Private History

Elizabeth II is within a few years of becoming the longest-reigning British monarch. A personally quiet, modest and dutiful person, she is far better-informed about the lives of her subjects than they often realize. She has known every Prime Minister since Winston Churchill and every American President since Eisenhower. Yet what of the woman behind the crown?

Morally ambiguous P.I. Leonid McGill is back -- and investigating crimes against society's most downtrodden -- in this installment of the beloved detective series from an Edgar Award-winning and bestselling crime novelist. Leonid McGill's spent a lifetime building up his reputation in the New...

Steadfast in fighting crime, but operating outside the police force - and sometimes even the law - is the private detective. Driven by his own moral code, he is a shadowy figure in a trench coat standing on a street corner, his face most likely obscured by a tilted fedora, a lit cigarette dangling from his hand. The hard-boiled detective is known by his dark past, private pain, and powers of deduction. He only asks questions - never answers them. In his stories he is both the main character and the narrator.

Like the Rockefellers and the Kennedys, the Kochs are one of the most influential dynasties of the modern age, but they have never been the subject of a major biography -- until now. Not long after the death of his father, Charles Koch, then in his early 30s, discovered a letter the family...

“Lippman is a writing powerhouse. ” —USA Today “I love her books.” —Harlan Coben New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman—winner of the Edgar Award and every other major literary prize given for mystery and crime fiction—embroils Baltimore p.i. Tess Monaghan in the...

With a keen eye for the juicy anecdote, Thévoz tells the fascinating and entertaining story of the rise, decline and resurgence of London's private members' clubs, from the late-eighteenth century to the present day. In doing so he looks at cultural and political developments beyond the clubs, revealing how while the clubs may have been products of their city and country, they also exerted significant influence on London, Britain and places far beyond.

North Korea is one of the most troubled societies on earth. The country's 24 million people live under a violent dictatorship led by a single family, which relentlessly pursues the development of nuclear arms, which periodically incites risky military clashes with the larger, richer, liberal South, and which forces each and every person to play a role in the "theater state" even as it pays little more than lip service to the wellbeing of the overwhelming majority.

In this deeply researched and vivid account, Cyril Marlen uncovers the astonishing role pigeons played in the most destructive conflict of the twentieth century. Radios could be jammed, batteries failed in freezing cold, and transmissions risked interception. But pigeons, guided only by instinct and loyalty to their home lofts, rose into the air and carried messages across battlefields, seas, and occupied territories. Their journeys were often short, sometimes perilously long, but always fraught with danger from bullets, hawks, storms, and exhaustion.

Packed auditoriums. Crowds of anxious people. Crowds of scary people. Suffocating sound studios. TV lights cooking my skull and cameras that looked like they were going to bite me in the face. Rooms full of lawyers. Celebrities. Strangers pleading with me to save them. The unbearable pressure of money. The genuine beauty of quiet democracy. If you’re not interested in listening about any of that, fine, but at least listen to chapter Googolplex.

Robert E. Lee is remembered by history as a tragic figure, stoic and brave but distant and enigmatic. Using dozens of previously unpublished letters as departure points, Pryor produces a stunning personal account of Lee's military ability, his beliefs, and his time, shedding new light on every aspect of the complex and contradictory general's life story.

In the decade before the onset of the Civil War, groups of Americans engaged in a series of longshot - and illegal - forays into Mexico, Cuba, and other Central American countries in hopes of taking them over. These efforts became known as filibustering, and their goal was to seize territory to create new independent fiefdoms, which would ultimately be annexed by the still-growing United States. Most failed miserably. William Walker was the outlier. Soft-spoken with no military background, in 1856 he managed to install himself as president of Nicaragua.

The female private detective has been a staple of popular culture for over 150 years. But what about the real-life women behind these fictional tales? Dismissed as 'Mrs Sherlock Holmes' or amateurish Miss Marples, mocked as private dicks or honey trappers, they have been investigating crime since the mid-nineteenth century - everything from theft and fraud to romance scams and murder. In Private Inquiries, Caitlin Davies traces the history of the UK's female investigators.

The Korean War rages on in this thrilling alternate history sequel to Beat the Devils: Morris Baker, now a private investigator, must solve a missing persons case in the midst of an endless battle. December, 1959: The Korean War rages on. Protesting the bloody conflict, a Korean-American man by...

From Frank D. Gilroy - a prolific and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, novelist and, most recently, author of a best-selling Kindle Single (Lake) - comes this chilling memoir of a young soldier in World War II confronting the nightmare of death. This isn't the battle cry of a war hero; it's the confessions of a young man pressed into service and searching for answers. In Gilroy's spare yet muscular prose, this saga of a young private's journey becomes a universal story of manhood and military life, told from the ground level of combat.

Bradley Manning perpetrated the biggest breach of military security in American history. While serving as an Army intelligence analyst, he leaked an astounding amount of classified information to WikiLeaks: classified combat videos, plus hundreds of thousands of documents from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and from embassies around the globe. Nearly all of WikiLeaks' headline-making releases of information have come from a single source: Bradley Manning.

EDGAR AWARD FINALIST A private investigator revisits the case that has haunted her for decades and sets out on a deeply personal quest to sort truth from lies. CLUE AWARD FINALIST “[A] haunting memoir, which also unfolds as a gripping true-crime narrative . . . This is a...

During the Peninsular campaign of the Napoleonic wars, the author of this book travelled with Wellington's headquarters. His position as Judge-Advocate kept him busy prosecuting the wrongdoers of the army. In this narrative you'll get to hear first-hand accounts of the various battles and sieges of the campaign including Vitoria.

Lost for 13 months in the wilds of Afghanistan, this is the dramatic, heart-warming and truly amazing story of Sarbi, the Army's most famous explosives detection dog - the miracle dog of Tarin Kot. Powerful, dramatic, heartwarming, this is the true story of Sarbi, the scruffy black Labrador-cross trained by the Australian Army as an explosives detection dog for the most dangerous combat mission imaginable. Thirteen months after Australia's most famous canine warrior went missing in action in 2008, she was found by an American Special Forces officer patrolling a village....

These letters, in the form of a frank and amusing diary, were written by a private in Wellington's army who fought throughout the Napoleonic Wars. Private Wheeler's record covers the Peninsular Campaign, keeping order during the coronation of Louis XVIII (whom he called 'an old bloated poltroon') and his later posting to Corfu.

The vivid and emotional story of one soldier's heroic struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder.1944: Norm Bussel, an introspective and happy-go-lucky teen from Memphis, finds himself bailing out of a burning B-17 bomber just months after his 19th birthday. Touching-down in a field outside Berlin, Norm was immediately seized by local farmhands, who were in the process of lynching him when a passing German soldier put a stop to the execution.