Chapter One With Greg Grasso

Finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in History Written from a strikingly fresh perspective, this new account of the Boston Tea Party and the origins of the American Revolution shows how a lethal blend of politics, personalities, and economics led to a war that few people welcomed but nobody could prevent. “A great Empire, like a great Cake, is most easily diminished at the edges,” observed Benjamin Franklin, shortly before the American Revolution. In An Empire on the Edge, British author Nick Bunker delivers a powerful and propulsive narrative of the road to war. At the heart of the book lies the Boston Tea Party, when the British stumbled into an unforeseen crisis that exposed deep flaws in an imperial system sprawling from the Mississippi to Bengal. Shedding new light on the Tea Party’s origins and on the roles of such familiar characters as Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, Thomas Hutchinson, and the British ministers Lord North and Lord Dartmouth, Bunker depicts the last three years of deepening anger

They thought he was gone, but they were wrong. Jack the Ripper is loose in London once more. Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad faces the most shocking case of its existence, in the extraordinary new historical thriller from the author of the acclaimed national bestsellers The Yard and The Black Country. London, 1890. A small group of the city’s elite, fed up with the murder rate, have made it their business to capture violent criminals and mete out their own terrible brand of retribution. Now they are taking it a step further: They have arranged for four murderers to escape from prison, and into the group’s hands. But the plan goes wrong. The killers elude them, and now it is up to Walter Day, Nevil Hammersmith, and the rest of Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad to hunt the convicts down before they can resume their bloody spree. But the Murder Squad may already be too late. The killers have retribution in mind, and one of them is heading straight toward a member of the Murder Squad, and his family. And that isn’t e

In this episode King and Klinger discuss the story collection they edited entitled a Study in Sherlock. Neil Gaiman. Laura Lippman. Lee Child. These are just three of eighteen superstar authors who provide fascinating, thrilling, and utterly original perspectives on Sherlock Holmes in this one-of-a-kind book. These modern masters place the sleuth in suspenseful new situations, create characters who solve Holmesian mysteries, contemplate Holmes in his later years, fill gaps in the Sherlock Holmes Canon, and reveal their own personal obsessions with the Great Detective.

In this episode Brown discusses her book Operation Thriller. Sandra Brown is the author of sixty-two New York Times bestsellers, including LOW PRESSURE (2012), LETHAL(2011), TOUGH CUSTOMER (2010), SMASH CUT (2009), SMOKE SCREEN (2008), PLAY DIRTY (2007), RICOCHET (2006),CHILL FACTOR (2005), and WHITE HOT (2004).Brown began her writing career in 1981 and since then has published over seventy novels, bringing the number of copies of her books in print worldwide to upwards of eighty million. Her work has been translated into thirty-four languages.

An award-winning classic of creative non-fiction, The Children’s Blizzard is the true story of an epic winter storm that hit the Upper Midwest on January 12, 1888. Laskin unfolds this blizzard of unprecedented suddenness and ferocity by focusing on half a dozen pioneer families – most of them immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia. Hailed by the Washington Post as “a vital addition to the lore of Western immigrant pioneering,” this national bestseller has sold over 100,000 copies and has been adopted in history and literature classes in high schools and colleges nationwide.

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Sandra Brown comes a gripping story of family ties and forbidden attraction. Crawford Hunt wants his daughter back. Following the death of his wife four years ago, Crawford, a Texas Ranger, fell into a downward spiral that left him relegated to deskwork and with his five-year-old daughter Georgia in the custody of her grandparents. But Crawford has cleaned up his act, met all the court imposed requirements, and now the fate of his family lies with Judge Holly Spencer. Holly, ambitious and confident, temporarily occupies the bench of her recently deceased mentor. With an election upcoming, she must prove herself worthy of making her judgeship permanent. Every decision is high-stakes. Despite Crawford's obvious love for his child and his commitment to being an ideal parent, Holly is wary of his checkered past. Her opinion of him is radically changed when a masked gunman barges into the courtroom during the custody hearing. Crawford reacts instinctually, saving Ho

Chopper pilot and Vietnam war hero Joe Murphy finds himself in the middle of the brutal Guatemalan revolution when he witnesses an attack on a Mayan village by the Guatemalan Army and its CIA “advisors”. Badly injured, he escapes on a nightmare trek through the jungle, hunted by the Army, the CIA, and death squads.Healed by guerrilla doctor Dona Villalobos, he falls in love with her and tries to save her from the revolution’s widening horror of insanity, tragedy, and death. She convinces him to return to San Francisco to reveal this hidden war to the US media, but the CIA hunts him down there, killing everyone he turns to.He returns to Guatemala to find Dona and to face the war in the jungle and the death squads.Based on the author’s own experiences as the only foreign war correspondent left alive in Guatemala when over 150 journalists had been killed by death squads, House of Jaguar is “a riveting thriller of murder, politics, and lies”

