Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Publishing" in Spies & Politics

Yakov Blumkin claimed to have had nine lives. Born to a poor Jewish family and orphaned as a child, he was a Socialist Revolutionary, a terrorist, the assassin of the German ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach, a poet close to the avant-garde, a member of Cheka, a military strategist, a secret agent, and Leon Trotsky’s secretary. Executed in 1929 on Stalin’s orders at the age of only twenty-nine, he has continued to inspire a powerful curiosity, and wild rumors and falsehoods about his extraordinary life abound today.

In Mesa County, Nevada, the tide of history was about to change. A tiny tribe of Indigenous Americans had just beaten the white man in his own court—and won title to some of the richest land in America. But some people were poor losers. And if they couldn’t hold on to the land … they’d simply eliminate its rightful owners. With a handful of poorly armed Native Americans facing a lynch mob led by the county sheriff and backed by corporate millions, Mesa County might be the setting for another Wounded Knee. Until the Black Berets get in on the action and show how professionals handle a massacre.

In 1976 Buenos Aires, Lorena Ledesma is a housewife with dangerous secrets living under Argentina’s rising military dictatorship. When she and her husband are torn from their home by the paramilitary in the middle of the night, their two-year-old son is left behind with Lorena’s mother, Esme. There’s never any record of the arrest. Desperate to locate Lorena, Esme joins an underground group of mothers who are investigating the disappearances of their own missing children.

He was released from federal prison to a second life as an unwilling assassin, serving a major Chicago crime lord until the day he finally won his freedom. But that freedom was a lie. Now Mason finds himself on a plane to Jakarta, promoted to lead assassin for a vast shadow organization that reaches every corner of the globe. This time, there’s only one name on his list: Hashim Baya—otherwise known as the Crocodile—international fugitive and #1 most wanted on Interpol’s “Red Notice” list. Baya is the most dangerous and elusive criminal Mason has ever faced.

Three hundred thirty-three fatalities and no survivors. So begins Pulitzer Prize finalist Jean Heller’s chilling hard-boiled saga, as a flight crashes on takeoff when one of its engines explodes in midair. After that, it’s a toss-up—you may or may not be able to catch your breath as the thriller loops and careens to a twisty climax.

Like millions of Americans, Dr. John VanDuyne is stunned to watch President Tom Winston announce his plans to legalize narcotics in a radical bid to destroy the power of the drug cartels. Especially since, as Winston’s personal physician and a government health spokesman, VanDuyne might have expected some prior warning. And now he’s going to be right in the firing line when the uproar begins. For President Winston, his daring plan could turn out to be political suicide. For VanDuvne, it’s going to be much worse than that.

Dr. Duncan Lathram is a brilliant plastic surgeon who recently invented a dissolving implant that allows incisions to heal without scarring. His unparalleled artistry in the operating room is the salvation of all the biggest power players in Washington, DC, whenever they need to be TV ready. Lathram appears to have it all, but something isn’t right....

While on vacation in Las Vegas, a businessman wakes up in a strange hotel room to find a dead woman in the bathtub. Panicked, he runs. But before he can get far, a pair of detectives stop him. Desperate, he tells them that he’s innocent. That there’s no way he killed the woman. That he’ll do anything not to go to prison. That’s when they offer him a way out. But there is no way out—as the detectives will soon learn.

February, 1586. When the queen’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, learns that Ursula is to visit her relatives in Devon, he asks her to find out what has happened to two of his local agents, who have been strangely silent recently. On arrival in the small Devon village of Zeal Aquatio, Ursula discovers that both spies in question have met with mysterious - and fatal - accidents. Or is there more to it than that? What did the two spies find out that got them killed?

During the Gulf War in 1991, an ancient scroll is found in Southern Israel. Years later, scientists declare it a fake, but an American nun believes it will lead her to the resting place of the Virgin Mary. What she finds seems to possess miraculous healing powers that attract believers and skeptics from across the globe. She also draws the attention of a mysterious Israeli Shin Bet officer determined to retrieve the remains of the “Mother” at any cost. And that is only the beginning....

