When an annual boring family gathering in an isolated farmhouse turned out to be a gathering of the world’s most devious... With With uncle Ravi’s immensely valuable designs stolen and his company refusing to call in the police, it is upto 14-year old Kavya, Raima and Varun, aided by Anna (Kavya’s older cousin), to solve the mystery. Blood-thirsty alien monsters. Killer cars. Hounds of horror. Rogue spies. Menacing threats. Six deadly Chinese daggers. A gun between the eyes. And it only gets worse… Will the mystery busters succeed before the guests leave the farmhouse? But first, will they escape death that lurks around them? Stifle your fears and sharpen your intelligence as you hurtle into a treacherous whirlpool with the Crime Busters on their first adventure. Armed with a MBA from the University of Oxford, Ketaki Karnik roller-coastered through management consultancies and corporates. Through all this, her only lifeline to sanity has been concocting the next Crime Busters’ mystery. In addition to being a mystery fiction junkie, Ketaki is a movie buff who loves the guitar, chocolates and anything sci-fi. Join Ketaki’s gang of mystery addicts to share your real.
The incredible true story of the decade-long quest to bring down Paul Le Roux—the creator of a frighteningly powerful Internet-enabled cartel who merged the ruthlessness of a drug lord with the technological savvy of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. “A tour de force of shoe-leather reporting—undertaken, amid threats and menacing, at considerable personal risk.”—Los Angeles Times NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • NPR • Evening Standard • Kirkus Reviews It all started as an online prescription drug network, supplying hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of painkillers to American customers. It would not stop there. Before long, the business had turned into a sprawling multinational conglomerate engaged in almost every conceivable aspect of criminal mayhem. Yachts carrying $100 million in cocaine. Safe houses in Hong Kong filled with gold bars. Shipments of methamphetamine from North Korea. Weapons deals with Iran. Mercenary armies in Somalia. Teams of hit men in the Philippines. Encryption programs so advanced that the government could not break them. The man behind it all, pulling the strings from a laptop in Manila, was Paul Calder Le Roux—a reclusive programmer turned criminal genius who could only exist in the networked world of the twenty-first century, and the kind of self-made crime boss that American law enforcement had never imagined. For half a decade, DEA agents played a global game of cat-and-mouse with Le Roux as he left terror and chaos in his wake. Each time they came close, he would slip away. It would take relentless investigative work, and a shocking betrayal from within his organization, to catch him. And when he was finally caught, the story turned again, as Le Roux struck a deal to bring down his own organization and the people he had once employed. Award-winning investigative journalist Evan Ratliff spent four years piecing together this intricate puzzle, chasing Le Roux’s empire and his shadowy henchmen around the world, conducting hundreds of interviews and uncovering thousands of documents. The result is a riveting, unprecedented account of a crime boss built by and for the digital age. Praise for The Mastermind “The Mastermind is true crime at its most stark and vivid depiction. Evan Ratliff’s work is well done from beginning to end, paralleling his investigative work with the work of the many federal agents developing the case against LeRoux.”—San Francisco Book Review (five stars) “A wholly engrossing story that joins the worlds of El Chapo and Edward Snowden; both disturbing and memorable.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Social media and emerging internet technologies have expanded the ideas of marketing approaches. In particular, the phenomenon of the internet in China challenges the common perception of new media environments. Internet Mercenaries and Viral Marketing: The Case of Chinese Social Media presents case studies, textual analysis, media reviews, and in-depth interviews in order to investigate the Chinese pushing hand operation from the conceptual perspective of communications and viral marketing. This book is significant to researchers, marketers, and advocates interested in the persuasive influence of social networks.
From 1949 to 1968 author Robert van Gulick wrote 15 novels, two novellas and eight short stories featuring Judge Dee, a Chinese magistrate and detective from the Tang dynasty. In addition to providing the setting for riveting mysteries, Dee's world highlighted aspects of traditional Chinese culture through his personal relationships with his wives, his lieutenants and the citizens he served with dedication on the emperor's behalf. This book gives a synopsis of each Judge Dee story, along with commentary on plots, characters, themes and historical details. Exploring van Gulik's influence on Chinese and Western detective fiction and on the image of China in popular 20th century American literature, this study brings to light a significant contributor to the development of detective fiction.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.