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the longest, ongoing hot-and-cold war of the 20th and 21st centuries. It has produced more refugees than any current conflict, generating fully one quarter of all refugees worldwide. Everyone knows that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is important itself, and is also fueling tensions throughout the Middle East. Yet most people shy away from this conflict, claiming it is "just too complicated" to understand. This book is written for people who want a point of entry into the conversation. It offers both a historic and analytic framework. Readers, whether acting as students, parishioners, neighbors, voters, or dinner guests will find in these pages an analysis of the most commonly heard Israeli positions, and a succinct account of the Palestinian voices we seldom hear. I argue that human rights standards have never been used as the basis on which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be resolved and that only these standards can produce a just and sustainable reso

What was it like to serve in Afghanistan? That is the question civilians often ask returning servicemembers of the armed forces. Afghanistan: On the Bounce brilliantly conveys the full range of the troops’ experiences—on patrol, in combat, in the chow line, and in religious services—through photographs, stories, diagrams, and removable ephemera. As a documentation/production specialist in Afghanistan, photographer Robert L. Cunningham accompanied soldiers of 40 different units on 132 combat missions, following them during their typical on-base routines as well as into hazardous situations. Here are detailed examinations of the servicemembers’ weapons, uniforms, vehicles, and gear, along with reflections on duty, insights into valor and heroism, and clear-eyed humor about life on deployment.

It all starts on a cold, bleak day in 1916, a mining pit in Siberia turns into a bloodbath when its miners attack each other, savagely and ferociously. Minutes later, two men – a mysterious, horrified man of few words, and Grigory Rasputin, trusted confidant of the tsar – hit a detonator, blowing up the mine to conceal all evidence of the carnage. In the present day, FBI agent Sean Reilly is tasked with a new, disturbing case. A Russian embassy attaché seems to have committed suicide by jumping out of a fourth-floor window in Queens. The apartment’s owners, a retired high school teacher and his wife, have gone missing, while a faceless killer, a rogue ex-KGB agent only known as “Koschey”–from an old Russian folk tale, meaning the deathless–is roaming New York City, leaving a trail of death in his wake. Joined by Russian FSB agent Larisa Tchoumitcheva, Reilly’s investigation into the old man’s identity will lead to Korean and Russian mobsters and uncover a deadly search for a mysterious device whose origins

Internationally bestselling author Tess Gerritsen took an unusual route to a writing career. A graduate of Stanford University, Tess went on to medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, where she was awarded her M.D. While on maternity leave from her work as a physician, she began to write fiction. In 1987, her first novel was published. Call After Midnight, a romantic thriller, was followed by eight more romantic suspense novels. She also wrote a screenplay, “Adrift”, which aired as a 1993 CBS Movie of the Week starring Kate Jackson. Tess’s first medical thriller, Harvest, was released in hardcover in 1996, and it marked her debut on the New York Times bestseller list. Her suspense novels since then have been: Life Support (1997), Bloodstream (1998), Gravity (1999), The Surgeon (2001), The Apprentice (2002), The Sinner (2003), Body Double (2004), Vanish (2005), The Mephisto Club (2006), The Bone Garden (2007), The Keepsake (2008; UK title: Keeping the Dead), Ice Cold (2010; UK title: T

O'Clair is a former Detroit homicide investigator who now owns a motel in Pompano Beach, Florida in his retirement. He runs the place with his much younger girlfriend, Virginia, who's a knockout and can fix anything. One morning, he’s cleaning up after the previous night’s partiers when he sees a lovely young woman stretched out asleep on a lounge chair. He shakes her gently. Then he touches her neck and feels for a pulse. There isn't one. Her skin is cold, body starting to stiffen, definitely in the early stages of rigor. When a second girl is murdered, O'Clair knows someone is trying to send him a message. The way the girls are killed reminds O'Clair of a case he investigated years earlier. Now convinced the Pompano murders are related, O'Clair returns to Detroit Police Homicide to review the murder file and try to figure out what he might have missed. And when Virginia is kidnapped by the killer, the stakes grow exponentially higher. The most powerful work to date by one of

Jeffery Deaver, "the master of manipulation" (Associated Press) and "the most creative, skilled and intriguing thriller writer in the world." (Daily Telegraph, UK) returns with the new, long-awaited, Kathryn Dance thriller. A tragedy occurs at a small concert venue on the Monterey Peninsula. Cries of "fire" are raised and, panicked, people run for the doors, only to find them blocked. A half dozen people die and others are seriously injured. But it's the panic and the stampede that killed; there was no fire. Kathryn Dance--a brilliant California Bureau of Investigation agent and body language expert--discovers that the stampede was caused intentionally and that the perpetrator, a man obsessed with turning people's own fears and greed into weapons, has more attacks planned. She and her team must race against the clock to find where he will strike next before more innocents die.

