Mike Dash

Stories on the Mexican border. The protagonists comprise illegal immigrants, policemen, exploited workers, men seeking revenge, bigots and abused women. With an introduction by the author.

When his family exceeds its legal debt limit, thirteen-year-old Matt is sent to the Federal Debt Rehabilitation Agency workhouse, where he discovers illicit activities are being carried out using the children who have been placed there.

A doctor informs the President and First Lady that to make a diagnosis on their son Cam, they need to find other people with the same symptoms to conduct additional testing, but when two young people Dr. Lee has found, each with exceptional gifts, are murdered, Cam's condition suddenly takes on a terrifyingly new dimension. As Dr. Lee searches for answers, he will uncover unimaginable secrets and dark betrayals that breach the highest levels of security.

From the bestselling author of Tulipomania comes Batavia's Graveyard, the spellbinding true story of mutiny, shipwreck, murder, and survival.It was the autumn of 1628, and the Batavia, the Dutch East India Company's flagship, was loaded with a king's ransom in gold, silver, and gems for her maiden voyage to Java. The Batavia was the pride of the Company's fleet, a tangible symbol of the world's richest and most powerful commercial monopoly. She set sail with great fanfare, but the Batavia and her gold would never reach Java, for the Company had also sent along a new employee, Jeronimus Corneliszoon, a bankrupt and disgraced man who possessed disarming charisma and dangerously heretical ideas. With the help of a few disgruntled sailors, Jeronimus soon sparked a mutiny that seemed certain to succeed--but for one unplanned event: In the dark morning hours of June 3, the Batavia smashed through a coral reef and ran aground on a small chain of islands near Australia. The commander of the ship and the skipper evaded the mutineers by escaping in a tiny lifeboat and setting a course for Java--some 1,800 miles north--to summon help. Nearly all of the passengers survived the wreck and found themselves trapped on a bleak coral island without water, food, or shelter. Leaderless, unarmed, and unaware of Jeronimus's treachery, they were at the mercy of the mutineers.Jeronimus took control almost immediately, preaching his own twisted version of heresy he'd learned in Holland's secret Anabaptist societies. More than 100 people died at his command in the months that followed. Before long, an all-out war erupted between the mutineers and a small group of soldiers led by Wiebbe Hayes, the one man brave enough to challenge Jeronimus's band of butchers.Unluckily for the mutineers, the Batavia's commander had raised the alarm in Java, and at the height of the violence the Company's gunboats sailed over the horizon. Jeronimus and his mutineers would meet an end almost as gruesome as that of the innocents whose blood had run on the small island they called Batavia's Graveyard.Impeccably researched and beautifully written, Batavia's Graveyard is the next classic of narrative nonfiction, the book that secures Mike Dash's place as one of the finest writers of the genre.From the Hardcover edition.

Follows the plant from the steppes of Central Asia as it headed west into Europe, becoming even more prized by the time it reached the Netherlands.

Nearly five million men and women have served the United States as police officers. Only one has been executed for murder. They called it Satan's Circus -- a square mile of Midtown Manhattan where vice ruled, sin flourished, and depravity danced in every doorway. At the turn of the 20th century, it was a place where everyone from the chorus girls to the beat cops was on the take and where bad boys became wicked men; a place where an upstanding young policeman such as Charley Becker could become the crookedest cop who ever stood behind a shield. Murder was so common in the vice district that few people were surprised when the loudmouthed owner of a shabby casino was gunned down on the steps of its best hotel. But when, two weeks later, an ambitious district attorney charged Becker with ordering the murder, even the denizens of Satan's Circus were surprised. The handsome lieutenant was a decorated hero, the renowned leader of New York's vice-busting Special Squad. Was he a bad cop leading a double life, or a pawn felled by the sinister rogues who ran Manhattan's underworld? This tale brings to life an almost-forgotten Gotham. Chronicling Charley Becker's rise and fall, the book tells of the raucous, guady, and utterly corrupt city that made him, and recounts not one but two sensational murder trials that landed him in the electric chair. - Publisher.