Showing results by narrator "Edoardo Ballerini" in All Categories

In False Flag, Israeli-born Dalia Artzi, a tactical genius and specialist at Princeton in the study of maneuver warfare, uncovers a fiendish plot by a small group of Israeli fanatics to commit a horrific crime against the United States government and pin the blame on Iran. At first Dalia, a pacifist, is hesitant to get involved. But, strong in her Jewish faith, she believes that the goal of her religion is not to crush one's enemies but to practice tikkun olam, to repair the world.

North Korea's deadliest weapon is sleeper agent Song Sun Young. Married with children and living the good life in New York City, she has waited seven years to activate the mission she was trained to do: infiltrate America's financial infrastructure. She prays the call from her handlers will never come, because she loves her husband and kids and affluent New York lifestyle. But the call does come. During volatile negotiations between the White House and Pyongyang, Song is hurled back into a reality she had hoped to leave behind forever.

Bridge and Nicole are hired by a woman who's lost her gold coins. They follow the man that took them down to South America, where he intends to sell them to the highest bidder. Things don't quite go according to plan, though, as they run into the con man before he's able to rid himself of the coins. It becomes a cat-and-mouse game between Bridge and the con man, who acts more like a friend than a foe. Can Bridge and Nicole take the coins before the man can get rid of them? Or will they have to alter their plans if they're unable to stop him?

In the shadows of a seismic shift in American politics comes Tom Rachman's timely and hilarious new work. Basket of Deplorables takes an incisive and satirical look at the United States in the era of Trump data breaches, liberal self-righteousness, red-hat rancor, Starbucks macchiatos, Ultimate Fighting factories, and Internet sinkholes.

A heartrending, at times darkly comic but ultimately redemptive novel, Paolo Giordano’s The Human Body is an exploration of brotherhood and family, of modern war, and the wars we wage within ourselves. It is a novel that reminds us of what it means to be human. A platoon of young men and a single woman leave Italy for one of the most dangerous places on Earth. At their forward operating base in Afghanistan; this band of inexperienced soldiers navigates the irreversible journey from youth to adulthood.

America's most wanted man. The world's only hope? For months, the FBI has been on the hunt for a terrorist who seems invincible. The death toll is rising, yet somehow the killer, known only as the 'Green Man', has avoided leaving a single clue. This is no ordinary villain. Each attack is carefully planned to destroy a target that threatens the environment. Each time, the protest movement that supports the Green Man grows ever larger.

Speed: the most demonized - and misunderstood - drug in the land. Deprived of the ingrained romantic mysticism of the opiate or the cosmopolitan chic of cocaine or the mundane tolerance of marijuana, there is no sympathy for this devil. Yet speed - crystal meth, amphetamines, Dexedrine, Benzedrine, Adderall; crank, spizz, chickenscratch, oblivious marching powder, the go-fast - is the most American of drugs: twice the productivity at half the cost, and equal opportunity for all.

A decade has passed since Verlaine saw Evangeline alight from the Brooklyn Bridge, the sight of her new wings a betrayal that haunts him still. Now an elite angel hunter for the Society of Angelology, he pursues his mission with single-minded devotion: to capture, imprison, and eliminate her kind. But when Evangeline suddenly appears on a twilit Paris street, Verlaine finds her nature to be unlike any of the other creatures he so mercilessly pursues, casting him into a spiral of doubt and confusion that only grows when she is abducted before his eyes....

On January 12, 2010, a major earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Hundreds of thousands of people died, and the greater part of the capital was demolished. Dr. Paul Farmer, U.N. deputy special envoy to Haiti, who had worked in the country for nearly thirty years treating infectious diseases like tuberculosis and AIDS, and former President Bill Clinton, the U.N. special envoy to Haiti, had just begun to work on an extensive development plan to improve living conditions in Haiti.

Originally published in 1860, Ivan Turgenev’s First Love follows a 16-year-old boy’s infatuation with an older princess, who has moved in next door.

