Showing results by narrator "Jonathan Beville" in All Categories

Five men drive into an empty Kazakh desert. Four are professional killers. The fifth is their intended victim. This is not the first time someone has underestimated CIA paramilitary operator Mark Pierce. And it won't be the last. Pierce quickly dispatches the assassins, but soon realizes that his problems are only beginning. Someone has deliberately brought him to Kazakhstan so that he can be framed for the theft of Russian nuclear waste.

CIA operative Mark Pierce is a trained killer with a strict moral code—he only targets those who truly deserve to die. So he has no qualms about taking out Victor Vautrin, an international arms dealer supplying fanatical terrorists in West Africa who may soon trigger a brutal civil war. But when he is tasked with other objectives—rescue kidnapped tourists and recover eleven million dollars of stolen CIA money—it quickly becomes clear to Pierce that someone doesn't want him to succeed in his primary mission.

Throughout his storied career, Aswath Damodaran has searched for the universal key to demystify corporate finance and valuation. Now, at last, he offers the groundbreaking answer to listeners everywhere. As the corporate lifecycle touches virtually every aspect of business, this book is for anyone with skin in the corporate finance game—from managers to investors, from novices to seasoned pros. Aswath Damodaran’s The Corporate Life Cycle is the definitive guide to understanding businesses growth, behavior, and value.

It was once a utopian dream. But today’s internet, despite its conveniences and connectivity, is the primary cause of a pervasive unease that has taken hold in the U.S. and other democratic societies. The roots of this crisis, argue Frank McCourt and Michael Casey, lie in the prevailing order of the internet. In plain but forceful language, the authors—a civic entrepreneur and an acclaimed journalist—show how a centralized system controlled by a small group of for-profit entities has set this catastrophe in motion and eroded our personhood.

What happens when you pack almost a dozen jails, bulging at the seams with society’s cast-offs, onto a spit of landfill purposefully hidden from public view? Prize-winning journalists Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau have spent two years interviewing more than 130 people comprising a broad cross section of lives touched by New York City's Rikers Island prison complex—from incarcerated people and their relatives, to officers, lawyers, and commissioners, with stories spanning the 1970s to the present day. The portrait that emerges calls into question the very nature of justice in America.

USA Today best-selling author Ty Hutchinson and former detective and Wall Street Journal best-selling author Brian Shea deliver a fast-paced mystery series filled with twists, perfect for fans of James Patterson and Michael Connelly.

This is the unbelievable, unforgettable, unparalleled story of an ordinary guy whose attempts to become famous doing the thing he wanted most—become a world class race car driver—devolved into a you-can’t-make-this-up tale of one of the biggest crime rings and drug scandals of the 1980s. Now, with the help of New York Times bestselling author A.J. Baime, Randy tells the whole truth for the first time ever, a gripping narrative unlike any other, a sports story for the ages, and shocking a true crime epic.

By the year 2032, the US federal debt has surpassed $50 trillion. The American empire is on the verge of collapse. An entrepreneur named Kade Kapur has an idea for rescuing the debt-ridden United States: The government will issue stock in a company with exclusive mining rights to an asteroid whose orbit will soon bring it near Earth. The asteroid, which contains $10 trillion in valuable minerals, is officially called 2015 RK 16 Maimonides, but it soon comes to be known by another name: Mammon.

Dan Stone has a new assignment. In Africa. He's to cripple the Chinese incursions into the continent. The only problem is he might trigger World War III. This high-stakes thriller, set in the wild world of the DRC, pits Dan Stone against a complex array of forces, all vying for power and influence. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, DRC, holds some of the largest coltan deposits in the world. It is the source of two rare Earth metals, niobium and tantalum, vital to modern economies. Now the Chinese are trying to corner the market and hold the western world hostage.

As US hegemony fails in the wake of an unprecedented economic crisis, wars erupt across the globe. Meanwhile, a small band of engineers and scientists work in secret on a mission to redirect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth.

Though published second after Altmann's Tongue, The Din of Celestial Birds (1997) consists of the best of Evenson's early stories. They take place in a country (perhaps several countries) that seems at once everywhere and nowhere, haunted by birds, ghosts, poverty, tyranny, and the permeability of the line between the living and the dead. These stories offer a heady mix of absurdity and bleakness on the one hand and exuberant magic realism on the other.

Brian Evenson's fifth story collection constructs a human landscape as unearthly as it is mundane. Replete with the brutality, primordial waste, and savage blankness familiar to listeners of his earlier works, Evenson's Kafkaesque allegories entice the mind while stubbornly disordering it.

They set sail from Norway, two swift-moving longships and their handpicked crews, following the route navigated by the legendary Leif Ericson. But for young shipmaster Nils Thorsson and his fellow Norsemen, the real journey begins when they push on into the uncharted continent of Vinland. There the explorers revel in the chance to penetrate a virgin land—until they trespass on the grounds of a primitive people who have seen enough of the light-hairs' cruelty to believe they are too dangerous to ignore.

In the aftermath of disaster, China and America vie for control over North Africa and the world, while a band of engineers and mercenaries risk everything to save millions from starvation and forge a better future for all mankind.

After several missing university students turn up dead in Iowa’s cornfields, the police turn to FBI Special Agent Sterling Gray, a rising star at the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit. After painstaking investigative work, Gray thought they had identified the killer. But when Interpol suddenly contacts him about a similar investigation in London, the case takes a shocking turn. Now Gray must follow the chilling trail of a killer known only as the Mirror Man. To catch him, Gray must get inside the killer’s twisted mind—without losing himself in the process.

In 1952, John T. “Jack” Downey, a 23-year-old CIA officer from Connecticut, was shot down over Manchuria during the Korean War. The pilots died in the crash, but Downey and his partner Richard “Dick” Fecteau were captured by the Chinese. For the next 20 years, they were harshly interrogated, put through show trials, held in solitary confinement, placed in reeducation camps, and toured around China as political pawns.

Vegetarians have argued at great length that meat-eating is wrong. Even so, the vast majority of people continue to eat meat, and even most vegetarians eventually give up on their diets. Does this prove these people must be morally corrupt? Dan C. Shahar argues the answer is no: It's entirely possible to be an ethical person while continuing to eat meat - and not just the "fancy" offerings from the farmers' market, but also the regular meat we find at most supermarkets and restaurants.

Matt Kearns just needed to get away from it all - to grieve for his father and let the rugged wilderness of Michigan's Upper Peninsula renew him, like it always had. But from the moment he arrives, nothing feels right. Strange happenings shake his confidence and have him questioning his sanity. Even the animals seem to know something is amiss. But each time he tries to leave, something - something truly malicious - violently pulls him back. What could it be? Why him? And what will he have to do to escape with his life?

He is deadly and acts without remorse. He inflicts pain and death in service to his master. Now he's killed someone close to Dan and those he loves. It's become more than a mission for Dan; it's personal now. The assassin may want to lure Dan into his trap to kill him, but Dan has other ideas. One assassin must track another to his lair in a desperate attempt to eliminate him before anyone else dies.

Years ago, police detective Kevin McClain was captured and tortured when he was an airborne ranger in Somalia. Now, years later, the mutilation murder of a homeless man brings back a flood of unpleasant memories. At the same time, FBI agent Felicia Knight is busy tracking down a terrorist cell purportedly set to strike in our nation’s capital on the eve of the presidential election. What neither McClain nor Knight realizes is the two cases are secretly connected by a sinister plot more diabolical and far-reaching than either of them can imagine.