Alan Sklar

"Before he retired, J. P. Beaumont had looked forward to having his days all to himself. But too much free time doesn't suit a man used to brushing close to danger. When his longtime nemesis, retired Seattle crime reporter Maxwell Cole, dies in whats officially deemed to be an accidental fire, Beau is astonished to be dragged into the investigation at the request of none other than the deceased victim himself. In the process Beau learns that just...

In Seven Dirty Words, journalist and cultural critic James Sullivan tells the story of Alternative America from the 1950s to the present, from the singular vantage point of George Carlin, the Catholic boy for whom nothing was sacred. A critical biography, Seven Dirty Words is an insightful (and, of course, hilarious) examination of Carlin's body of work as it pertained to its cultural times and the man who created it, from his early days as a more-or-less...

After conducting exclusive interviews with more than one hundred current and former Secret Service agents, bestselling author and award-winning reporter Ronald Kessler reveals their secrets for the first time.
Never before has a journalist penetrated the wall of secrecy that surrounds the U.S. Secret Service, that elite corps of agents who pledge to take a bullet to protect the president and his family. Kessler portrays the dangers that...

"Do we really need yet another book about the financial crisis? Yes, we do—because this one is different....A must-read for anyone who wants to understand the mess we're in."
—Paul Krugman, New York Times Book Review

"Fox makes business history thrilling."
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

A lively history of ideas, The Myth of the Rational Market by former Time Magazine economics columnist Justin

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A blistering narrative account of the negligence and greed that pushed all of Wall Street into chaos and the country into a financial crisis.
 
At the beginning of March 2008, the monetary fabric of Bear Stearns, one of the world’s oldest and largest investment banks, began unraveling. After ten days, the bank no longer existed, its assets sold under duress to rival JPMorgan Chase. The effects would be felt nationwide, as the country...

Tony Valentine is an expert at spotting cheats. He’s tossed them out of gambling casinos from Atlantic City to Las Vegas and Monaco. But though Tony has never met a scam he couldn’t crack, his son and partner, Gerry, has just walked into one with a body count.
What started with a conman’s deathbed confession turns into a deadly Las Vegas grudge match during the world’s biggest poker tournament. While Gerry and his shady...

The boss of New York's infamous Lucchese crime family, Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso's life in the Mafia was preordained from birth. His rare talent for "earning"-concocting ingenious schemes to hijack trucks, rob banks, and bring vast quantities of drugs into New York-fueled his unstoppable rise up the ladder of organized crime. A mafioso responsible for at least fifty murders, Casso lived large, with a beautiful wife and money to burn. When the law finally...

SHE WAS EVERY MAN'S DREAM — AND ONE MAN'S NIGHTMARE! Johnny Hayden and Doug Rance had a scheme to take real estate entrepreneur Wallace Gunderman for all he was worth. But they needed a girl on the inside to make it work. Enter Evelyn Stone: Gunderman's secretary, his lover — and his worst enemy. Gunderman had promised to marry her, but never came through. Now she's ready to make him pay... Johnny Hayden has spent a lifetime working the long...

The bestselling author of Overthrow offers a new and surprising vision for rebuilding America's strategic partnerships in the Middle East What can the United States do to help realize its dream of a peaceful, democratic Middle East? Stephen Kinzer offers a surprising answer in this paradigm-shifting book. Two countries in the region, he argues, are America's logical partners in the twenty-first century: Turkey and Iran. Besides proposing this new...

On March 13, the cardinals of the Catholic Church, gathered to elect a successor to a living Pope for the first time in 600 years, announced a dramatic shift. By elevating Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina to become Pope Francis the 266th Pontiff, the cardinals were naming the first-ever Pope from the growing New World to take the helm of the church at a crucial moment. It was a stunning move by a 2,000-year-old institution that has immense...