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Few forces have shaped our world as powerfully - or as secretly - as mafias. Groups such as La Cosa Nostra, the Medellin Cartel, New York's Five Families, the Japanese yakuza and Russian vory are notorious, endlessly covered in news stories and popular media. Yet when official histories are written, their role in shaping nations, economies and societies is rarely acknowledged. In Mafia: A Global History, Ryan Gingeras draws on more than a decade of research to uncover this suppressed underworld history. Crossing centuries and continents, he introduces legendary figures - Al Capone, Pablo Escobar, Du Yuesheng - and explores the conditions, cultures and locales that gave birth to modern mafias: Sicily, Marseille, New York, Colombia, Tokyo. As he reconstructs the rise of a gang or the life of a gangster, he also charts the expanding power of states and the increasingly international reach of trade, crime and law enforcement. After all, governments define what is a crime and who is a criminal, and their agents create the strategies used to limit or defend against their threat. Beginning with bandits and ending with today's 'mafia states' - andthe alarming blurring of lines between gangsters, corporations and political leaders - this sweeping narrative traces the evolution of organised crime in response to industrialisation, globalisation and technological change. By charting the origins, consolidation and transformation of mafias,Gingeras reveals not only where contemporary gangsters come from, but how they became central to our imagination and why they are the uncredited architects of the modern world.
By an expert with more than 25 years of experience interviewing more than 30 of the most dangerous male and female serial killers of contemporary times, this latest book from the best-selling author explores the darkest corners of these thrill-killers' minds.  As all law-enforcement authorities, including the FBI's elite Behavioural Science Unit, will confirm, the majority of sexual psychopaths gain most of their perverse thrills from the stalking of their unsuspecting victims, often in so many different ways. For them, the actual kill is frequently something less, after which the dead body is treated like so much garbage and simply abandoned or thrown away. Yet as these cases show, a victim has often been unwittingly followed, watched or even visited before they are attacked, sometimes for weeks or even months. Having exhaustively studied the case histories of more than 60 modern-day sexually motivated serial murderers - some still alive, others subsequently executed - the author zeros in on the internet porn industry as one of the main motivating drivers in cultivating fantasy stalking, which can lead to rape, multiple rapes and homicide graduating to serial murder. Even more chillingly, anyone who is active on social media is a potential stalker's victim.
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Now on BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week' Winner of the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the 2021 Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2021 Shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction The gripping and shocking story of three generations of the Sackler family and their roles in the stories of Valium, OxyContin and the opioid crisis. The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions - Harvard; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Oxford; the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations in the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing Oxycontin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis - an international epidemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people. In this masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, award-winning journalist and host of the Wind of Change podcast Patrick Radden Keefe exhaustively documents the jaw-dropping and ferociously compelling reality. Empire of Pain is the story of a dynasty: a parable of twenty-first-century greed.
Reacher never backs down from a problem. And he's about to find a big one, on a deserted Arizona road, where a Jeep has crashed into the only tree for miles around. Under the merciless desert sun, nothing is as it seems. Minutes later Reacher is heading into the nearby border town, a backwater that has seen better days. Next to him is Michaela Fenton, an army veteran turned FBI agent, who is trying to find her twin brother. He might have got mixed up with some dangerous people. And Reacher might just need to pay them a visit. Their leader has burrowed his influence deep into the town. Just to get in and meet the mysterious Dendoncker, Reacher is going to have to achieve the impossible. To get answers will be even harder. There are people in this hostile, empty place who would rather die than reveal their secrets. But then, if Reacher is coming after you, you might be better off dead.
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