Someone is murdering the retired ladies of the lunch club. Jack McCall, ably assisted by Nora Burke and Max Logan, is hired by the governor - the brother of one of the victims. At the start, it seems a cushy job: nice weather, good pay, and an attractive Florida State cop is assigned to assist Jack. But in typical Jack McCall fashion, this murder case quickly turns screwy.

Edgar Kellogg has always yearned to be popular. Bored rigid by his pedestrian life as a solicitor, Edgar decides to risk everything on trying to make it as a journalist. When he’s offered the post of foreign correspondent in Barba - a Portuguese backwater that has sprouted a terrorist movement - Edgar leaps at the chance to replace a blowhard called "Barrington Saddler" who’s disappeared. But the more Edgar learns about his posting, and his larger-than-life predecessor, the more he realizes that it’s not Barban terrorism he’s covering; it’s Barrington Saddler.

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.

San Francisco, September 1921: Silent-screen comedy star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle is throwing a wild party in his suite at the St. Francis Hotel-girls, jazz, bootleg hooch...and a dead actress named Virginia Rappe. The D.A. says it was Arbuckle who killed her—crushed her under his weight—and brings him up on manslaughter charges. William Randolph Hearst's newspapers stir up the public and demand a guilty verdict.

Set against the backdrop of the island’s increasing disillusionment with its new rulers from Savoy and a yearning for the return of the formerly detested Spanish monarchy, book two of Sicilian Avengers continues as the future of the House of Albamonte hangs in the balance and the survival of the Beati Paoli is threatened.

New Pittsburgh, 1898 - a crucible of invention and intrigue. Born from the ashes of devastating fire, flood, and earthquake, the city is ruled by the shadow government of The Oligarchy. Jake Desmet and Rick Brand travel the world to secure treasures and unusual items for the collections of wealthy patrons, accompanied by Jake's cousin, Veronique Le Clerque. But when their latest commission leads to Jake's father's murder, the three friends are drawn into a conspiracy where dark magic, industrial sabotage, and monsters that prey on the night will ultimately threaten not just New Pittsburgh, but the whole world.

These 12 stories - published over the last five years in Harper's, The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney's, Playboy, and other publications - veer from comic tales of love to social satire to suspenseful crime fiction, from hip Portland to once-hip Seattle to never-hip Spokane, from a condemned casino in Las Vegas to a bottomless lake in the dark woods of Idaho. This is a world of lost fathers and redemptive conmen, of meth tweakers on desperate odysseys and men committing suicide by fishing.

Born in the Bronx, Guy Trebay was raised in an atmosphere of privilege on Long Island’s North Shore after his entrepreneurial father struck business gold with Hawaiian Surf, a wildly successful cologne company that capitalized on the optimism of the 1960s as marketed to “an adventurous new breed of men.’’ But behind the facade of material prosperity lay the emotional disarray of a household dominated by a charismatic, con artist father, a glamorous yet lost and careless mother, a family haunted by tragedy.

Auschwitz, 1944. Alfred Mendl's days are numbered. But he has little left to live for - his family were torn away from him, his life's work burned in front of his eyes - until a glimmer of hope arises as he watches a game of chess. To the guards Mendl is just another prisoner, but in fact he holds knowledge that only two people in the world possess. The other is working hard for the Nazi war machine. Four thousand miles away, in Washington, DC, intelligence lieutenant Nathan Blum decodes messages from occupied Poland.

Following a devastating nuclear war, the Moral Reclamation government took over the world and forced its citizens to live by strictly puritanical rules—no premarital sex, drunkenness, or displaying of neon signs—all of which are reinforced through a constant barrage of public messages. The chief purveyor of these messages is Alan Purcell, next in line to become head of the propaganda bureau. But there is just one problem: a statue of the government’s founder has been vandalized and the head is hidden in Purcell’s closet.