The Jack Taylor Novels

Martin Cruz Smith's “masterful” (USA TODAY) and “irresistible” (People) New York Times bestseller and Washington Post notable book of the year: Arkady Renko must connect the dots among a Russian journalist’s mysterious death, corrupt politicians, murderous gangsters, and brazen bureaucrats.Arkady Renko, one of the iconic investigators of contemporary fiction, has survived the cultural journey from the Soviet Union to the New Russia, only to find the nation as obsessed with secrecy and brutality as was the old Communist dictatorship. In Tatiana, the melancholy hero unravels a mystery as complex and dangerous as modern Russia itself. The reporter Tatiana Petrovna falls to her death from a sixth-floor window in Moscow the same week that a mob billionaire is shot and buried with the trappings due a lord. The trail leads to Kaliningrad, a Cold War “secret city” that is separated by hundreds of miles from the rest of Russia. The more Arkady delves into Tatiana’s past, the more she leads him into a surreal world of wandering sand dunes, abandoned children, and a notebook written in the personal code of a dead translator. Finally, in a lethal race to uncover what the translator knew, Renko makes a startling discovery that draws him still deeper into Tatiana’s past—and, paradoxically, into Russia’s future, where bulletproof cars, poets, corruption of the Baltic Fleet, and a butcher for hire combine to give Kaliningrad the “distinction” of having the highest crime rate in Russia. More than a mystery, Tatiana is Martin Cruz Smith’s most ambitious and politically daring novel since Gorky Park. It is a story rich in character, black humor, and romance, with an insight that is the hallmark of a writer The New York Times has called “endlessly entertaining and deeply serious…[not merely] our best writer of suspense, but of one of our best writers, period.”

A true story of the dangerous mission to rescue two executives from an Iranian jail under the direction of Ross Perot. A compelling picture of Iran just before the revolution that put Ayatollah Khomeini in power.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Lillian Smith Award.An American epic of science, politics, race, honor, high society, and the Mississippi River, Rising Tide tells the riveting and nearly forgotten story of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. The river inundated the homes of almost one million people, helped elect Huey Long governor and made Herbert Hoover president, drove hundreds of thousands of African Americans north, and transformed American society and politics forever. The flood brought with it a human storm: white and black collided, honor and money collided, regional and national powers collided. New Orleans’s elite used their power to divert the flood to those without political connections, power, or wealth, while causing Black sharecroppers to abandon their land to flee up north. The states were unprepared for this disaster and failed to support the Black community. The racial divides only widened when a white officer killed a Black man for refusing to return to work on levee repairs after a sleepless night of work. In the powerful prose of Rising Tide, John M. Barry removes any remaining veil that there had been equality in the South. This flood not only left millions of people ruined, but further emphasized the racial inequality that have continued even to this day.

In the second part of John le Carré's Karla Trilogy, the battle of wits between spymaster George Smiley and his Russian adversary takes on an even more dangerous dimension.George Smiley, now acting head of the Circus, must rebuild its shattered reputation after one of the biggest betrayals in its history. Using the talents of journalist and occasional spy Jerry Westerby, Smiley launches a risky operation uncovering a Russian money-laundering scheme in the Far East. His aim: revenge on Karla, head of Moscow Centre and the architect of all his troubles. 'Energy, compassion, rich and overwhelming sweep of character and action' The Times'A remarkable sequel ... the achievement is in the characters, major and minor ... all burned on the brain of the reader' The New York TimesTHE SIXTH GEORGE SMILEY NOVEL

The classic first novel of the epic Aubrey/Maturin series, widely considered “the best historical novels ever written” (Richard Snow, New York Times). Ardent, gregarious British naval officer Jack Aubrey is elated to be given his first appointment as commander: the fourteen-gun ship HMS Sophie. Meanwhile—after a heated first encounter that nearly comes to a duel—Aubrey and a brilliant but down-on-his-luck physician, Stephen Maturin, strike up an unlikely rapport. On a whim, Aubrey invites Maturin to join his crew as the Sophie’s surgeon. And so begins the legendary friendship that anchors this beloved saga set against the thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. Through every ensuing adventure on which Aubrey and Maturin embark, from the witty parley of their lovers and enemies to the roar of broadsides as great ships close in battle around them, O’Brian “provides endlessly varying shocks and surprises—comic, grim, farcical and tragic.… [A] whole, solidly living world for the imagination to inhabit” (A. S. Byatt).

