From acclaimed author and screenwriter Derek Haas comes a unique and thrilling twist on a family story—what happens when an elite assassin becomes a father? Now a new dad, the infamous Silver Bear finds himself staying up late to give a bottle and changing diapers—all while leading the double life of a contract killer. The struggle is not with his conscience. He enjoys his gig. But a child forces him to weigh selfishness versus safety. Continue in his line of work, and he’ll always wonder if he's putting his child’s life at risk. When the next assignment comes, both Columbus and his partner Risina are surprised to find that the mark is another assassin: a brash, young man named Castillo. An assassin on the rise, he’s responsible for slaying a high profile CEO. As Columbus closes in on his target, he realizes that Castillo is a younger version of himself. It's almost like looking in a mirror. Castillo has even studied Columbus' work. Yet as much as Columbus sees himself in this young man, his assignment is clear. Then, Castillo learns that his hero and unwitting mentor has a family—a revelation with enormous ramifications. Now that he knows Columbus’s weakness, he will go after it and exploit it. Just as Columbus would have done...
An explosive thriller from the acclaimed co-creator of "Chicago Fire" featuring his dynamic and compelling anti-hero, Columbus. The way I die is two taps to the head, stuffed in the trunk of a rental sedan, my body set on fire. The way I die is both arms broken, both legs broken, tossed off a cigarette boat in the middle of Lake Michigan, bricks in my pockets to weigh down the corpse. The way I die is acid in a bathtub, pushed out of an airplane, strung up and gutted in an old textile warehouse in Boston. My name is Copeland. My name is Columbus. The way I die is a shotgun in my mouth, my finger on the trigger. It is the middle of February on Mackinac Island, a tiny community off the northern Michigan coast. But Columbus isn't here to enjoy the picturesque surroundings. Reeling after the death of his wife and relinquishing his son, he lives in isolation—in self-imposed punishment and exile. Forgotten and alone. Nameless to his neighbors. But even if he runs and hides, Columbus is never alone for long. Ten years after Columbus—one of the most original anti-heroes in contemporary fiction—first exploded onto the scene in The Silver Bear, Derek Haas delivers another riveting thriller that promises heart-pounding action and shocking twists until the very last page.
Meet Austin Clay, the CIA's best-kept secret. There has always been a need in the spy game for operations outside the realm of legality-covert missions so black no one in the American government, and almost no one in intelligence itself, is aware of their existence. The left hand can't know what the right hand is doing. Austin Clay is that right hand, executing missions that would be disavowed by his own government were he ever to be compromised. His team consists of only his trusted handler and himself. His missions are among the most important and dangerous in U.S. history. Clay is sent to track down a missing American operative, a man who was captured outside of Moscow, in the Russian countryside. Soon he discovers the missing officer is only the beginning of the mission, and finds himself protecting a desperate woman who believes a mole has penetrated the top levels of the U.S. government, throwing the international balance of power into jeopardy. With blistering pace, international intrigue, and a high-stakes plot that spans continents, THE RIGHT HAND introduces a new hero, from the novelist whose work the New York Times Book Review has proclaimed "devastatingly cool.
The latest thriller featuring the sleek and sinister Silver Bear—from leading Hollywood scriptwriter Derek Haas. Columbus has retired. Or so he thinks. He and his lover, Risina, a mysterious rare-book dealer, have fled to a tiny Italian coastal village where no one knows their names. And yet Columbus has trouble letting go. His paranoia is justified when one day, he notices a suspicious man following him, and within days, he’s back in Chicago trying to figure out why his old fence has been kidnapped and maybe even killed. The ransom note left behind demands Columbus by name. The Silver Bear must now sever this last link with his dark past if he and Risina are to ever have hope at a new life. Yet Risinia seems to show a remarkable knack for the kill herself . . . and perhaps there won’t be a chance for turning back.
