The fast-paced and “engrossing account” ( The New York Times Book Review ) of “one of the greatest breakthroughs in archaeological history” ( The Christian Science Monitor ): two rival geniuses in a race to decode the writing on one of the world’s most famous documents—the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone is one of the most famous objects in the world, attracting millions of visitors to the British museum every year, and yet most people don’t really know what it is. Discovered in a pile of rubble in 1799, this slab of stone proved to be the key to unlocking a lost language that baffled scholars for centuries. Carved in ancient Egypt, the Rosetta Stone carried the same message in different languages—in Greek using Greek letters, and in Egyptian using picture-writing called hieroglyphs. Until its discovery, no one in the world knew how to read the hieroglyphs that covered every temple and text and statue in Egypt. Dominating the world for thirty centuries, ancient Egypt was the mightiest empire the world had ever known, yet everything about it—the pyramids, mummies, the Sphinx—was shrouded in mystery. Whoever was able to decipher the Rosetta Stone would solve that mystery and fling open a door that had been locked for two thousand years. Two brilliant rivals set out to win that prize. One was English, the other French, at a time when England and France were enemies and the world’s two great superpowers. Written “like a thriller” ( Star Tribune , Minneapolis), The Writing of the Gods chronicles this high-stakes intellectual race in which the winner would win glory for both himself and his nation. A riveting portrait of empires both ancient and modern, this is an unparalleled look at the culture and history of ancient Egypt, “and also a lesson…in what the human mind does when faced with a puzzle” ( The New Yorker ).

This critically acclaimed, explosive thriller is a book only prosecutor Linda Fairstein could write. Patricia Cornwall knows the morgue; John Grisham knows the courtroom; but no one knows the inner workings of the D.A.'s office like Linda Fairstein, renowned for two decades as head of Manhattan Sex Crimes Unit. Now that world comes vividly to life in a brilliant debut novel of shocking realism, powerful insight, and searing suspense. Alexandra Cooper, Manhattan's top sex crimes prosecutor, awakens one morning to shoking news: a tabloid headline announcing her own brutal murder. But the actual victim was Isabella Lascar, the Hollywood film star who sought refuge at Alex's Martha's Vineyard retreat. Was Isabella targeted by a stalker or -- mistaken for Alex -- was she in the wrong place at the wrong time? In an investigation that twists from the back alleys of lower Manhattan to the chic salons of the Upper East Side. Alex knows she'sin final jeopardy...and time is running out. She has to get into the killer's head before the killer gets to her.

In late December 2008, Ian Halperin told the world that Michael Jackson had only six months to live. His investigations into Jackson’s failing health made headlines around the globe. Six months later, the King of Pop was dead. Whatever the final autopsy results revealed, Ian Halperin believes it was greed that killed Michael Jackson. Friends and associates paint a tragic picture of the last years and days of his life as Jackson made desperate attempts to prepare for the planned concert series at London’s 02 Arena in July 2009. These shows would have earned millions for the singer and his entourage, but he could never have completed them, not mentally, and not physically. Michael knew it and his advisors knew it. Anyone who caught even a fleeting glimpse of the frail old man hiding beneath the costumes and cosmetics would have understood that the London tour was madness. After an intense five-year investigation, New York Times bestselling author Ian Halperin uncovers the real story of Michael Jackson’s final years, in this suspenseful and surprising thriller.

The electrifying, often harrowing memoir of a highly decorated DEA agent who targeted the world's most notorious narco-terrorists through the "dark art" of undercover operations. Edward Follis bought eightballs of coke in a red Corvette. He negotiated multimillion-dollar deals onboard private King Airs. He developed covert relationships with men who were not only international drug traffickers but--in some cases--operatives for Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Shan United Army, or the Mexican Federation of cartels. He was a master at the dark art of going undercover. And this is his story... Spanning five continents and filled with harrowing stories about the world's most ruthless drug lords and terrorist networks, The Dark Art is an incredible first hand account of Edward Follis's twenty-seven-year undercover career in the DEA--from doing street-level busts evocative of Miami Vice to using high-resolution-optics surveillance and classified cutting-edge technology to bring down narco-terror kingpins. It also closely examines how, from the early 1990s to today, the DEA underwent its own radical transformation, shifting its focus from local dealers of coke and weed to the billionaire financiers of worldwide terrorism. Every word is true, and every story is documented. A globe-hopping nonfiction thriller, The Dark Art is a page-turning memoir that will electrify you from page one.