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Story comes “a dark, labyrinthian tale of murder and family relationships” (Chicago Sun-Times), starring an unlikely duo who must confront demons from the past and dark secrets that still haunt the present. Tom Pasmore, ten years old, survives a near fatal accident. During his long recovery, he becomes obsessed with an unsolved murder and finds he has clues to solving it that he shouldn’t. Lamont von Heilitz has spent his life solving mysteries, until he wanted to know nothing more of the terror of life and the horror of death. When a new murder disrupts their world of wealth, power, and pleasure, the two must form an unlikely partnership to find the killer.

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Story brings the chilling Blue Rose Trilogy to an astonishing close—secrets unearthed, demons revisited, and mysteries solved. • “A masterpiece…. The most intelligent novel of suspense to come along in years.” —The Washington Post Book WorldTim Underhill, now an acclaimed novelist, travels back to his hometown of Millhaven, Illinois after he gets a call from John Ransom, an old army buddy. Ransom believes there’s a copycat killer on the loose, mimicking the Blue Rose murders from decades earlier—he thinks his wife could be a potential victim. Underhill seeks out his old friend Tom Pasmore, an aging hermit who has attained minor celebrity as an expert sleuth, to help him investigate. They quickly discover that Millhaven is a town plagued by horrifying secrets and there is a twisted killer on the loose who is far more dangerous than they ever imagined. Expertly tying together the events of Koko and Mystery, The Throat proves Peter Straub to be the master of the suspense novel.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Story comes “an inspired thriller” (The Washington Post) about four Vietnam vets linked by a shattering secret and their global hunt to track down a brutal killer. Koko. Only four men knew what it meant. Now they must stop it. They were Vietnam vets—a doctor, a lawyer, a working stiff, and a writer. Very different from each other, they are nonetheless linked by a shared history and a devastating secret. Now, they have been reunited and are about to embark on a quest that will take them from Washington, D.C., to the graveyards and fleshpots of the Far East to the human jungle of New York, searching for someone from the past who has risen from the darkness to kill and kill and kill.

In the summer of 1965, several Ku Klux Klan members riding in a pickup truck shot two Black deputies on patrol in Washington Parish, Louisiana. Deputy Oneal Moore, the driver of the patrol car and father of four daughters, died instantly. His partner, Creed Rogers, survived and radioed in a description of the vehicle. Less than an hour later, police in Mississippi spotted the truck and arrested its driver, a decorated World War II veteran named Ernest Ray McElveen. They returned McElveen to Washington Parish, where he spent eleven days in jail before authorities released him. Afterward, the FBI sent its top inspector to Bogalusa, Louisiana, to participate in the murder inquiry—the only civil rights–era FBI investigation into the killing of a Black law enforcement officer by the KKK. Despite that assistance, lack of evidence and witnesses unwilling to come forward forced Louisiana prosecutors eventually to drop all charges against McElveen. The FBI continued its investigation but could not gather enough evidence to file charges, leaving the murder of Oneal Moore unsolved. Klan of Devils: The Murder of a Black Louisiana Deputy Sheriff is Stanley Nelson’s investigation of this case, which the FBI probed from 1965 to 2016. Nelson describes the Klan’s growth, and the emergence of Black activism in Bogalusa and Washington Parish, against the backdrop of political and social change in the 1950s and early 1960s. With the assistance of two retired FBI agents who worked the case, Nelson also explores the lives of the primary suspects, all of whom are now dead, and points to the Klansmen most likely responsible for the senseless and horrific attack.