Showing results by narrator "Noah Michael Levine" in All Categories

A man holds 12 children hostage at gunpoint. Across the street, James Hawker dangles from a skyscraper, watching the terrorist through a sniper's scope. Hawker has a shot, and he wants to take it, but the police brass say no. By the time he gets permission, it will be far too late. The terrorist opens fire, killing two of the children before Hawker can take him out. When the smoke clears, the madman is dead, and Hawker's career is toast. No longer a cop, he's about to become America's deadliest defender.

In a pawnshop alleyway, James Hawker finds a body mutilated beyond recognition. She was beautiful once, he knows, but life in this hardened Los Angeles neighborhood took its toll. Starnsdale was once a working-class community, but now it is a battlefield ravaged by warring gangs who kill without thinking and care nothing for the ordinary citizens crushed beneath their feet. The toughest gang is called the Panthers - and Hawker has come to hunt them down.

For Con Ye Cwong, the Vietnam War will never be over. Head of the North Vietnamese secret police during the brutal conflict, he has built himself an empire selling cocaine and heroin to the West. Even after the war, American servicemen remain his favorite targets. He relishes nothing more than getting a soldier hooked, and then upping the price until the junkie has no choice but to reveal military secrets for the next fix. He's one of the most powerful men in the world, and James Hawker is going to take him down.

When the police department told him to hold his fire, Hawker pulled the trigger anyway - and killed a dangerous terrorist. Since losing his badge, this hardnosed vigilante has been exiled from Chicago, the city he loves more than any other. He returns for the sake of one man: Saul Beckerman, a friend from the old neighborhood who has become one of the richest people in the city. Since Hawker began his nationwide war against organized crime, Beckerman has gotten into trouble with the wrong people.

Outside the cabana, an assassin waits for James Hawker, the country's most dangerous vigilante. Hawker's nationwide crusade against organized crime has led him to the Fister Corporation - one of the most corrupt businesses on the planet - and for that, he has been targeted for death. The assassin draws a .38 and screws on a silencer, planning a quick and quiet kill. But it won't be so easy. He bursts into Hawker's room, gun drawn, but Hawker is waiting. The gunman is dead within seconds, and Hawker is safe - for now.

If they hadn't come to the cabin, Lomela and her children would be dead by now. Evil men want something from Lomela's father, and they'll hurt his family to get it, so the young mother has taken refuge far from civilization, in a remote patch of the Rocky Mountains. She believes she's safe. She's wrong. The sniper focuses his scope on Lomela. He squeezes the trigger, and his crossbow bolt flies across the mountains, passing Lomela - and striking dead the man who was about to shoot her in the back.

Brenda Paulie is fresh out of law school, newly married, and recently pregnant. She's also marked to die. In an affluent neighborhood of Detroit, three masked men burst into Brenda's house, beat her husband senseless, and take her captive - their 13th victim this year. Only one man can save her: James Hawker, America's deadliest vigilante. And when he comes to Detroit, the city will never be the same.

In a forgotten town on the wrong side of Texas, James Hawker stumbles into a fetid dive bar. The most dangerous vigilante in America is blind drunk, and stinks of mescal. He begs the bartender for help getting back across the border, and the man obliges - for a fee. He introduces Hawker to a pair of toughs, who chain him up in the back of a truck and begin the long trip north. Hawker has been captured by a modern-day slaving outfit - and it's exactly what he had in mind.

It's just past six a.m., and the Rutledge family is gathering for breakfast, unaware of the two bombs that have been planted outside their home. They're about to start eating when a fireball bursts through the windows, and the house is blasted to dust, leaving only one survivor. In the last six weeks, the Rutledges are the seventh family to be attacked - and the onslaught is just beginning. A terrorist group is intent on bringing the citizens of Washington, D.C. to their knees.

James Hawker finds her in the Yellow Pages, listed under "P" - for prostitution. This is Las Vegas, after all, where the world's oldest profession is just another business. Vegas has been a wide-open town for more than a century: a place where respectable Americans can indulge their darkest fantasies. But an unpleasant new attraction has been added to this paradise of gambling and perversion - the forbidden vice called murder. Hawker isn't a gambling man, but murder is his business.

Ambitious newspaper journalist Savannah O'Neill will do anything for a story, even if it means pretending to be a prostitute in Sydney's most exclusive brothel. She's there on a tip-off that underage girls are being held illegally and kept compliant with illicit drugs. What's more, unidentified bodies of young women have turned up in Sydney Harbour, and at least one of them is linked to the brothel. Detective Will Rutledge has vowed to destroy the man he holds responsible for his brother's suicide.

When much decorated Australian Federal Police officer Declan Munro is accused of illegally accessing confidential police files containing child pornography, his world is turned upside down. Fronting the investigation into his alleged criminal behavior is Senior Internal Affairs Investigator Chloe Sabattini. A veteran investigator, Chloe is taken aback to discover that not only is Declan likable, but his protestations of innocence are believable. Furthermore, despite her best efforts, she finds herself drawn to him.

Two torturous months came and went. Detective Bennett refuses to give up on finding his daughter. Even as the authorities of New England and beyond, trailing the blood in the girl's wake, devised a ruthless manhunt to bring her back. Well aware of the young woman's fragile state, Bennett is determined to locate her first. He's terrified to learn that he and the officers aren't the only ones looking...

What do you do when your life crumbles around you? If you're Frank "Triggaltheron" Trigg, you climb into a bottle looking for oblivion. Of course, he couldn't even get that right. Alone and adrift, Frank's five month binge is interrupted with a boom. A nuclear one, and every bit of chaos and treachery he tried to leave behind comes knocking once more. Caught up in a plot to foment a supernatural revolution, Frank is made into a pawn for both sides. But what does a man with nothing have to lose?

America's Favorite Holidays explores how five of America's culturally important holidays - Christmas, Valentine's Day, Easter, Halloween, and Thanksgiving - came to be what they are today, seasonal and religious celebrations heavily influenced by modern popular culture.

Escaped from prison and back in his own body, life has taken a turn toward the domestic for Frank "Triggaltheron" Trigg. His days are filled with diapers, formula, and baby farts, and he wouldn't have it any other way. Of course it can't last. A raid on Frank's home threatens his family and throws his life into chaos. He scrambles to survive, his enemies growing more numerous at every turn.

This is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people - an embryonic black nation. As Steven Hahn demonstrates, rural African-Americans were central political actors in the great events of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building. At the same time, Hahn asks us to think in more expansive ways about the nature and boundaries of politics and political practice.

J. is a young Cuban man who, thanks to his knowledge of Russian and Spanish, has become the tutor of the young son of a wealthy Russian couple living in Marbella, in the part of southern Spain that the Russian mafia has turned into its winter quarters. As J. attempts to give the boy a general grade-school education by exclusively reading him Proust, he also becomes the personal secretary of the boy's father, Vasily, an ex-scientist whom J. suspects is on the run from gangsters.

Considered by many to be the first Beat novel, this underground classic follows a clique of young bohemians from dive bar to dance hall in 1940s New York. Recently fired from his job and not yet ready to find a new one, aspiring author Blake Williams begins his evenings at the Sporting Club Bar in Greenwich Village, where he knows he will find Henry Porter.

Here is the story of a community - Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts - and a sporting event - the island's legendary Striped Bass & Bluefish Derby - that is rendered with the same depth, color, and emotional power of the best fiction. Among the characters we meet Dick Hathaway, a crotchety legend who once caught a bluefish from a helicopter and was ultimately banned for cheating; and Janet Messineo, a recovering alcoholic who says that striped bass saved her life.