Stalin, like Hitler, remains the very personification of evil but also one of the creators of today’s world. Now in an enthralling biography that reads like a thriller, Simon Sebag Montefiore unveils the shadowy, adventurous journey of the Georgian cobbler’s son who became the Red Tsar.What makes a Stalin? Was he illegitimate? Was his mother whore or saint? Was Stalin a Tsarist agent or Lenin’s chief gangster? Was his most notorious heist planned during his stay in London? Was he to blame for his wife’s death? If he really missed the 1917 Revolution, how did he emerge so powerful?Born in poverty, scarred by his upbringing, exceptional in his studies, this charismatic but dangerous boy was hailed as a romantic poet and trained as a priest but found his mission as fanatical revolutionary. He became the mastermind of bank robberies, protection-rackets, arson, piracy, and murder yet he was, uniquely part-intellectual, part-brigand. Surprisingly, he is also revealed as a scandalously prolific lover, leaving a trail of mistresses (varying from schoolgirls to noblewomen) and illegitimate children. Her is the arch-conspirator and escape-artist whose brutal ingenuity so impressed Lenin that he made Stalin (with Trotsky) his top henchman. The paranoid underworld of Joseph Conrad-style terrorism was Stalin’s natural habitat. Montefiore shows how murderous Caucasian banditry and political gangsterism, combined with pitiless ideology, qualified Stalin to demonstrate the Kremlin – and create the USSR in his flawed image. Based on massive research and astonishing new evidence in archives from Moscow to Georgia, YOUNG STALIN, companion and prequel to bestselling, prizewinning STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR, is a chronicle of the Revolution, a pre-history of the USSR – and an intimate biography: this is how Stalin became Stalin.

From CNN chief legal analyst and bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin, a real-life legal thriller about the prosecutors and congressional investigators pursuing the truth about Donald Trump's complicity in several crimes--and why they failed. Donald Trump's campaign chairman went to jail. So did his personal lawyer. His long-time political consigliere was convicted of serious federal crimes, and his national security advisor pled guilty to others. Several Russian spies were indicted in absentia. Career intelligence agents and military officers were alarmed enough by the president's actions that they alerted senior government officials and ignited the impeachment process. Yet despite all this, a years-long inquiry led by special counsel Robert Mueller, and the third impeachment of a president in American history, Donald Trump survived to run for re-election. Why? Jeffrey Toobin's highly entertaining definitive account of the Mueller investigation and the impeachment of the president takes readers behind the scenes of the epic legal and political struggle to call Trump to account for his misdeeds. With his superb storytelling and analytic skills Toobin recounts all the mind-boggling twists and turns in the case--Trump's son met with a Russian operative promising Kremlin support! Trump paid a porn star $130,000 to hush up an affair! Rudy Giuliani and a pair of shady Ukrainian-American businessmen got the Justice Department to look at Russian-created conspiracy theories! Toobin shows how Trump's canny lawyers used Mueller's famous integrity against him, and how Trump's bullying and bluster cowed Republican legislators into ignoring the clear evidence of the impeachment hearings. Based on dozens of interviews with prosecutors in Mueller's office, Trump's legal team, Congressional investigators, White House staffers, and several of the key players, including some who are now in prison, True Crimes and Misdemeanors is a revelatory narrative that makes sense of the seemingly endless chaos of the Trump years. Filled with never-before-reported details of the high-stakes legal battles and political machinations, the book weaves a tale of a rogue president guilty of historic misconduct, and how he got away with it.

Countless school children have recited the opening line of Poe's The Raven: "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary..." But Poe is valued not only for his poetry. He was also a prolific writer of short stories, the creator of two literary forms that readers everywhere enjoy--the detective story and the horror thriller.

A true-crime thriller -- the first book for teens to tell the nearly unknown tale of the brazen attempt to steal Abraham Lincoln's body. Reissued in Scholastic Focus, with an exciting new cover. The action begins in October of 1875, as Secret Service agents raid the Fulton, Illinois, workshop of master counterfeiter Ben Boyd. Soon after Boyd is hauled off to prison, members of his counterfeiting ring gather in the back room of a smoky Chicago saloon to discuss how to spring their ringleader. Their plan: grab Lincoln's body from its Springfield tomb, stash it in the sand dunes near Lake Michigan, and demand, as a ransom, the release of Ben Boyd -- and $200,000 in cash. From here, the action alternates between the conspirators, the Secret Service agents on their trail, and the undercover agent moving back and forth between them. Along the way readers get glimpses into the inner workings of counterfeiting, grave robbing, detective work, and the early days of the Secret Service. The plot moves toward a wild climax as robbers and lawmen converge at Lincoln's tomb on election night: November 7, 1876.A dynamic and thrilling tale from critically acclaimed author Steve Sheinkin.

Driving down the Long Island Expressway in November of 1992, Sol Wachtler was New York's Chief Judge and heir apparent to the New York Governorship. Suddenly, three van loads of FBI agents swerved in front of him--bringing his car and his legal career to a halt. Wachtler's subsequent arrest, conviction and incarceration for harassing his longtime lover precipitated a media feeding frenzy, revealing to the world his struggles with romantic obsession, manic-depression and drug abuse. In this, his prison diary, Wachtler reveals the stark reality behind his vertiginous fall from the heights of the legal establishment to the underbelly of the criminal justice system. Sentenced to a medium security prison in Butner, North Carolina, Wachtler is stabbed by an unseen assailant, berated by prison guards, and repeatedly placed in solitary confinement with no explanation. Moreover, as a prisoner he confronts first hand the inequities of a system that his judicial rulings helped to construct and befriends the type of people he once sentenced to prison. With unflinching honesty, Wachtler draws upon his unique experience of living life on both sides of the bench to paint a chilling portrait of prison life interwoven with a no-holds-barred analysis of the shortcomings of the American legal justice system.

