The Devils Agent

"The unheroic hero of this controversial story is George Droste, a native of Vienna, whose ironical adaptability to all kinds of situations stems from the fact that he comes from "a long line of waiters." Accidentally and casually he drifts into employment by both the Soviet and the American secret services, which flourished in that divided city on the Danube immediately after the war. His motives are neither patriotism nor political conviction. At first, the whole affair seems to him rather amusing, and an easy way to make some money. But as his assignments take him behind the Iron Curtain, to the United States, to Korea, his moral and emotional entanglement becomes increasingly stronger. He has fallen in love with Nora Guldendag, the wife of a Swedish diplomat who has vanished in the Soviet orbit, and who, presumably, was a British spy. Droste knows about Nora's hatred and contempt for espionage work, and because of his love for her, the conflict over his duplicity mounts. As their relationship develops and their love intensifies, he finds this conflict and turmoil impossible to live with."--Publisher description.

This novel of crime and corruption in a lawless eighteenth-century London “captures the dark streets of the capital perfectly” (Richard Foreman). Nearly a century before London would have a professional police force, “thief-taker” Balthazar Bloodwine can be hired privately to help rid the capital of the criminals that are as rife as the pox. He has the lean and hungry look of someone who lives by his wits and who trusts no one’s judgment but his own. But the boot is suddenly on the other foot for Bloodwine when he himself is “apprehended” one night by thugs in the service of one William Murray, the MP for Boroughbridge and solicitor general. Murray is convinced that a fellow member of parliament is mixed up in corruption related to a lucrative contract to transport convicts to America. Murray gives the thief-taker a task: infiltrate and expose this powerful man. Now Bloodwine is caught between a rock and a hard place—with the noose waiting for him if he fails . . .

On the day of his sixth birthday, Isaac Gale becomes the victim of a road traffic accident. The boy survives but lies in a coma, with his father dead and his mother lost in grief. In the darkness only Sebastian, the boy's imaginary friend, can help him. But Sebastian is not a friend to be trusted. He is a dark and powerful force capable of creating terrible nightmares and dark psychological visions in order to prove his worth to the devil, eradicating anyone who stands in his way. Two such people are neurologist Dr. Harish Dhami and nurse Alison Clark, who believe something far more sinister lurks in the damaged mind of their six year old coma patient. So begins a terrifying struggle between good and evil, reality, fantasy and everything we fear.

As waves of epidemic disease swept the Philippines in the late nineteenth century, some colonial physicians began to fear that the indigenous population would be wiped out. Many Filipinos interpreted the contagions as a harbinger of the Biblical Apocalypse. Though the direct forebodings went unfulfilled, Philippine morbidity and mortality rates were the world's highest during the period 1883-1903. In Agents of Apocalypse, Ken De Bevoise shows that those "mourning years" resulted from a conjunction of demographic, economic, technological, cultural, and political processes that had been building for centuries. The story is one of unintended consequences, fraught with tragic irony. De Bevoise uses the Philippine case study to explore the extent to which humans participate in creating their epidemics. Interpreting the archival record with conceptual guidance from the health sciences, he sets tropical disease in a historical framework that views people as interacting with, rather than acting within, their total environment. The complexity of cause-effect and agency-structure relationships is thereby highlighted. Readers from fields as diverse as Spanish, American, and Philippine history, medical anthropology, colonialism, international relations, Asian studies, and ecology will benefit from De Bevoise's insights into the interdynamics of historical processes that connect humans and their diseases.

Eric Torch was a detective for the New York City police department, working homicide. Some said that he was the best when it came down to finding killers and bringing them in, or so everyone thought. Eric's whole life had been around murder and death. He had the best training from his past. There were many that hated him or loved him, not that he really cared. They say one moment can change your whole life and Eric was living proof of that.