As a spy for President Franklin Roosevelt, Lanny Budd was able to infiltrate the inner circle of the Nazi high command and glean essential information on behalf of the Allied cause. Now, as the terrible global conflict approaches its long-awaited conclusion, the newly commissioned Captain Budd of the US Army is on hand to witness the final collapse of the Third Reich in the aftermath of the Battle of the Bulge.

Since the age of thirteen, Lanny Budd has been more than an eyewitness to history. From the Paris Peace Conference to the Battle of the Bulge, he has played key roles in the extraordinary events of his age. Now, forty years later, Presidential Agent 103 is coming out of retirement to serve his country—and the free world—once more. A counterfeiting conspiracy hatched by unrepentant neo-Nazis threatens to gravely damage America’s efforts to rebuild and stabilize a divided Germany.

In 1943, the once-unstoppable Nazi war machine is starting to falter. For a decade and a half, Lanny Budd’s cover as a fine-art dealer and Fascist sympathizer has held firm, earning him the confidence of Hermann Göring and other top officials, including Adolf Hitler himself. With the Allies preparing to retake Europe, Lanny must make certain that the location of the invasion remains hidden from the Nazi high command. But his mission is compromised and his life endangered when Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s feared Gestapo chief, uncovers Lanny’s true loyalties.

They were the most elite team of interservice fighters America’s government had ever formed. As war raged in Vietnam, the Black Berets took on the most secret—and most heinous—of covert operations. Now they’re back, and they have a new mission. Eight years after their bloody exploits across the battlefields of Asia, the five-man team is reunited at the behest of their scheming CIA handler, a man none of them trusts after a dirty war of lies and betrayals. However, word has it one of their own, thought long-dead, is alive and being held prisoner in Laos.

Someone wanted to overthrow the government of San Sebastian, a country whose tiny army, nonaligned status, and location on the deadly curve of Central America made it ripe for subversion. The first try was an attempted hit on its president on a crowded street in Washington. The second was an invasion from the sea. Both times the Black Berets were there to keep the worst from happening. But how long could five men and one boy hold out against an army of the world’s most skilled assassins? An army with limitless resources—and the patience to keep on killing?

In the arms race against Russia, the United States has eked ahead with their superior advancements in computer technology. All that changes when Russia recruits some of Japan’s finest scientific minds to build their greatest weapon yet: a supercomputer capable of annihilating the US’s formidable Star Wars defense system. Destined for the land of the Samurai, the Black Berets know just how much is riding on this latest mission. If Russia succeeds in its quest for world domination, the future of the warriors’ countrymen—and their loved ones—is bleak indeed.

The Black Berets had to hand it to Parkes, their former CIA case officer. First he’d sent them on a suicide mission to Vietnam. Then he’d sent some CIA hitmen to finish them off when the enemy couldn’t. And the moment they set foot stateside, the world’s meanest mercenaries found that Parkes had arranged another lethal welcome. Well, they’d never liked Parkes much. But how were they going to tell him? First they had to find him, and that would take Beeker, Rosie, Cowboy, Harry, and Marty, from the bayous of Louisiana to an academy of terror in the Libyan desert.

The year 1942 marked the turning point of World War II. The Americans destroyed the Japanese Battle Fleet in the decisive engagements of Midway and the Coral Sea. General Montgomery defeated General Rommel at El Alamein. But for President Roosevelt, 1942 was the darkest hour of the war. He knew the Germans were developing the atomic bomb. Our victories would be meaningless if the Nazis perfected the “A” bomb first. There was only one man who could find out the biggest Nazi secret of the war: Lanny Budd.

In 1902 Lithuania, a group of rebels armed with books triumphs against the mighty Russian Empire. Part folktale, part thriller, The Last Book Smuggler tells the story of Ada and her grandfather Viktoras, an old book smuggler tired of his forty-year battle to keep his language alive despite the attempts of the Russian Empire to destroy it. Into their world steps Jonas, a young man in love with Ada and ready to join the underground book smugglers. But there is a traitor in their midst who must stop them or lose everything.

Throughout Southern India, eighty-six villages are set to completely submerge due to a government-sanctioned dam across the Krishna River. Nilgi, one such village on the banks of the mighty River Krishna, has so far escaped unscathed from the illegal iron-ore mining and floods that have ravaged the rest of the district for decades. The village believes itself to be indestructible and incorruptible despite warnings of impending doom.