In a western Ukraine wine cellar in 1985, Chernobyl engineer Mihaly Horvath discloses the unnecessary risks associated with the power plant to his brother, Kiev Militia detective Lazlo. Spawned by a desire to protect his family, Lazlo investigates—irritating his superiors, drawing the attention of a CIA operative, raising the hackles of an old KGB major, and ultimately discovering his brother’s secret affair with a Chernobyl technician, Juli Popovics. After the explosion, the Ukraine is not only blanketed with deadly radiation, but also becomes a killing ground involving pre-perestroika factions in disarray, a Soviet government on its last legs, and madmen hungry for power. With a poisoned environment at their backs and a killer snapping at their heels, Lazlo and Juli flee for their lives—and their love—in this engrossing political thriller.
A Moscow detective is sent to Chernobyl for a frightening case in the most spectacular entry yet in Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko series. In his groundbreaking Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith created an iconic detective of contemporary fiction. Quietly subversive, brilliantly analytical, and haunted by melancholy, Arkady Renko survived, barely, the journey from the Soviet Union to the New Russia, only to find his transformed nation just as obsessed with corruption and brutality as was the old Communist dictatorship. In Wolves Eat Dogs, Renko returns for his most enigmatic and baffling case yet: the death of one of Russia’s new billionaires, which leads him to Chernobyl and the Zone of Exclusion—closed to the world since 1986’s nuclear disaster. It is still aglow with radioactivity, now inhabited only by the militia, shady scavengers, a few reckless scientists, and some elderly peasants who refuse to relocate. Renko’s journey to this ghostly netherworld, the crimes he uncovers there, and the secrets they reveal about the New Russia make for an unforgettable adventure.
Colonel Sam Thorpe, a member of the anti-terrorist task force, must go undercover and train the Patriots, a homegrown militia in central Pennsylvania. His job: get close to self-appointed general Quentin Oliver and uncover the core of evil. Oliver, a disgruntled ex-Marine colonel, plans to steal cesium-137 from a local university and construct seven dirty bombs. During training sessions, Sam also uncovers a link between Oliver and the French Separatist Movement in Quebec. The world is in trouble, and Sam is isolated with only one person in his corner: FBI covert agent Alex Prescott, a kick-ass woman with spiked blond hair and a personality to match. Will she be enough? Or is the world about to realize its worst nightmare?
When a Kiev video store is torched, the wife of the now-deceased owner—and primary suspect in the arson case—hires private investigator Janos Nagy. As he delves into the woman’s past, Janos discovers things are far more than meets the eye, and as the case is pursued further, a human trafficking plot unfolds from Kiev across the Ukraine. With mixed involvement of Eastern European and Russian mafia, the Ukraine Secret Service, and both orthodox and nonorthodox church rivalries, the race to untangle the threads of the international trafficking ring turns quickly to a matter of life and death.
A New York Times Best Book of the Year A Time Best Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Winner From journalist Adam Higginbotham, the New York Times bestselling “account that reads almost like the script for a movie” (The Wall Street Journal)—a powerful investigation into Chernobyl and how propaganda, secrecy, and myth have obscured the true story of one of the history’s worst nuclear disasters. Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering one of the twentieth century’s greatest disasters. In the thirty years since then, Chernobyl has become lodged in the collective nightmares of the world: shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility, and for what can happen when a dishonest and careless state endangers its citizens and the entire world. But the real story of the accident, clouded from the beginning by secrecy, propaganda, and misinformation, has long remained in dispute. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of more than ten years, as well as letters, unpublished memoirs, and documents from recently-declassified archives, Adam Higginbotham brings the disaster to life through the eyes of the men and women who witnessed it firsthand. The result is a “riveting, deeply reported reconstruction” (Los Angeles Times) and a definitive account of an event that changed history: a story that is more complex, more human, and more terrifying than the Soviet myth. “The most complete and compelling history yet” (The Christian Science Monitor), Higginbotham’s “superb, enthralling, and necessarily terrifying...extraordinary” (The New York Times) book is an indelible portrait of the lessons learned when mankind seeks to bend the natural world to his will—lessons which, in the face of climate change and other threats, remain not just vital but necessary.
