Hostage

The bestselling author of Demolition Angel and L.A. Requiem returns with his most intense and intricate thriller yet. As the Los Angeles Times said, Robert Crais is “a crime writer operating at the top of his game.” His complex heroes and heroines, his mastery of noir atmosphere, and his brilliant, taut plots have catapulted him into the front rank of a new breed of thriller writers. Hostage proves his earlier success was no fluke. It’s an unstoppable read. An ex-con with delusions of grandeur and his tagalong brother unwittingly team up with a psychopath one wrong word away from meltdown. When their late afternoon joyride turns into a random act of violence, they take a family hostage in the affluent bedroom community of Bristo Camino. Enter Chief of Police Jeff Talley, a stressed-out former LAPD SWAT negotiator who is hiding from his past. Plunged back into the high-pressure world that he desperately wants to forget, Talley soon learns that his nightmare has only begun. The hostages are not who they seem, and the home contains secrets that even L.A.’s most lethal and volatile crime lord, Sonny Benza, fears. As Talley tries to hold himself together and save the people inside, the full weight of Benza’s wrath descends on him, putting the police chief and his own family at risk. Soon, all involved are held hostage by the exigencies of fate and the only one capable of diffusing the standoff is the least stable of them all. Hostage is a blistering stand-alone thriller with superb characters in crisis, multistranded plotting, and pitch-perfect Southern California sensibility.

12-16 yrs.

"Feels like a blockbuster movie."—Lisa Jewell, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Then She Was Gone "Mackintosh is a pro...the final scene in the book almost made me sick as I read it. I mean that as a compliment of the highest order."—The New York Times You can save hundreds of lives. Or the one that matters most... From New York Times bestselling author Clare Mackintosh comes a claustrophobic thriller set over 20 hours on-board the inaugural nonstop flight from London to Sydney. Mina is trying to focus on her job as a flight attendant, not the problems with her five-year-old daughter back home, or the fissures in her marriage. But the plane has barely taken off when Mina receives a chilling note from an anonymous passenger, someone intent on ensuring the plane never reaches its destination: "The following instructions will save your daughter's life..." Someone needs Mina's assistance and knows exactly how to make her comply. When one passenger is killed and then another, Mina knows she must act. But which lives does she save: Her passengers...or her own daughter and husband who are in grave distress back at home? It's twenty hours to landing. A lot can happen in twenty hours. For fans of the locked-room mystery of One by One and the heart-stopping tension The Last Flight, Hostage is an explosively addictive thriller about one flight attendant and the agonizing decision that will change her life—and the lives of everyone on-board—forever. Praise for Hostage: "A banger of a book with a truly agonizing 'what would you do?'" —Ruth Ware, #1 New York Times bestselling author of One by One "Hypnotically good. Should be a hit, could be a classic..." —Lee Child, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Jack Reacher series "Fiendishly clever." —Lisa Gardner, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Before She Disappeared "A propulsive read." —Karin Slaughter, New York Times bestselling author of The Silent Wife "A nail-biter of a thriller." —Shari Lapena, New York Times bestselling author of The Couple Next Door

HOW DOES ONE SURVIVE WHEN ALL HOPE IS LOST? In the middle of the night in 1997, Doctors Without Borders administrator Christophe Andre was kidnapped by armed men and taken away to an unknown destination in the Caucasus region. For three months, Andre was kept handcuffed in solitary confinement, with little to survive on and almost no contact with the outside world. Close to twenty years later, award-winning cartoonist Guy Delisle (Pyongyang, Jerusalem, Shenzhen, Burma Chronicles) recounts Andre's harrowing experience in Hostage, a book that attests to the power of one man's determination in the face of a hopeless situation. Marking a departure from the author's celebrated first-person travelogues, Delisle tells the story through the perspective of the titular captive, who strives to keep his mind alert as desperation starts to set in. Working in a pared down style with muted colour washes, Delisle conveys the psychological effects of solitary confinement, compelling us to ask ourselves some difficult questions regarding the repercussions of negotiating with kidnappers and what it really means to be free. Thoughtful, intense, and moving, Hostage takes a profound look at what drives our will to survive in the darkest of moments.