The intense psychological portrait of a hitman—the anti-Jason Bourne—as he stalks his prey from Boston to LA. He wants you to know him, maybe even admire him, but only for his excellence in his craft. Perhaps he was even born for it. "A natural killer," his mentor—a middleman named Vespucci—said he was. He proved it with his first professional hit: a Fifth Circuit Court judge in Boston, executed with a sheet of Saran Wrap in the stairwell of her own courthouse. He's proved his merit often, usually with a Glock semiautomatic, but he's improvised too, with his bare hands, the heel of a shoe, knives, even a sewing machine. He is the consummate assassin, at the top of his form, immune to the psychological strains of his chosen profession. He is what the Russians call a Silver Bear. He calls himself Columbus. It's the name Vespucci gave him, ten years ago, when he discovered a dark, new world of fences, clients, marks, jobs, jack. Not that his real name meant much to him anyway. He never knew his father or his mother, a prostitute who became dangerously involved back in the seventies with an earnest young congressman named Abe Mann, then a rising star in the Democratic Party. The magnetic Abe Mann has since become the Speaker of the House. He is currently running for the Democratic nomination in an exhausting presidential campaign, weaving his way across the country. Columbus is not far behind. But as he pieces together his past and prepares the seamless assassination of his mark, the criminal underworld he has always ruled begins unraveling violently around him.
In the shadowy world of hitmen, one man stands alone. His name is Columbus. They call him the Silver Bear. It means he will take on any assignment, complete it, and walk away clean. Columbus thinks he is immune to the pressures of his chosen career. But fate intends to prove him different. In these three novels, collected for the first time, Columbus finds himself in ever greater danger: a target, and on the run...
Assassins cannot retire. All they can do is die. But expert hitman Columbus has never followed the rules. He and his lover Risina have turned their back on violence and fled. He wanted peace... yet he is having trouble letting go. His fears are justified when he notices a suspicious man following him. Within days he's back in Chicago - and back in his old world. Columbus must sever his last links with his past if he's to have any hope of a new life. But perhaps he doesn't really want to walk away...
Columbus is back and as deadly as ever. But the hunter has now become the hunted, in this sequel to the national bestseller The Silver Bear. He told you not to like him. To get close to Columbus, the Silver Bear, means death. Exactly whose death remains to be determined. Recouping in Europe after losing his fence and best friend during his mission to assassinate his father, Columbus now finds his reverie interrupted by multiple assassins searching for the elusive Silver Bear. As Columbus eliminates each killer, more and more appear—a hydra effect he can only eliminate by finding the origin of the hit, a source connected to his own past. Racing across the globe, as both hunter and hunted, Columbus’ travels take him to Italy, where he meets a mysterious woman named Risina. A woman with her own secret past, she may be Columbus’ only hope of salvation.
An e-original omnibus of three suspense novels by the Barry Award-nominated novelist and co-screenwriter of Wanted, 3:10 to Yuma and The Double. He calls himself Columbus. His real name never meant much to him anyway. He never knew his father, an earnest young congressman and rising star in the Democratic Party named Abe Mann, or his mother, a prostitute whose involvement with Mann would prove dangerous. All Columbus cares about is his next target. A hit man who quickly made a name for himself as one of the best in his profession, you can be sure he'll fulfill whatever contract's been given him. Even if those who put out the hit have other plans in mind. In THE COLUMBUS TRILOGY, the first three novels by Barry Award-nominated author Derek Haas, Columbus squares off against the shadow of his father, Czech crime lords, drug dealers, a prostitution ring, and more, in three acclaimed suspense novels by a rising master of the genre.
Why do we have such a desire to explore? What can we do to fully experience life and how can we use those experiences to better understand the world, spirituality and ourselves?The world has an unimaginable number of lessons to teach us. These lessons hide on every inch of the earth, but we aren't always open to hearing what the world has to tell us.Thoughts Across the Map is a compilation of life lessons learned while traveling across the world. Each of the stories within seeks to consider how much the world has to teach us. These thoughts are not part of a How To book, but rather the opening to a conversation about how we can better understand ourselves, the world and God. Wherever we have been, whatever we have done, life has a way of teaching us lessons. Experience is the greatest of all teachers and the more we wander, the more we master.
Meet Austin Clay, the CIA's best-kept secret. There has always been a need in the spy game for operations outside the realm of legality-covert missions so black no one in the American government, and almost no one in intelligence itself, is aware of their existence. The left hand can't know what the right hand is doing. Austin Clay is that right hand, executing missions that would be disavowed by his own government were he ever to be compromised. His team consists of only his trusted handler and himself. His missions are among the most important and dangerous in U.S. history. Clay is sent to track down a missing American operative, a man who was captured outside of Moscow, in the Russian countryside. Soon he discovers the missing officer is only the beginning of the mission, and finds himself protecting a desperate woman who believes a mole has penetrated the top levels of the U.S. government, throwing the international balance of power into jeopardy. With blistering pace, international intrigue, and a high-stakes plot that spans continents, THE RIGHT HAND introduces a new hero, from the novelist whose work the New York Times Book Review has proclaimed "devastatingly cool.
