Mark Bowden

At the height of summer a dark shadow falls across Exmoor. Children are being stolen. Each disappearance is marked only by a terse note - a brutal accusation. There are no explanations, no ransom demands ... and no hope. Policeman Jonas Holly faces a precarious journey into the warped mind of the kidnapper if he's to stand any chance of catching him. But - still reeling from a personal tragedy - is Jonas really up to the task? Because there's at least one person on Exmoor who thinks that, when it comes to being the first line of defence, Jonas Holly may be the last man to trust ..."--Back cover.

Late in the afternoon of Sunday, 3 October 1993, 140 elite US soldiers abseiled from helicopters into a teeming market neighbourhood in the heart of the city of Mogadishu, Somalia. Their mission was to abduct two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord and return to base. It was supposed to take them about an hour. Instead, they were pinned down through a long and terrible night in a hostile city, fighting for their lives against thousands of heavily armed Somalis. When the unit was rescued the following morning, eighteen American soldiers were dead and more than seventy badly injured. The Somali toll was far worse – more than five hundred killed and over a thousand injured. Authoritative, gripping, and insightful, Black Hawk Down is a heart-stopping, minute-by-minute account of modern war and is destined to become a classic of war reporting.

This work is a dramatic account of the hunt for and defeat of Osama bin Laden draws on unprecedented access to primary sources to trace how key decisions were made, revealing events from the perspectives of an adept President Obama and an increasingly despondent bin Laden. After masterminding the attacks of September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden managed to vanish. Over the next ten years, as the author shows, America found that its war with al Qaeda, a scattered group of individuals who were almost impossible to track, demanded an innovative approach. Step by step, the author describes the development of a new tactical strategy to fight this war, the fusion of intel from various agencies and on the ground special ops. After thousands of special forces missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the right weapon to go after bin Laden had finally evolved. By Spring 2011, intelligence pointed to a compound in Abbottabad; it was estimated that there was a 50/50 chance that Osama was there. The author shows how three strategies were mooted: a drone strike, a precision bombing, or an assault by Navy SEALs. In the end, the President had to make the final decision. It was time for the finish.

Interviews with participants from both sides of the conflict and materials from Vietnamese and American archives provide multiple points of view on each stage of the Battle of Hue.

The bestselling author "Black Hawk Down" writes the remarkable story of the 1958 NFL Championship game between the Colts and the Giants--considered by many to be the greatest football game ever played.

A chronicle of the Iran hostage crisis, America's first battle with militant Islam. On November 4, 1979, a group of radical Islamist students, inspired by the revolutionary Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran. They took 52 Americans hostage, and kept nearly all of them hostage for 444 days. Journalist Bowden tells the story through the eyes of the hostages, the soldiers in a new special forces unit sent to free them, their radical, naïve captors, and the diplomats working to end the crisis. Bowden takes us inside the hostages' cells and inside the Oval Office for meetings with President Carter and his exhausted team. We travel to international capitals where shadowy figures held clandestine negotiations, and to the deserts of Iran, where a courageous, desperate attempt to rescue the hostages exploded into tragic failure.--From publisher description.

Worm: The First Digital World War tells the story of the Conficker worm, a potentially devastating piece of malware that has baffled experts and infected more than twelve million computers worldwide. When Conficker was unleashed in November 2008, cybersecurity experts did not know what to make of it. Exploiting security flaws in Microsoft Windows, it grew at an astonishingly rapid rate, infecting millions of computers around the world within weeks. Once the worm infiltrated one system it was able to link it with others to form a single network under illicit outside control known as a "botnet." This botnet was soon capable of overpowering any of the vital computer networks that control banking, telephones, energy flow, air traffic, health-care information -- even the Internet itself. Was it a platform for criminal profit or a weapon controlled by a foreign power or dissident organization? Surprisingly, the US governement was only vaguely aware of the threat that Conficker posed, and the task of mounting resistance to the worm fell to a disparate but gifted group of geeks, Internet entrepreneurs, and computer programmers. The group's members included Rodney Joffe, the security chief of Internet telecommunications company Neustar, and self-proclaimed "adult in the room"; Paul Vixie, one of the architects of the Internet; John Crain, a transplanted Brit with a penchant for cowboy attire; and "Dre" Ludwig, a twenty-eight-year-old with a big reputation and a forthright, confrontational style. They and others formed what came to be called the Conficker Cabal, and began a tireless fight against the worm. But when Conficker's controllers became aware that their creation was encountering resistance, they began refining the worm's code to make it more difficult to trace and more powerful, testing the Cabal's unity and resolve. Will the Cabal lock down the worm before it is too late? Game on. Worm: The First Digital World War reports on the fascinating battle between those determined to exploit the Internet and those committed to protect it. Mark Bowden delivers an accessible and gripping account of the ongoing and largely unreported war taking place literally beneath our fingertips. - Jacket flap.

Describes the rise and fall of Larry Lavin, multimillionaire drug-dealing young dentist in Philadelphia.

"Road Work offers the best of Mark Bowden's nonfiction, from his stories for The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he was a reporter for twenty-four years, to his highly talked-about pieces in The Atlantic on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq." "Whether traveling to a small town in Rhode Island where one of the largest cocaine rings in history is uncovered, or to the Luangwa Valley in Zambia where a bold team of antipoachers fights to save the fate of the black rhino, Mark Bowden takes us down rough roads previously off-limits. "The Dark Art of Interrogation" exposes the top-secret world of Guantanamo Bay, offering an insider's view of the controversial, often shocking ways America is fighting its war on terror. "Tales of a Tyrant" takes us into the world of Saddam Hussein, shedding new and dramatic light on his life, his reign of terror, and his days on the run. "The Kabul-Ki Dance" brings us the high-adrenaline world of the 391st Fighter Squadron of Idaho as it wages the air war over Afghanistan and shows what happens when raw emotion goes up against the clinical precision of modern war."--BOOK JACKET.