Dead Center

WHEN YOU'RE IN THE DEATH BUSINESS, EACH DAWN COULD BE YOUR LAST. Raw, straightforward, and powerful, Ed Kugler's account of his two years as a Marine scout-sniper in Vietnam vividly captures his experiences there--the good, the bad, and the ugly. After enlisting in the Marines at seventeen, then being wounded in Santo Domingo during the Dominican crisis, Kugler arrived in Vietnam in early 1966. As a new sniper with the 4th Marines, Kugler picked up bush skills while attached to 3d Force Recon Company, and then joined the grunts. To take advantage of that experience, he formed the Rogues, a five-sniper team that hunted in the Co Bi-Than Tan Valley for VC and NVA. His descriptions of long, tense waits, sudden deadly action, and NVA countersniper ambushes are fascinating. In DEAD CENTER, Kugler demonstrates the importance to a sniper of patience, marksmanship, bush skills, and guts--while underscoring exactly what a country demands of its youth when it sends them to war.

Edgar Award finalist and author of Bury the Lead, a Today Show Book Club pick, returns with a tale of murder and deadly secrets in an ultra-secretive religious community.

"The urgent question of our time is whether we can make change our friend and not our enemy....To renew America, we must be bold...must revitalize our democracy....Together with our friends and allies, we will work to shape change, lest it engulf us." With those inaugural words, William Jefferson Clinton began his first term as President of the United States. Now, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and a former White House aide provide the first penetrating, thoughtful evaluation of President Clinton's leadership. Before he was voted into office, Bill Clinton told the authors in an interview that he wanted to be a transforming leader, a president who would fashion real and lasting change in peoples' lives, in the tradition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But how has this president, who has sought to lead from the center with his vice president, Al Gore, and the First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, measured up against his own stated goals and the aspirations and performances of other presidents since World War II? From the health care debacle and the 1994 midterm elections that swept the Republicans to a majority in both houses of Congress to the effect of scandal and impeachment on his ability to govern, Dead Center examines the leadership style of Bill Clinton and offers a forceful challenge to the strategy of centrism. There is no more respected presidential historian than James MacGregor Burns, author of several acclaimed books on leadership and the Pulitzer Prize-winning study of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Georgia J. Sorenson adds her own insights as a political scientist and presidential scholar. Their combined efforts have resulted in an incisive, informative, authoritative work and an absorbing read.

The shocking true story of murder on Colorado's Snipe Mountain. Struck by three rifle bullets, newlywed John Bruce Dodson supposedly died in a hunting accident. But District Attorney Frank Daniels suspected Dodson's wife-and would stop at nothing to prove his suspicions before another man suffered the same fate.

A city with eight million people has eight million ways to die For fifteen years, Shiya Ribowsky worked as a medicolegal investigator in New York City’s medical examiner’s office—the largest, most sophisticated organization of its kind in the world. Utilizing his background in medicine, he led the investigations of more than eight thousand individual deaths, becoming a key figure in some of New York’s most bizarre death cases and eventually taking charge of the largest forensic investigation ever attempted: identifying the dead in the aftermath of the September 11 tragedies. Now, in this mesmerizing book, Ribowsky pulls back the curtain on the New York City’s medical examiner’s office, giving an enthralling, never-before-seen glimpse into death and the city. Born and raised in New York City’s orthodox Jewish community, Ribowsky seems an unlikely candidate for this macabre profession. Nevertheless he has forsaken a promising career of medical work with the living, descending instead into the realm of the dead, enticed by the challenge of confronting death on a daily basis. Taking you through the vermin-infested Bowery flophouses and posh Upper East Side apartments of the city’s dead, Ribowsky explores in gruesome detail the skeletons that hang in the Big Apple’s closets. Combing through the autopsy room, he also exposes the grim secrets that only a scalpel and a dead body can tell and explains how forensic investigation does not merely solve crimes—it saves lives. But it is in the aftermath of September 11 that the ME’s office is handed its biggest challenge: to identify as many of the fallen as possible. With poignant descriptions, Ribowsky provides a dramatic account of the office’s diligent and unflappable work with the families of the victims, helping them emerge from the ashes of this tragedy while displaying the strength, grit, intelligence, and compassion that Americans expect from true New Yorkers. At once compelling and heartbreaking, Dead Center is a story of New York unlike any other, blending the haunting with the sublime, while painting a striking portrait of death (and life) in the city that never sleeps.

A predator is on the hunt. An aggressive monster who preys on a specific type of victim. Female. Police. Officers. The heart-stopping thriller that "has everything-murder, intrigue, scandal, friendship, and a tough-as-nails heroine. Prepare yourself for the roller coaster ride that is Dead Center." For San Francisco Sex Crimes Inspector Jamie Vail, no case has ever hit closer to home. The brutalized women are her colleagues. Her friends. Her job is everything. Divorced and alone, Jamie vows to end the violence and capture this deranged criminal. Nothing else matters. Within days of the latest attack, a female police officer is murdered and Jamie's ex-husband is the primary suspect. She shouldn't care. She tells herself she doesn't... until she learns that the details of the murder are eerily similar to the case she is working. Jamie realizes the killer and her predator may be one and the same. Now, Jamie must confront her past and solve the murder of her ex-husband's lover to stop a serial rapist. But he has Jamie in his sights and time is running out before she becomes the killer's ultimate prize. "A thrilling read, packed with suspense that left me breathless to the very last page..." "This series is addictive. Get ready for a pulse-pounding ride that will have you reading until you can't see straight..." Fans of Lincoln Rhyme, DD Warren, Will Trent, Tracy Crosswhite and Lucas Davenport will love Jamie Vail. Praise for Dead Center and the Rookie Club Series: "A fantastic series. Buckle up for a heart-stopping ride along with the rookies. A new character in each book keeps the series fresh and the reader on their toes until the last, unforgettable page."-T. Heschel "Serial killers, human trafficking, sharpshooters, political intrigue, and more. This series has it all." -Amazon Customer "Let's just get this straight - Girard belongs beside John Grisham, Patricia Cornwell, Robert Parker, Mary Higgins Clark, Elizabeth Peters, and other top-notch mystery and crime novelists." -K. Burch "I'm in love. Phenomenal book. Phenomenal series. Phenomenal author. The series is truly exciting with spine-chilling plots mixed with realistic but fierce characters who are battling crime on the streets of San Francisco and in their personal lives. Amazing female protagonists and a great mix of good ole boys and kind, supportive men make up the police department in this suspenseful thriller series." -BookNerd "This writer is amazing, I am hooked. I've read all the Rookie Club books and several of her standalone books. I WILL be reading each and every one. Her crime scenes are insane. The books are intense. I cannot put them." -A. Daughtry "I bought this book without ever reading anything by this author before. I am SO glad I took a chance. Loved it so much upon finishing it I immediately got the next one in the "Rookie Club" series!"-J. West

A second collection of articles and columns by one of the world's best motorcycle writers, arranged thematically and with brief new introductions by the author.