A major new theoretical and empirical contribution to our understanding of the influence of EU institutions vis-á-vis governments in the major decisions about both widening and deepening the European Union. Engagingly written and based on significant new archival research and original interviews, Derek Beach offers both a new history of the major treaty negotiations of the EU and a new leadership model of European integration.
In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare gave the landlocked country of Bohemia a coastline—a famous and, to Czechs, typical example of foreigners' ignorance of the Czech homeland. Although the lands that were once the Kingdom of Bohemia lie at the heart of Europe, Czechs are usually encountered only in the margins of other people's stories. In The Coasts of Bohemia, Derek Sayer reverses this perspective. He presents a comprehensive and long-needed history of the Czech people that is also a remarkably original history of modern Europe, told from its uneasy center. Sayer shows that Bohemia has long been a theater of European conflict. It has been a cradle of Protestantism and a bulwark of the Counter-Reformation; an Austrian imperial province and a proudly Slavic national state; the most easterly democracy in Europe; and a westerly outlier of the Soviet bloc. The complexities of its location have given rise to profound (and often profoundly comic) reflections on the modern condition. Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, Karel Capek and Milan Kundera are all products of its spirit of place. Sayer describes how Bohemia's ambiguities and contradictions are those of Europe itself, and he considers the ironies of viewing Europe, the West, and modernity from the vantage point of a country that has been too often ignored. The Coasts of Bohemia draws on an enormous array of literary, musical, visual, and documentary sources ranging from banknotes to statues, museum displays to school textbooks, funeral orations to operatic stage-sets, murals in subway stations to censors' indexes of banned books. It brings us into intimate contact with the ever changing details of daily life—the street names and facades of buildings, the heroes figured on postage stamps—that have created and recreated a sense of what it is to be Czech. Sayer's sustained concern with questions of identity, memory, and power place the book at the heart of contemporary intellectual debate. It is an extraordinary story, beautifully told.
How did Paul depict Satan as an apocalyptic opponent? Derek R. Brown demonstrates the significance of Paul's references to Satan and demonstrates the history of Satan in the Bible and nature of Satan's inimical work.
In Executive Firepower, David Lockhart holds down a pretty typical job, as a sales manager for a company that supplies an extensive catalog of products. On the surface, theres nothing unusual about David Lockhart. However, when he receives a certain call sign, Lockhart becomes the team leader of MESA, a Black Ops organization that reports to the Director of the NSA. Only the President of the United States knows of their existence. So, when orders came through for Lockhart to gather his team together for another top-secret mission, he thinks nothing of it. It came from the proper source, within proper channels, encoded with the latest series of ciphers. Everything seemed in order. It was not. The mission was a one-way ticket to oblivion and the ambush MESA walked into took every life of the team. All except one. Yup, you guessed it. David Lockhart managed to survive, rescued by a stunningly beautiful, but mysterious woman assassin. For the perpetrators of this betrayal of MESA, David Lockharts survival was not a good thing. No, it was not a good thing. For now Lockhart was mad. Not the raging, red-faced, out-of-control, irrational kind of mad. No, you see, David Lockhart wasnt like that. His anger was far more dangerous and revenge would come from anywhere, at any time. For David Lockhart was the best, the very best. A story filled with violent gun battles and torrid sex, all leading to a stunning climax as Lockhart saves the President of the United States.
Process-tracing in social science is a method for studying causal mechanisms linking causes with outcomes. This enables the researcher to make strong inferences about how a cause (or set of causes) contributes to producing an outcome. In this extensively revised and updated edition, Derek Beach and Rasmus Brun Pedersen introduce a refined definition of process-tracing, differentiating it into four distinct variants and explaining the applications and limitations of each. The authors develop the underlying logic of process-tracing, including how one should understand causal mechanisms and how Bayesian logic enables strong within-case inferences. They provide instructions for identifying the variant of process-tracing most appropriate for the research question at hand and a set of guidelines for each stage of the research process.
The book provides a comprehensive history of the third-largest Jewish community in Britain and fills an acknowledged gap in both Jewish and urban historiography. Bringing together the latest research and building on earlier local studies, the book provides an analysis of the special features which shaped the community in Leeds. Organised in three sections, Context, Chronology and Contours, the book demonstrates how Jews have influenced the city and how the city has influenced the community. A small community was transformed by the late Victorian influx of poor migrants from the Russian Empire and within two generations had become successfully integrated into the city’s social and economic structure. More than a dozen authors contribute to this definitive history and the editor provides both an introductory and concluding overview which brings the story up to the present day. The book will be of interest to both historians and general readers.
