Showing results by narrator "David Colacci" in All Categories

When a wealthy Venetian woman is found brutally murdered, the prime suspect is her Romanian maid, who has fled the city. As she attempts to leave the country, carrying a considerable sum of money and forged papers, the maid runs into the path of an oncoming train and is killed. Case closed. But when the old woman's neighbour returns from abroad, it transpires that the maid could not have been the killer. Commissario Brunetti decides - unofficially - to take on the case himself.

There were two men in Rebecca Harris's life: Joshua Weinstein - the tough, dark, passionate, Jewish FBI agent she was engaged to; and John Menden - the blond, WASP, slick newsman who was her lover. Both men silently knew of the other's existence in Rebecca's life - and each hoped that when she made her ultimate decision between them, he would be the chosen one. Now they must become allies to solve her murder.

In Becoming Madison, Michael Signer takes a fresh look at the life of our fourth president. His focus is on Madison before he turned 36, the years in which he did his most enduring work: battling with Patrick Henry - the most charismatic politician in revolutionary America, whose political philosophy and ruthless tactics eerily foreshadowed those of today's Tea Party - over religious freedom; introducing his framework for a strong central government; and becoming the intellectual godfather of the Constitution.

Neither Commissario Brunetti nor his wife Paolo have ever had much sympathy for the Italian armed forces, so when a young cadet is found hanged, a presumed suicide, in Venice's elite military academy, Brunetti's emotions are complex: pity and sorrow for the death of a boy, close in age to his own son, and contempt and irritation for the arrogance and high-handedness of the boy's teachers and fellow-students.

The death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, and the ensuing trial of Derek Chauvin for murder a year later has rubbed raw the bloodiest stain on the United States’ history and its world reputation. The nine minutes and 29 seconds during which Chauvin’s knee crushed the spark of life out of Floyd was not unusual in the history of the United States. In roughly two centuries, Blacks have achieved nominal freedom. But, as this book’s opening chapter and expert essays that follow indicate, freedom has been conditional based on inequity of wealth, social, and legal discrimination.

For years FBI agent Cameron Daggett has been on the trail of an international triggerman responsible for planting at least two nearly undetectable explosive devices on airplanes. When a strange murder takes place in a Seattle aircraft training installation, Daggett suspects that his nemesis is involved. The man who was murdered was a specialist in training pilots to fly the Duhning 959-600 - a new breed of ultra-sophisticated aircraft - and he was killed in a Duhning flight simulator.

China's reform era is ending. Core factors that characterized it - political stability, ideological openness, and rapid economic growth - are unraveling.

On a frigid New Year’s Eve in Minneapolis, a young woman’s brutalized body falls from the trunk of a car into the path of oncoming traffic. Questions as to whether she was alive or dead when she hit the icy pavement result in her macabre nickname, Zombie Doe. Unidentified and unidentifiable, she is the ninth nameless female victim of the year, and homicide detectives Sam Kovac and Nikki Liska are charged with the task of not only finding out who Zombie Doe is but who in her life hated her enough to destroy her. Was it personal? Or could it just have been a crime of opportunity?

When a body is found floating in a canal, disfigured and with multiple stab wounds, Commissario Brunetti is called to investigate and is convinced he recognises the man from somewhere. However, with no identification except for the distinctive shoes the man was wearing, and no reports of people missing from the Venice area, the case cannot progress. Brunetti soon realises why he remembers the dead man, and asks Signorina Elettra if she can help him find footage of a farmers' protest the previous autumn.

The Curtlees are a powerful force in San Francisco, unscrupulous billionaires who’ve lined every important pocket in the Bay Area in pursuit of their own ascent. So when the family’s heir, Ro Curtlee, was convicted of rape and murder a decade ago, the fallout for those who helped to bring him to justice was swift and uncompromising. The jury foreman was fired from his job and blacklisted in his industry.

A luminous spring day in Venice, and Commissario Brunetti and his sidekick Vianello play hooky from the Questura along the Grand Canal to rescue Vianello's friend Marco, who has been arrested during an environmental protest. They get him released, only to be faced by the fury of the man's father-in-law, who owns a glass factory on Murano. The old man is seething with rage, and his daughter shares her fear with Brunetti that he will actually hurt her husband.

