The Devil's Alternative

Author: Frederick Forsyth
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101602163
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 469

Book Description
#1 New York Times bestselling author Frederick Forsyth delivers a frighteningly possible novel of international terrorism and impending war… As the Russian people face starvation, the Politburo is faced with a hard choice: negotiate with America for food, go to war for national survival, or deal with an uprising in the motherland. Through an informant, British Agent Adam Munro learns that the situation is growing dangerously tense, with powerful forces in the USSR maneuvering for supremacy. But even as East and West conduct delicate talks, events spiral out of control and threaten to undo every step taken. The world’s largest oil tanker is hijacked by terrorists, and a Ukrainian “freedom fighter” is rescued in a bloody catastrophe on the Black Sea. From Moscow to Washington, the stakes grow ever more perilous as the mad actions of a few threaten to engulf the entire world in nuclear war—unless Munro can stop them.

Beat the Devils

Author: Josh Weiss
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 1538719436
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 390

Book Description
This inventive, page-turning crime thriller, shortlisted for the Sidewise Award, with "palpable emotional depth" (New York Times Book Review) envisions a world in which the Red Scare never ended. USA, 1958. President Joseph McCarthy sits in the White House, elected on a wave of populist xenophobia and barely‑concealed anti‑Semitism. The country is in the firm grip of McCarthy's Hueys, a secret police force evolved from the House Un-American Activities Committee. Hollywood's sparkling vision of the American dream has been suppressed; its remaining talents forced to turn out endless anti‑communist propaganda. LAPD detective Morris Baker—a Holocaust survivor who drowns his fractured memories of the unspeakable in schnapps and work—is called to the scene of a horrific double‑homicide. The victims are John Huston, a once‑promising but now forgotten film director, and an up‑and‑coming young journalist named Walter Cronkite. Clutched in the hand of one of the dead men is a cryptic note containing the phrase “beat the devils” followed by a single name: Baker. Did the two men die in an attack fueled by better-dead-than-red sentiment, as the Hueys are quick to conclude, or were they murdered in a cover-up designed to protect—or even set in motion—a secret plot connected to Baker's past? In a country where terror grows stronger by the day, and paranoia rises unchecked, Baker is determined to find justice for two men who raised their voices in a time when free speech comes at the ultimate cost. In the course of his investigation, Baker stumbles into a conspiracy that reaches deep into the halls of power and uncovers a secret that could destroy the City of Angels—and the American ideal itself.

The Devil's Only Friend

Author: Mitchell Bartoy
Publisher: Minotaur Books
ISBN: 1466839902
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Book Description
It is the fall of 1943, and the city of Detroit is doing its best to recover from the explosive race riots that marked the recent summer. The police are working overtime to protect the auto plants and ensure that their massive machinery continues to churn out the steel that comprises America's lifeblood overseas. Pete Caudill, late of the Detroit detective squad, is passing the time sitting on the fire escape of a squalid rented room, consumed by the ghosts of his past, including the black teenager he shot and killed years ago and a similar boy whose life he saved in the recent riots. When a young woman distantly connected to Caudill is murdered, her blood threatens to stain the reputation of the Lloyd family, scions of Detroit's all-powerful auto industry. Caudill himself has a certain reputation with the Lloyds, plus a direct link to the complicated man who runs the company and, some say, the city of Detroit itself. As a desperate investigation unfolds and the war effort rages on, the tentacles of a menacing conspiracy reach deep into the soul of the powerful Lloyd family and threaten to squelch the very heart of American patriotism beating within. It's up to Pete Caudill, using whatever meager resources he can assemble, to put down the sinister forces working against the Lloyds, perhaps in the process preserve America's chances in the war—and discover an unexpected second chance at his own life.

The Devils' Due

Author: Steve Berry
Publisher: MIRA
ISBN: 1488074240
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 23

Book Description
A heart-pumping short story from the New York Times–bestselling author featuring one of operative Cotton Malone’s earliest missions . . . In this alternate-history-with-a-twist Thriller Short, Steve Berry explores one of Cotton Malone’s early missions, from a time when Malone was still employed as one of the Magellan Billet’s twelve agents. Malone is sent on a mission to a small central Asian country run by an enigmatic dictator, Yossef Sharma, whose alliance with the United States must be kept under wraps. It’s not a mission Malone enjoys, since Sharma has a penchant for burning books. Things get even more interesting when Sharma connects Malone with the world’s most infamous criminal, a man who wants to surrender. Things are not always what they seem, and Malone will need Sharma’s help if he plans to set things right and give the devil his due. This story was originally published in the “outstanding anthology” Thriller (Publishers Weekly), edited by #1 New York Times–bestselling author James Patterson. Many other Thriller Shorts are available from such blockbuster authors as Lee Child, David Morrell, Brad Thor, Katherine Neville, Heather Graham, and Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. Praise for Steve Berry “Berry pumps the veins of history with action-packed adrenaline.” —Chicago Tribune “A fast-moving, globe-hopping tale of long-lost treasure and shadowy bad guys.” —San Francisco Chronicle

The Devil's Wall

Author: Mark Cornwall
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674064895
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
Legend has it that twenty miles of volcanic rock rising through the landscape of northern Bohemia was the work of the devil, who separated the warring Czechs and Germans by building a wall. The nineteenth-century invention of the Devil's Wall was evidence of rising ethnic tensions. In interwar Czechoslovakia, Sudeten German nationalists conceived a radical mission to try to restore German influence across the region. Mark Cornwall tells the story of Heinz Rutha, an internationally recognized figure in his day, who was the pioneer of a youth movement that emphasized male bonding in its quest to reassert German dominance over Czech space. Through a narrative that unravels the threads of Rutha's own repressed sexuality, Cornwall shows how Czech authorities misinterpreted Rutha's mission as sexual deviance and in 1937 charged him with corrupting adolescents. The resulting scandal led to Rutha's imprisonment, suicide, and excommunication from the nationalist cause he had devoted his life to furthering. Cornwall is the first historian to tackle the long-taboo subject of how youth, homosexuality, and nationalism intersected in a fascist environment. "The Devil's Wall" also challenges the notion that all Sudeten German nationalists were Nazis, and supplies a fresh explanation for Britain's appeasement of Hitler, showing why the British might justifiably have supported the 1930s Sudeten German cause. In this readable biography of an ardent German Bohemian who participated as perpetrator, witness, and victim, Cornwall radically reassesses the Czech-German struggle of early twentieth-century Europe.