In the tradition of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Leebaert tells the stories of small forces that have triumphed over vastly larger ones and changed the course of history -- from the Trojan Horse to Al Qaeda. Maps and charts.
Spin-label electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy is a versatile molecular probe method that finds wide application in molecular biophysics and structural biology. This book provides the first comprehensive summary of basic principles, spectroscopic properties, and use for studying biological membranes, protein folding, supramolecular structure, lipid-protein interactions, and dynamics. The contents begin with discussion of fundamental theory and practice, including static spectral parameters and conventional continuous-wave (CW) spectroscopy. The development then progresses, via nonlinear CW-EPR for slower motions, to the more demanding time-resolved pulse EPR, and includes an in-depth treatment of spin relaxation and spectral line shapes. Once the spectroscopic fundamentals are established, the final chapters acquire a more applied character. Extensive appendices at the end of the book provide detailed summaries of key concepts in magnetic resonance and chemical physics for the student reader and experienced practitioner alike. Key Features: Indispensable reference source for the understanding and interpretation of spin-label spectroscopic data in its different aspects. Tables of fundamental spectral parameters are included throughout. Forms the basis for an EPR graduate course, extending up to a thorough coverage of advanced topics in Specialist Appendices. Includes all necessary theoretical background. The primary audience is research workers in the fields of molecular biophysics, structural biology, biophysical chemistry, physical biochemistry and molecular biomedicine. Also, physical chemists, polymer physicists, and liquid-crystal researchers will benefit from this book, although illustrative examples used are often taken from the biomolecular field. Readers will be postgraduate researchers and above, but include those from other disciplines who seek to understand the primary spin-label EPR literature.
An e-original omnibus of three suspense novels by the Barry Award-nominated novelist and co-screenwriter of Wanted, 3:10 to Yuma and The Double. He calls himself Columbus. His real name never meant much to him anyway. He never knew his father, an earnest young congressman and rising star in the Democratic Party named Abe Mann, or his mother, a prostitute whose involvement with Mann would prove dangerous. All Columbus cares about is his next target. A hit man who quickly made a name for himself as one of the best in his profession, you can be sure he'll fulfill whatever contract's been given him. Even if those who put out the hit have other plans in mind. In THE COLUMBUS TRILOGY, the first three novels by Barry Award-nominated author Derek Haas, Columbus squares off against the shadow of his father, Czech crime lords, drug dealers, a prostitution ring, and more, in three acclaimed suspense novels by a rising master of the genre.
This new textbook is the definitive evidence-based resource for pediatric critical care. It is the first ostensibly evidence-based pediatric critical care textbook and will prove an invaluable resource for critical care professionals across the globe.
If, as many argue, movies and television have become Western culture's premier storytelling media, so too have they become, for most members of society, the primary source of encounters with the natural world—particularly wild animals. The television fare offered nightly by national and cable networks such as PBS and the Discovery Channel provides millions of viewers with their only experience of the wilderness and its inhabitants. The very films that so many viewers take as accurate portrayals of wildlife, however, have evolved primarily as a form of entertainment, following the established codes and conventions of narrative exposition. The result has been not the representation of nature, but its wholesale reconstruction and reconfiguration according to film and television conventions, audience expectations, and the demands of competition in the media marketplace. Wildlife Films traces the genealogy of the nature film, from its origins as the "animal locomotion" studies that mark the very beginnings of motion pictures themselves, to the founding of the Animal Planet cable channel that boasts "all animals, all the time." The narrative and thematic elements that unite wildlife films as a genre have their roots not in the documentary film tradition, but in the older traditions of oral and written animal fables as reflections of human society. Derek Bousé contends that classic wildlife films often portray animal protagonists living in families modeled on an ideal of the human nuclear family and working in communities that resemble an ideal of bucolic human society. In these stories—presented as documentaries—animals are motivated by human emotions and conduct relationships according to human customs. This imposition of culturally satisfying narrative patterns upon the lives of animals has not only led to the misrepresentation of the natural world; it has promoted the notion that our values, our moral vision, our models of society and family structure derive from nature, rather than being cultural formations.
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