In Chernobyl Murders, Chernobyl engineer Mihaly Horvath discloses the unnecessary risks associated with the power plant to his brother, Kiev Militia detective Lazlo in a western Ukraine wine cellar in 1985. Spawned by a desire to protect his family, Lazlo investigates—irritating his superiors, drawing the attention of a CIA operative, raising the hackles of an old KGB major, and ultimately discovering his brother's secret affair with a Chernobyl technician, Juli Popovics. After the explosion, the Ukraine is not only blanketed with deadly radiation, but also becomes a killing ground involving pre-perestroika factions in disarray, a Soviet government on its last legs, and madmen hungry for power. With a poisoned environment at their backs and a killer snapping at their heels, Lazlo and Juli flee for their lives—and their love—in this engrossing political thriller. In Traffyck, when a Kiev video store is torched, the wife of the now-deceased owner—and primary suspect in the arson case—hires private investigator Janos Nagy. As he delves into the woman's past, Janos discovers things are far more than meets the eye, and as the case is pursued further, a human trafficking plot unfolds from Kiev across the Ukraine. With mixed involvement of Eastern European and Russian mafia, the Ukraine Secret Service, and both orthodox and nonorthodox church rivalries, the race to untangle the threads of the international trafficking ring turns quickly to a matter of life and death.
This timely book is the first to explore the physical and intangible legacies of historic and contemporary dark tourism sites, and the contribution such sites make to place identity. It achieves this by critically reviewing the marketing, management and interpretation of contemporary and historic sites associated with death, disaster, atrocity and related events from a wide range of geographical locations. In doing so the book proposes a compose model for discussing place identity and dark tourism which will provide further understanding about these increasingly popular destinations.
Navy Special Warfare officer Matt Berkeley is on a new hunt. Under the seas off the coast of Florida, in a corpse-filled German U-boat, he finds a document lost for more than half a century, which leads him to the vaults of the German National Archives, an elderly widow and her horrifying memories of the Auschwitz death camp, and ultimately to the submarine's most guarded secret—a revelation that could forever disgrace the Catholic Church in the eyes of the world. Each mind-shattering twist plunges Berkeley further into a conspiracy littered with lies, betrayal, death, and the discovery of a single gold ingot bearing the mark of the devil.
'Murder in the Gulag is brilliant journalistic writing: punchy, eloquent, page-turning and factual. It's a powerful reminder of what an extraordinary man Navalny was' - Roland Oliphant, Telegraph The gripping sequel to the bestselling Killer in the Kremlin 2:19pm, Moscow time, 16 February 2024. The Federal Penitentiary Service of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District announces that Alexei Navalny is dead. The news sends shockwaves around the world. In Murder in the Gulag, award-winning journalist John Sweeney goes behind the headlines to reveal what really happened to the Russian opposition leader in the freezing Polar Wolf penal colony in a remote part of Siberia. The book is less a whodunnit - Russian President Vladimir Putin's machinery of repression killed Navalny - than a howdunnit. The narrative relates Navalny's extraordinary life story in technicolour detail, from his childhood summers spent with his grandparents in the shadow of the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine to his untimely death at the age of 47, cut down in his prime. This is a warts-and-all portrayal of a highly charismatic but controversial figure who flirted with far-right Russian nationalists before course-correcting, told by an intrepid journalist, based in London and Kyiv, who knew Navalny personally. Murder in the Gulag contains a warning. Navalny made a fatal misjudgement in returning to Russia after his poisoning by Novichok in 2020, betting that Vladimir Putin wouldn't kill him. But as Putin has gained in strength, with the death of Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin and the fortunes of war slowly turning in Russia's favour, Navalny lost that bet. Sweeney argues that if the West fails to stand up more forcefully to Putin, we are in danger not just of betraying Ukraine but our own security too.
"A colonel with a shadowy past . . . A new kind of war and warrior . . . A military science experiment out of control . . . On the tropical island of Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean, the United States has gathered together its most talented scientists to conduct top secret experiments. Their goal—to create a revolutionary new warrior. A warrior so strong, so valiant, so expendable that the age of “casualties of war” becomes only a sad and distant memory. And so, the Lemuria Project is brought to life—by a Nobel laureate in genetics and a three-star general seeking redemption in a long-lost and forgotten metaphysical civilization. Haunted by a dark and dangerous past, Colonel Link McGraw is the officer chosen to train and lead these special “soldiers.” In the course of battles to renew his tattered reputation, he, above all, knows what constitutes the perfect soldier. It’s simple: Follow orders, command decisively, make no excuses, and have no regrets. When Egyptian beauty Fala al-Shohada and Israeli Joshua Krantz, romantically paired archaeologists, stumble across the top secret project, they are determined to uncover its true nature and pursue their quest to the island of Diego Garcia. Science and politics clash, as do Krantz and McGraw, who vie for Fala’s affection. When they discover they aren’t the only ones on the island competing for her attention, shocking truths are revealed. The future of the entire human race comes to a crossroads on Lemuria. Will humanity find there its loftier spirit or become a lesser species in earth’s evolution? - See more at: http://medallionmediagroup.com/books/forty-eight-x-the-lemuria-project/#sthash.Qjp0bqEz.dpuf"