoon, Angus's dog Cyril goes to stay with the Pollocks--to the delight of one member of the family, and the utter despair of another. The long-suffering Bertie knows firsthand how... Views: 59
From the acclaimed Author of TEMPLE OF THE GRAIL, THE SEAL and THE SIXTH KEY comes a singular achievement, a novel that transcends the four known gospels to unveil a secret kept hidden for centuries: the secret of the two Jesus Children. It is 1244 and the Castle of Montségur is under siege. Trapped in the small fortress perched high in the Pyrenees Cathars and their supporters fight to avoid death on the pyre at the hands of the Catholic Church. Amidst the carnage and mayhem of war, a woman mysteriously appears to Cathar Perfect, Bertrand Marty – a woman with a tale to tell. Two worlds collide, Judea and France, as she unfolds a story of shattering proportions, revealing secrets, both dangerous and devastating, which have been hidden for centuries in the annals of a Fifth gospel. A story of courage and sacrifice, of faith beyond life, and of astounding secrets buried in time. Views: 59
A major literary event: the first volume in the definitive, complete collection of the letters of Sylvia Plath—most never before seen.One of the most beloved poets of the modern age, Sylvia Plath continues to inspire and fascinate the literary world. While her renown as one of the twentieth century's most influential poets is beyond dispute, Plath was also one of its most captivating correspondents. The Letters of Sylvia Plath is the breathtaking compendium of this prolific writer's correspondence with more than 120 people, including family, friends, contemporaries, and colleagues. The Letters of Sylvia Plath includes her correspondence from her years at Smith, her summer editorial internship in New York City, her time at Cambridge, her experiences touring Europe, and the early days of her marriage to Ted Hughes in 1956.Most of the letters are previously unseen, including sixteen letters written by Plath to Hughes when they were apart after their... Views: 59
A group of American ex-pats en route to adventure, inspiration, or perhaps even history-in-the-making in Prague, somehow get side-tracked and settle instead for the enigmatic city of Budapest. Arriving in Hungary's capital to pursue his elusive brother, journalist John Price finds himself drawn into the din of Budapest's nightclubs, a romance with a secretive young diplomat, the table of an elderly cocktail pianist, and the moody company of a young man obsessed with nostalgia, all in a bid to forget the larger questions that arise in a city still pocked with bullet holes from war and crushed rebellion. With humour, intelligence and masterly prose, Phillips captures the character of his contemporaries and brilliantly renders a very weird 'modern' city. Views: 59
On its initial publication in 1962, Eudora Welty said of A Long and Happy Life, "Reynolds Price is the most impressive new writer I've come across in a long time. His is a first-rate talent and we are lucky that he has started so young to write so well. Here is a fine novel."From its dazzling opening page, which announced the appearance of a stylist of the first rank, to its moving close, this brief novel has charmed and captivated millions of readers since its publication twenty-five years ago and its subsequent translation into fifteen languages. On the triumphant publication of Kate Vaiden, his most recent novel, in 1986, there was almost no review that -- praising the new book to the skies -- didn't also mention in glowing terms the reviewer's fond recollection of the marvelous first novel, the troubled love story of Rosacoke Mustian and Wesley Beavers and its beautifully evoked vision of rural North Carolina. It is a pleasure now to restore to print the... Views: 59
EXCLUSIVE! 2 brand-new releases by SM REINE and ROBERT J. CRANE that you'll find only in SINNERS & SORCERERS! 4 full-length books by 5 bestselling authors WITCH HUNT (Preternatural Affairs) - SM Reine Cesar Hawke wakes up with a dead waitress in his bathtub after a night of drunken partying, but he knows he didn't kill her. He works for the Office of Preternatural Affairs. He doesn't hurt people - he saves them. The cops disagree. Now he's running. He'll have to find Isobel Stonecrow, a witch that speaks to the dead, to clear his name and get his life back. He's bagged a dozen witches before. How hard can one more be? CALLED (Southern Watch) - Robert J. Crane A local cop keeping order in Midian, Tennessee, Archibald "Arch" Stan lives a good but ultimately empty life. Until the drifter with a sword comes to town. Lafayette Hendricks fights things that don't die - even when shot. As demons, chaos and unspeakable evils threaten Arch's small town, he and Hendricks must join forces to keep watch on the darkness before it swallows Midian--and from there, the world. FLAMING DOVE - Daniel Arenson A child of both angel and demon, Laila is outcast from Hell, banished from Heaven and lost on an Earth left in ruins. Yet the armies of Armageddon, ended now in an uneasy truce set to implode, both need her. She can become the ultimate spy...or ultimate soldier. As the armies of Heaven and Hell pursue her, Laila's forced to confront the struggle between her demonic and heavenly blood that battles within her heart. CURSED! - Scott Nicholson & J.R. Rain Albert Shipway is an ordinary SoCal guy, an insurance negotiator who likes booze and women and never having to say he’s sorry. But a little old woman knows about the storm of broken things -- promises, hearts, families -- littering his past, and she has one heck of a recipe for supernatural revenge: a psychotic ex, a pinch of childhood fear, a life-stealing great-granddad and a notorious mass murderer who doesn't know he's dead. Albert's about to get a chance to right some wrongs. Views: 58
They said the dead can't hurt you . . . They were wrong. The House on Cold Hill is a chilling and suspenseful ghost story from the multi-million copy bestselling author of Dead Simple, Peter James.Moving from the heart of Brighton and Hove to the Sussex countryside is a big undertaking for Ollie and Caro Harcourt and their twelve-year-old daughter Jade. But when they view Cold Hill House - a huge, dilapidated Georgian mansion - Ollie is filled with excitement. Despite the financial strain of the move, he has dreamed of living in the country since he was a child, and he sees Cold Hill House as a paradise for his animal-loving daughter, the perfect base for his web-design business and a terrific long-term investment. Caro is less certain, and Jade is grumpy about being separated from her friends.Within days of moving in, it becomes apparent that the Harcourt family aren't the only residents of the house. A friend of Jade's is the first to see the spectral woman, standing behind her as the girls talk on FaceTime. Then there are more sightings, as well as increasingly disturbing occurrences in the house. As the haunting becomes more malevolent and the house itself begins to turn on the Harcourts, the terrified family discover Cold Hill House's dark history, and the horrible truth of what it could mean for them . . . Views: 58