The Devil's Politics

Author: Drew Benbow
Publisher: Di Angelo Publications
ISBN: 1955690030
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Book Description
Damion and Devon are identical twins. But it’s their differences that set them onto diverging life paths, resulting in their eventual estrangement. Devon grapples with his identity. He’s black, and a low-level aide to a Republican congressman. He’s forced to reckon with his politics and his social consciousness when one of the congressman’s past misdeeds lands them both in the center of a national scandal. Deemed a bad apple from childhood, Damion’s story collides with Devon’s when a pair of hit men track Damion from his Army base in Afghanistan all the way to Devon’s Washington, D.C. doorstep. Amid this all, a love triangle involving both brothers sparks an ember of rage in a woman that grows into a homicidal blaze. The Congressman’s scandal, Damion’s hit men and the woman’s scorn test the brothers’ already strained relationship. At its core, The Devil’s Politics challenges systems of power, suggesting a hot take alternative to contemporary black political participation, with the aim of strengthening black political empowerment in America.

The Devil's Star

Author: Jo Nesbo
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061133973
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 470

Book Description
Oslo is sweltering in the summer heat when a young woman is murdered in her flat. One finger has been cut off and a tiny red diamond in the shape of a pentagram—a five-pointed star—is found under her eyelid. Detective Harry Hole is assigned the case with Tom Waaler, a colleague he neither likes nor trusts. He believes Tom is behind a gang of arms smugglers—and the murder of his partner. But Harry, an off-the-rails alcoholic, is barely holding on to his job and has little choice but to play nice. Five days later, another woman is reported missing. When her severed finger is found adorned with a star-shaped red diamond ring, Harry fears a serial killer is on the loose. Determined to find the killer and expose the crooked Tom Waaler, Harry discovers the two investigations melding in unexpected ways. But pursuing the truth comes at a price, and soon Harry finds himself on the run and forced to make difficult decisions about a future he may not live to see. One of the brightest stars of Scandinavian crime writing, Jo NesbØ has been compared to Ian Rankin, Michael Connelly, and Henning Mankell. His novels are bestsellers throughout Europe, acclaimed by critics and revered by aficionados of thrillers and mysteries. Brilliantly plotted and paced, The Devil's Star shows NesbØ at his absolute best, combining powerful emotional resonance with truly stunning suspense.

Devil House

Author: John Darnielle
Publisher: MCD
ISBN: 0374717672
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Book Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “It’s never quite the book you think it is. It’s better.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times From John Darnielle, the New York Times bestselling author and the singer-songwriter of the Mountain Goats, comes an epic, gripping novel about murder, truth, and the dangers of storytelling. Gage Chandler is descended from kings. That’s what his mother always told him. Years later, he is a true crime writer, with one grisly success—and a movie adaptation—to his name, along with a series of subsequent less notable efforts. But now he is being offered the chance for the big break: to move into the house where a pair of briefly notorious murders occurred, apparently the work of disaffected teens during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Chandler finds himself in Milpitas, California, a small town whose name rings a bell––his closest childhood friend lived there, once upon a time. He begins his research with diligence and enthusiasm, but soon the story leads him into a puzzle he never expected—back into his own work and what it means, back to the very core of what he does and who he is. Devil House is John Darnielle’s most ambitious work yet, a book that blurs the line between fact and fiction, that combines daring formal experimentation with a spellbinding tale of crime, writing, memory, and artistic obsession.

Silver on the Road

Author: Laura Anne Gilman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1481429698
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Book Description
Hailed by RT Book Reviews as “fresh and original…stark and lovely,” a heroic fantasy by an award-winning author about a young woman who is trained in the art of the sinister hand of magic. A Locus Magazine Bestseller. Isobel, upon her sixteenth birthday, makes the choice to work for the Boss called the Devil by some, in his territory west of the Mississippi. But this is not the devil you know. This is a being who deals fairly with immense—but not unlimited—power, who offers opportunities to people who want to make a deal, and they always get what they deserve. But his land is a wild west that needs a human touch, and that’s where Izzy comes in. Inadvertently trained by him to see the clues in and manipulations of human desire, Izzy is raised to be his left hand and travel circuit through the territory helping those in need. As we all know, where there is magic there is chaos…and death.

The Alteration

Author: Kingsley Amis
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590176170
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
BOOKER PRIZE–WINNING AUTHOR Set in a world in which the Reformation failed, this award-winning science fiction tale is “one of the best . . . alternate-worlds novels in existence” (Philip K. Dick) In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history it is 1976, but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart’s second requiem) is about to be sung to lay him to rest. In the choir is our hero, Hubert Anvil, an extremely ordinary ten-year-old boy with a faultless voice. In the audience is a select group of experts whose job is to determine whether that faultless voice should be preserved by performing a certain operation. Art, after all, is worth any sacrifice. How Hubert realizes what lies in store for him and how he deals with the whirlpool of piety, menace, terror, and passion that he soon finds himself in are the subject of a classic piece of counterfactual fiction equal to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. The Alteration won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science-fiction novel in 1976.