The incredible true story of the decade-long quest to bring down Paul Le Roux—the creator of a frighteningly powerful Internet-enabled cartel who merged the ruthlessness of a drug lord with the technological savvy of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. “A tour de force of shoe-leather reporting—undertaken, amid threats and menacing, at considerable personal risk.”—Los Angeles Times NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • NPR • Evening Standard • Kirkus Reviews It all started as an online prescription drug network, supplying hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of painkillers to American customers. It would not stop there. Before long, the business had turned into a sprawling multinational conglomerate engaged in almost every conceivable aspect of criminal mayhem. Yachts carrying $100 million in cocaine. Safe houses in Hong Kong filled with gold bars. Shipments of methamphetamine from North Korea. Weapons deals with Iran. Mercenary armies in Somalia. Teams of hit men in the Philippines. Encryption programs so advanced that the government could not break them. The man behind it all, pulling the strings from a laptop in Manila, was Paul Calder Le Roux—a reclusive programmer turned criminal genius who could only exist in the networked world of the twenty-first century, and the kind of self-made crime boss that American law enforcement had never imagined. For half a decade, DEA agents played a global game of cat-and-mouse with Le Roux as he left terror and chaos in his wake. Each time they came close, he would slip away. It would take relentless investigative work, and a shocking betrayal from within his organization, to catch him. And when he was finally caught, the story turned again, as Le Roux struck a deal to bring down his own organization and the people he had once employed. Award-winning investigative journalist Evan Ratliff spent four years piecing together this intricate puzzle, chasing Le Roux’s empire and his shadowy henchmen around the world, conducting hundreds of interviews and uncovering thousands of documents. The result is a riveting, unprecedented account of a crime boss built by and for the digital age. Praise for The Mastermind “The Mastermind is true crime at its most stark and vivid depiction. Evan Ratliff’s work is well done from beginning to end, paralleling his investigative work with the work of the many federal agents developing the case against LeRoux.”—San Francisco Book Review (five stars) “A wholly engrossing story that joins the worlds of El Chapo and Edward Snowden; both disturbing and memorable.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
This comprehensive and authoratative four-volume work surveys the history and philosophy of crime, punishment, and criminal justice institutions in America from colonial times to the present.
The New York Times bestselling guide to thinking like literature's greatest detective. "Steven Pinker meets Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" (Boston Globe), by the author of The Confidence Game. No fictional character is more renowned for his powers of thought and observation than Sherlock Holmes. But is his extraordinary intellect merely a gift of fiction, or can we learn to cultivate these abilities ourselves, to improve our lives at work and at home? We can, says psychologist and journalist Maria Konnikova, and in Mastermind she shows us how. Beginning with the “brain attic”—Holmes’s metaphor for how we store information and organize knowledge—Konnikova unpacks the mental strategies that lead to clearer thinking and deeper insights. Drawing on twenty-first-century neuroscience and psychology, Mastermind explores Holmes’s unique methods of ever-present mindfulness, astute observation, and logical deduction. In doing so, it shows how each of us, with some self-awareness and a little practice, can employ these same methods to sharpen our perceptions, solve difficult problems, and enhance our creative powers. For Holmes aficionados and casual readers alike, Konnikova reveals how the world’s most keen-eyed detective can serve as an unparalleled guide to upgrading the mind.
There's a folk memory of China in which numberless yellow hordes pour out of the 'mysterious East' to overwhelm the vulnerable West, accompanied by a stereotype of the Chinese as cruel, cunning and depraved. Hollywood films played their part in perpetuating these myths and stereotypes that constituted 'The Yellow Peril'. Jeffrey Richards examines in detail how and why they did it. He shows how the negative image was embodied in recurrent cinematic depictions of opium dens, tong wars, sadistic dragon ladies and corrupt warlords and how, in the 1930s and 1940s, a countervailing positive image involved the heroic peasants of The Good Earth and Dragon Seed fighting against Japanese invasion in wartime tributes to the West's ally, Nationalist China. The cinema's split level response is also traced through the images of the ultimate Oriental villain, the sinister Dr. Fu Manchu and the timeless Chinese hero, the intelligent and benevolent detective Charlie Chan.Filling a longstanding gap in Cinema and Cultural History, the book is founded in fresh research into Hollywood's shifting representations of China and its people.
The utterly gripping story of the most outrageous case of cyber piracy prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice. A former U.S. Navy intelligence officer, David Locke Hall was a federal prosecutor when a bizarre-sounding website, CRACK99, came to his attention. It looked like Craigslist on acid, but what it sold was anything but amateurish: thousands of high-tech software products used largely by the military, and for mere pennies on the dollar. Want to purchase satellite tracking software? No problem. Aerospace and aviation simulations? No problem. Communications systems designs? No problem. Software for Marine One, the presidential helicopter? No problem. With delivery times and customer service to rival the world’s most successful e-tailers, anybody, anywhere—including rogue regimes, terrorists, and countries forbidden from doing business with the United States—had access to these goods for any purpose whatsoever. But who was behind CRACK99, and where were they? The Justice Department discouraged potentially costly, risky cases like this, preferring the low-hanging fruit that scored points from politicians and the public. But Hall and his colleagues were determined to find the culprit. They bought CRACK99's products for delivery in the United States, buying more and more to appeal to the budding entrepreneur in the man they identified as Xiang Li. After winning his confidence, they lured him to Saipan—a U.S. commonwealth territory where Hall’s own father had stormed the beaches with the marines during World War II. There they set up an audacious sting that culminated in Xiang Li's capture and imprisonment. The value of the goods offered by CRACK99? A cool $100 million. An eye-opening look at cybercrime and its chilling consequences for national security, CRACK99 reads like a caper that resonates with every amazing detail.
