Showing results by narrator "Stephen Hoye" in All Categories

In this compelling new biography, historian Niccol Capponi frees Machiavelli (1469-1527) from centuries of misinterpretation. Exploring the Renaissance city of Florence, where Machiavelli lived, Capponi reveals the man behind the legend. A complex portrait of Machiavelli emerges - at once a brilliantly skillful diplomat and a woefully inept liar; a sharp thinker and an impractical dreamer; a hard-nosed powerbroker and a risk-taking gambler; a calculating propagandist and an imprudent jokester.

An incisive portrait of a culture unanchored and adrift. In these pieces, veteran MTV commentator and rock journalist Kurt Loder turns his jaundiced eye and trenchant wit on the nature of celebrity as embodied by rock musicians and other pop culture icons. Ride along as Mick Jagger sheds his bad-boy image to embrace the jet-setter lifestyle; ponder the puzzling dichotomy between Prince's racy lyrics and self-proclaimed spirituality; and much more.

The people in the car don’t recognize Mary as anything special. They see the skinny ten-year-old as just another young girl on the streets of Brussels, not as the daughter of a US ambassador. The black car stops and Mary, used to having a chauffeur, climbs aboard. Before she knows what’s happening, she is on her way to a mansion in Antwerp with a specially designed, child-sized cell. She has been abducted. Now, a team of FBI agents, along with Europe’s foremost psychological profiler, are on the hunt for the girl’s captors.

The man is found on the icy streets of Boston, vomit in his beard, alcohol in his system, and ice in his veins. The police assume he is just another in the dozens of derelicts whom the urban winter claims each year, but Brady Coyne knows better. Attorney to New England's upper crust, he was the dead man's lawyer, and he knows that Stuart Carver was no bum: He was a senator's nephew.

John Thinnes, a detective on the Chicago police force, and Jack Caleb, a well-known psychiatrist, were friends - unlikely friends, maybe, with very different lives, but men who liked and respected each other. And they had one significant experience in common: Both had been "in country" in Vietnam during the war.

Once a devastated mill town, by 1959 Locke City has established itself as a thriving center of vice tourism. The city is controlled by boss Royal Beaumont, who took it by force many years ago and has held it against all comers since.

It's 1963, and what terrifies Bostonians most is the mysterious killer who has already claimed a dozen victims: the Boston Strangler. For the three Daley brothers, sons of a Boston cop, crime is the family business. Joe is the eldest, a tough-talking cop. Michael is the middle son, a Harvard-educated lawyer. And Ricky floats above the fray as an expert burglar. Now each must look into a killer's murderous rage, into their family's own lethal secrets, and into the one death that has changed them forever.

Kevin's dad, Jerry, is a crook. And he taught his son every trick in the book. Masters of identity theft, Kevin and Jerry move from one seedy motel to another, always trying for the big score. Colette is a runaway who dreams of conning her way into the upper echelons of high society. Just a teenager, she's already a tough and talented grifter, and soon becomes Jerry's girlfriend and accomplice.

America is starkly divided between the haves and the have-nots. A Republican president seeks reelection in the afterglow of a war many view as unnecessary and imperialistic. He is bankrolled by millionaires, with every step of his career orchestrated by a political mastermind. Religious extremists crusade against the nation’s moral collapse. Terrorists plot the assassination of leaders around the world. And a lonely, disturbed revolutionary stalks the President.... It all happened. One hundred years ago. It all comes to life in The Temple of Music.

Reporting from Jerusalem for The New York Times and Fox News respectively, Greg Myre and Jennifer Griffin, witnessed a decades-old conflict transformed into a completely new war. The West has learned a lot about asymmetrical war in the past decade. At the same time, many strategists have missed that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become one of them. This book shows the importance of applying these hard-won lessons to the longest running, most closely watched occupation and uprising in the world.

A dark and riveting thriller that reimagines the life and mission of the Spanish nationalist enlisted to murder Leon Trotsky: Based on a true chapter of world history and ten years of research, here is the story of the real-life reluctant soldier and killer, Ramn Mercader—the obedient assassin. Ramn Mercader was plucked from the front of the Spanish Civil War by the Soviets and conscripted to murder the great intellectual Leon Trotsky, a leader of the Bolshevik Revolution who was exiled in the 1920s for opposing Joseph Stalin.

Ethan Denton is a lucky man. Most things have gone his way, and being granted full custody of Nate, his young son and "North Star", has given him a near-perfect life. On a crisp winter morning just before the start of deer season, Ethan and Nate set off together to discover the beauties of the forest. As he parks the truck, Ethan spots a pair of magnificent bucks, and, eager to take a closer look, leaves Nate asleep in the car seat, a brief, impulsive decision any parent might make.

Set in the once-great Midwestern city of Trude - a treacherous maze of convoluted shopping malls, barricaded libraries, and elitist assisted-living homes - Lundgren's novel follows a disconsolate legal clerk named Sven Norberg, who sets out to investigate his wife's disappearance. Written with boundless intelligence and razor-sharp wit, The Facades is a comic and existential mystery that unfolds at the urgent pace of a thriller.

David Sears grew up in the shadow of his brilliant younger sister, Diana, convinced by their father that she would accomplish great things. Instead, she married and had a son, Jason, who, like David and Diana's father, is schizophrenic. Her husband, Mark, a geneticist, never made peace with Jason's condition.

Set on the colonial, war-torn island of Cyprus in 1956, Jones tells the story of a young solider, Hal Treherne, and the effects of this "small war" on him, his wife, Clara, and their family. Reminiscent of classic tales of love and war such as The English Patient and Atonement, Jones's gripping novel also calls to mind the master works of Virginia Woolf and their portrayal of the quiet desperation of a marriage in crisis.

The headquarters of an American oil company hemorrhages chemical-pink smoke into the Moscow night, the aftermath of an apparent terrorist attack. A Russian army captain carrying a priceless Fabergé egg and digital evidence of horrific wartime atrocities is murdered and relieved of both of those prizes.

Native American artist Blue Mountain Cat has a style described as "Andy Warhol meets Jonathan Swift in Indian country." When he's murdered at an exclusive showing in a posh art museum, Detective John Thinnes has no shortage of suspects. Targets of the artist's satire included a greedy developer, a beautiful Navajo woman, and black-market antiquities dealers. And some of the museum's patrons were outraged by his work.

The scene is perplexingly always the same: the home of a single woman, no signs of forced entry, no evidence of an intruder, and no victim - only a bathtub filled with blood. Newly promoted homicide detective Angel Alves wants to make his mark in the department and a difference on the streets.

Stephen Alter was raised by American missionary parents in the hill station of Mussoorie, in the foothills of the Himalayas, where he and his wife Ameeta, now live. Their idyllic existence was brutally interrupted when four armed intruders invaded their house and viciously attacked them, leaving them for dead. The violent assault and the trauma of almost dying left him questioning assumptions he had lived by since childhood. For the first time, he encountered the face of evil and the terror of the unknown.

In a secret room in Washington DC John Tanner is asked to stake his life - and his wife and children - on a gamble whose goals and risks no one will fully reveal to him. In a small suburban town, where only the nicest people live, friends, neighbours, everyone and anyone could be part of a monstrous conspiracy of international evil. The machinery has already been set in motion.