Amos Decker's life changed forever--twice. The first time was on the gridiron. A big, towering athlete, he was the only person from his hometown of Burlington ever to go pro. But his career ended before it had a chance to begin. On his very first play, a violent helmet-to-helmet collision knocked him off the field for good, and left him with an improbable side effect--he can never forget anything. The second time was at home nearly two decades later. Now a police detective, Decker returned from a stakeout one evening and entered a nightmare--his wife, young daughter, and brother-in-law had been murdered. His family destroyed, their killer's identity as mysterious as the motive behind the crime, and unable to forget a single detail from that horrible night, Decker finds his world collapsing around him. He leaves the police force, loses his home, and winds up on the street, taking piecemeal jobs as a private investigator when he can. But over a year later, a man turns himself in to the police and c

New York Times bestselling author Joseph Finder delivers his next breakneck stand-alone thriller about the secrets families can keep, and the danger of their discovery When former investigative reporter Rick Hoffman loses his job, fiancée, and apartment, his only option is to move back into — and renovate — the home of his miserable youth, now empty and in decay since the stroke that put his father in a nursing home. As Rick starts to pull apart the old house, he makes an electrifying discovery — millions of dollars hidden in the walls. It’s enough money to completely transform Rick’s life — and everything he thought he knew about his father. Yet the more of his father’s hidden past that Rick brings to light, the more dangerous his present becomes. Soon, he finds himself on the run from deadly enemies desperate to keep the past buried, and only solving the mystery of his father — a man who has been unable to communicate, comprehend, or care for himself for almost 20 years — will save Rick... if he can surv

In 1944, hundreds of Allied soldiers were trapped in POW camps in occupied France. The odds of their survival were long. The odds of escaping, even longer. But one-man had the courage to fight the odds . . . An elite British S.A.S. operative on an assassination mission gone wrong. A Jewish New Yorker injured in a Nazi ambush. An eighteen-year-old Gary Cooper lookalike from Mobile, Alabama. These men and hundreds of other soldiers found themselves in the prisoner-of-war camps off the Atlantic coast of occupied France, fighting brutal conditions and unsympathetic captors. But, miraculously, local villagers were able to smuggle out a message from the camp, one that reached the Allies and sparked a remarkable quest by an unlikely—and truly inspiring—hero. Andy Hodges had been excluded from military service due to a lingering shoulder injury from his college-football days. Devastated but determined, Andy refused to sit at home while his fellow Americans risked their lives, so he joined the Red Cross, volunteer

It is 1973. A small college town in Southern Illinois is terrorized by a spree of sadistic assaults. The rapist tells the victims—all Asian women—that he is making them pay for America’s betrayal in Vietnam. When the only other Black faculty member is accused of the crimes, African American philosophy professor Nathan “Ribs” Rivers struggles to suspend his doubts about his colleague’s innocence. Rivers reluctantly yields to the urgings of his students and takes up leadership of a campus coalition formed to advocate for a fair trial. Professor Rivers embarks on a vision quest for the truth that is as much about his character as it is about the crimes—a quest that threatens to topple his family and career, ignites in him a spiritual crisis, and plunges him headlong toward lethal unknowns.

It's labeled "natural," "grass-fed," or "free-roaming;" yet it might be anything but. It's time to find out what you're actually eating... When your groceries are labeled “low-fat,” “sugar-free,” and even “natural” and "antibiotic-free," it’s easy to assume that you’re making healthy choices. Yet even some of those seemingly wholesome offerings contain chemical preservatives, pesticides, and artificial flavors and coloring that negatively affect your health. In What the Fork Are You Eating?, a practical guide written by certified chef and nutritionist Stefanie Sacks, MS, CNS, CDN, we learn exactly what the most offensive ingredients in our food are and how we can remove (or at least minimize) them in our diets. Sacks gives us an aisle-by-aisle rundown of how to shop for healthier items and create simple, nutritious, and delicious meals, including fifty original recipes.

Mick Ebeling—a film and TV producer by trade, an optimist by nature—set out on a simple act of kindness that quickly turned into a lifelong mission. In the process he discovered that he could, indeed, change the world. And, as he recounts his own adventures in this fast-paced, fascinating new book, he shows you how you can, too. Then the question becomes: What other great challenges—and what other great inventions—might be made “not impossible”? From the beginning, Ebeling has dreamed big, but that doesn’t mean his accomplishments have come easily. He’s had to deal with the voice in his head we all recognize—the skeptical, pessimistic one that says, “Sorry, this ain’t gonna happen.” Yet he has found the courage to ignore that voice and move on. And believe. And get things done. Fascinating, inspiring, and a true testament to the power of determination, Not Impossible is bursting with optimism and new ideas. It will motivate you to believe that all problems have the ability to be solved—and that you have th

In the latest thriller in the New York Times bestselling Pike Logan series, a hostage situation places America’s most powerful political elite at the mercy of their worst enemies. When veteran operator Pike Logan and partner Jennifer Cahill receive a letter from Blaisdell Consulting—the umbrella cover company for their real employer, a top-secret counterterrorist unit called the Taskforce—they expect orders for their next mission-impossible tasking. Instead, they learn that their latest actions have gotten them fired, despite having saved thousands of innocent lives. Pike’s shock and fury is redirected when their commander, Colonel Kurt Hale, asks him and Jennifer for help with a personal matter: His niece Kylie, an exchange student in England, has gone missing. Neither Pike nor Jennifer understands how critical her disappearance will become. Meanwhile, all Taskforce teams have been redirected to a developing situation. A terrorist organization has targeted military relatives of key members of the United St