Ivory's Ghosts is the first comprehensive, contemporary look at the world's most treasured organic material, ivory. Using a wide range of historical and firsthand reportage, John Frederick Walker tells the astonishing and sometimes savage story of ivory's enormous impact on both human history and that of its most important source: the majestic African elephant.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy Charlie Hood is attached to the ATF, working undercover on the Iron River that flows across the U.S.-Mexican border. The diamond fillings he wears in his left canine glimmer, distracting the men who sell the illegal firearms that enable the unspeakable violence on both sides of the map. Spotting the sparkle when “Charlie Diamonds” opens his mouth is often their first step toward life behind bars. Meanwhile, Bradley Jones, sheriff’s deputy and employee of the Baja Cartel and son of the love of Charlie’s life, the deceased L.A. outlaw Suzanne Jones, is expecting a son of his own.

The truth is, as a character in this provocative new collection puts it, "passionate, beautiful, and hideous, it can make you happy and it can torture you, and it's always liberating." In "After the Season", a man of humble means falls quickly in love with a woman belonging to a much elevated financial status and wrestles with his feelings and his beliefs about the rich. A son takes his distant father to a Bach festival in "Johann Sebastian Bach on Ruegen" only to learn that perhaps he was the one who was never really present in their relationship. And in "The Night in Baden-Baden" a man who's caught in a lie changes his ways.

Charles "Jay" Tice was a spy's spy. The chief of the CIA's elite Clandestine Services, he was a legend throughout the world of international intelligence. But secretly he was also a traitor, reputedly selling information that will seriously compromise the security of the United States for decades to come. Since his treachery was exposed, Tice has been kept under strict surveillance in a maximum security prison.Then one morning, his cell is discovered empty. Jay Tice has vanished - without tripping an alarm or leaving any trace of his passing.

During 20 years of almost total darkness in a rat-infested cell, Keith Johnson has had time to plan. So, like a ghost, he has returned to even the score. He has no intention of killing his betrayers; he wants to ruin their lives like they ruined his. Johnson's elaborate plan is meant to cause the three to self-destruct, and given their characters, it ought to be easy. But his scheme goes haywire with consequences he neither foresees nor wants.

FBI agent Puller Monk is losing his mind. His father passed away six months ago and left him a predisposition for Alzheimer's disease. Add to that a lethal American spy raised by the North Koreans, and Monk's life just got a lot more complicated. Aware of his dark side and willingness to take chances no matter what the risk, Monk is asked by the NSA to go undercover. His mission: find the sleeper spy, infiltrate the contact she's been seducing, and stop her before she carries out her shadowy objective.

One frigid, January morning in Manhattan, a new father, racked by sleep deprivation, decides to let his wife sleep in - then spontaneously flees lower Manhattan with the baby for a weekend in the Caribbean. It wasn’t a kidnapping, he wasn’t leaving his wife; he just wanted to spend a little time with the baby and give his wife a break. When the wife awakes, truly rested for the first time in nearly a year, she feels great - and embarks on a city adventure as misguided in its own way as her husband’s impulsive escape. Told from the couple’s alternating points of view, the story unfolds across one life-changing long weekend.

The Euganean Hills golf community in northern Italy is a golfer's paradise. With a perpetual smell of freshly cut grass, rolling green plains, and bright blue skies, it seems nothing could go wrong for the tight-knit group that lives there. But the normally laid-back residents are shaken to their cores when one of their own turns up at the club brutally murdered. After discovering his friend's body, investigative journalist Riccardo Ranieri makes it his mission to track down the perpetrator of the heinous crime.

Mr. Phileas Fogg, master of precision, enters into the strangest wager ever made over the whist table--that he will circle the globe in 80 days. The news astounds Jean Passepartout, sometime wandering minstrel, bareback rider, funambulist, gymnast, and fireman, now turned valet to Mr. Fogg in the expectancy of a quiet and well-regulated life. For the next 80 days, their lives are anything but quiet or well regulated.