George Kohlrieser—an international leadership professor, consultant, and veteran hostage negotiator—explains that it is only by openly facing conflict that we can truly progress through the most difficult business challenges. In this provocative book, he reveals how the proven techniques and psychological insights used in hostage negotiation can be applied successfully to any personal or business relationship. Step by step, he outlines the seven key factors that anyone can use to remove the blocks that stand in the way of resolving tough problems and shows how business leaders, in particular, can develop and access the skills they need to create trust and a positive mind-set in their companies.

A young girl and her neighbor are kidnapped during a burglary gone awry in this hair-raising and fast-paced thriller from three-time Edgar Award–winning author Willo Davis Roberts. Sixth-grader Kaci Drummond longs for excitement and to be noticed just as her sister Jodie is for dancing, or her brother Jeff is for playing the piano. Shortly after her family moves to a new house, Kaci returns home in the middle of the school day and stumbles upon a burglary. The robbers kidnap her, and when a nosy neighbor suspects that something is wrong and tries to help, they take her as well. Kaci quickly discovers that the elderly woman not only has some good ideas, but also helps them both keep up their courage. Can the two hostages band together to escape their captors?

On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants stormed the United States Embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six Americans captive. Thus began the Iran Hostage Crisis, an affair that captivated the American public for 444 days and marked America's first confrontation with the forces of radical Islam. Using hundreds of recently declassified government documents, historian David Farber takes the first in-depth look at the hostage crisis, examining its lessons for America's contemporary War on Terrorism. Unlike other histories of the subject, Farber's vivid and fast-paced narrative looks beyond the day-to-day circumstances of the crisis, using the events leading up to the ordeal as a means for understanding it. The book paints a portrait of the 1970s in the United States as an era of failed expectations in a nation plagued by uncertainty and anxiety. It reveals an American government ill prepared for the fall of the Shah of Iran and unable to reckon with the Ayatollah Khomeini and his militant Islamic followers. Farber's account is filled with fresh insights regarding the central players in the crisis: Khomeini emerges as an astute strategist, single-mindedly dedicated to creating an Islamic state. The Americans' student-captors appear as less-than-organized youths, having prepared for only a symbolic sit-in with just a three-day supply of food. ABC news chief Roone Arledge, newly installed and eager for ratings, is cited as a critical catalyst in elevating the hostages to cause célèbre status. Throughout the book there emerge eerie parallels to the current terrorism crisis. Then as now, Farber demonstrates, politicians failed to grasp the depth of anger that Islamic fundamentalists harbored toward the United States, and Americans dismissed threats from terrorist groups as the crusades of ineffectual madmen. Taken Hostage is a timely and revealing history of America's first engagement with terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, one that provides a chilling reminder that the past is only prologue.

This book is about the role of negotiation in resolving terrorist barricade hostage crises. What lessons can be learned from past deadly incidents so that crisis negotiators and decision makers can act with greater effectiveness in the future? What are the lessons the terrorists are learning and how will they affect the dynamics of future incidents? What can we learn about the terrorist threat, and about preventing the escalation of future terrorist hostage-taking situations? While there are many trained crisis negotiators around the world, almost none of them has ever had contact with a terrorist hostage-taking incident. Further, the entire training program of most hostage negotiators focuses on resolving crises that do not take into consideration issues such as ideology, religion, or the differing sets of strategic objectives and mindsets of ideological hostage takers. This is especially true with regard to the terrorists of the new breed, who have become less discriminate, more lethal, and more willing to execute hostages and die during the incident. Further, many of the paradigms and presumptions upon which the contemporary practice of crisis negotiation is based do not reflect the reality of the new terrorists. The main focus of this book is on the detailed reconstruction and analysis of the two most high-profile cases in recent years, the Moscow theater and the Beslan school hostage crises, with a clear purpose of drawing lessons for hostage negotiation strategies in the future. This is an issue of top priority. Terrorist manuals from countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq reveal that terrorist organizations are very closely observing and analyzing the lessons learned from these two incidents, suggesting that we are likely to see this type of new terrorist hostage taking involving large numbers of suicide fighters and executions of hostages at some point in the future. This raises a wide array of questions about appropriate responses and negotiation strategies. From the first glance, it is clear that we are not prepared.