This first fully documented biography of Simon Wiesenthal, the legendary Nazi hunter, is also a brilliant character study of a man whose life was part invention but wholly dedicated to ensuring both that the Nazis be held responsible for their crimes and that the destruction of European Jewry never be forgotten. Like most Jews in Eastern Europe on the eve of Hitler's invasion of Poland, twenty-four-year-old Simon Wiesenthal did not grasp the nature of the Nazi threat. But six years later, when a skeletal Wiesenthal was liberated from the concentration camp at Mauthausen, he fully fathomed the crimes of the Nazis. Within days he had assembled a list of nearly 150 Nazi war criminals, the first of dozens of such lists he would make over a lifetime as a Nazi hunter. A hero in the eyes of many, Wiesenthal was also attacked for his unrelenting pursuit of the past, when others preferred to forget. For this new biography, rich in newsworthy revelations, historian and journalist Tom Segev has obtained access to Wiesenthal's private papers and to sixteen archives, including records of the U.S., Israeli, Polish, and East German secret services. Segev is able to reveal the intriguing secrets of Wiesenthal's life, including his stunning role in the capture of Adolf Eichmann, his relationship with Israel's Mossad, his controversial investigative techniques, his unlikely friendships with Kurt Waldheim and Albert Speer, and the nature of his rivalry with Elie Wiesel. Segev's challenge in writing this biography was Wiesenthal's own complicated relationship to truth. Wiesenthal told many versions of his life, his suffering in the camps, and his involvement with the arrest of individual Nazis. Segev shows that in order to gain the information he sought and twist the arms of reluctant government figures, Wiesenthal needed to seem more influential than he really was. For two generations of Americans, Simon Wiesenthal was a Jewish superhero--depicted on film by Ben Kingsley and Laurence Olivier--and the muse for a Frederick Forsyth thriller. Now Segev demonstrates that the truth of Wiesenthal's existence is as compelling as the fiction. "Simon Wiesenthal" is an unforgettable life of one of the great men of the twentieth century.

With letters from Mordecai Richler, Mavis Gallant, and Brian Moore Getting Started is a wonderful memoir, a collection of extraordinary letters, and a brilliant recreation of a time when Canadian writers were set to make their mark in the world for the first time. Writer Brian Moore emigrated from Ireland to Canada in the late 1940s and found work at the Montreal Gazette, where he also found William Weintraub embarking upon a career as a freelance journalist. When he travelled to Paris, Weintraub saw an old friend and former Gazette writer, Mavis Gallant, who filled him in on the tribulations of the expatriate writer’s life ( “My room is enormous and the radiator very small indeed” ). Gallant introduced Weintraub to another Montreal writer, Mordecai Richler, also pursuing a career as a novelist while living a gloriously Bohemian life. Weintraub joined Richler for a while in Ibiza (he later introduced him to Brian Moore), and later they kept in touch. ( “Dear Bill: I got your highly unintellectual letter yesterday and it confirmed my suspicions that you slipped a chair under your arse in the Deux Magots as soon as you arrived in Paris and probably haven’t moved since.” ) In these years, Gallant had her short stories published for the first time in the New Yorker, Moore methodically churned out money-making thrillers while working on The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne , and Richler wrote his first acclaimed book, The Acrobats . Weintraub, meanwhile, returned to Montreal, where he saw published his brilliant comic novel, Why Rock the Boat? William Weintraub weaves together his own memories of the 1950s with letters both to and from his literary colleagues. The letters and his recollections are always fascinating, often hilarious, and provide intimate insight into the lives and work of some of Canada’s finest contemporary writers. From the Hardcover edition.

Dead End: Be Careful How You Live is a suspenseful crime thriller novel written by Ed Lacy. The story revolves around a young man named Johnny Dolan, who is wrongly accused of murdering his girlfriend. Despite his innocence, the police and the media are convinced of his guilt, and Johnny is forced to go on the run to clear his name.As Johnny tries to evade the law and find the real killer, he becomes embroiled in a dangerous world of organized crime and corruption. Along the way, he meets a cast of colorful characters, including a tough-talking private detective, a seductive nightclub singer, and a ruthless gangster who will stop at nothing to protect his interests.As the plot thickens, Johnny must use all his wits and resources to stay one step ahead of his pursuers and uncover the truth behind his girlfriend's murder. With plenty of twists and turns, Dead End: Be Careful How You Live is a gripping page-turner that will keep readers on the edge of their seats until the very end.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.