For the Mob (as they are also known), crime was big business. Feuds between Mafia families and their associates led to Lucky Luciano, the preeminent Mob boss, creating the Commission, which to this day rules over Mob activity and disputes. Throughout the 20th century, the ruthlessness of the Mafia has been in evidence: the list of Mob victims seems endless. Mafia Hits recalls the most important executions - the rival bosses, the stool pigeons and snitches, the good cops and the dirty cops, the vicious feuds and the hit-men who lived by the gun and died by it. All are here in this fascinating tale of the American underworld.

    However, she didn’t count on falling for the youngest of the clan, Hawk Pattel. Hawk is wealthy, handsome, intelligent and charming. Raven tries to resist him, but when a Pattel wants something, nothing will stand in his way. Just when Hawk is on the verge of convincing Raven that the two of them could have something special, something real, all of his skeletons start falling out of the closet, one ugly bone at a time. Self-preservation takes over for Raven, and the only thing she can do is run. But Hawk is determined not to give up. He’ll break down the walls she’s had time to rebuild one brick at a time if he has to. However, old hurts and secrets are revealed that will test Hawk and Raven beyond anything they’ve come up against. Will they be strong enough to withstand a storm a second time? The Pattels: Hawk and Raven II is the continuation of the first book in the hot new series by National Best Selling author S.K. Hardy. It’s sexy, thrilling, and intriguing, all of the elements that S.K. is known for. This exciting saga is a story that will engage every one of your emotions: anger, happiness, laughter, and fear. The Pattels is a spin off of S.K.’s previous bestseller, The Sin City Heat Series. However, it is not necessary to have read Sin City Heat in order to start this new series. **Warning: This book is an erotic romance novel. It contains strong sexual language and themes that is not appropriate for anyone under the age of 18.

    

    

    Poems from the 1600s to the present day are beautifully illustrated with images from the unrivaled collection of Japanese paintings and prints in the British Museum. The majority of the poems come from the Tokugawa period (early seventeenth to mid nineteenth centuries) and include works from the best-known Japanese classical authors, female poets and a number of contemporary writers. Nearly all are newly translated by Alan Cummings.From the tender and the melancholy to the witty and the ribald, the poems and images in Haiku Love comment on the most universal of human emotions.

    

    

    Dick Seaton is a shy, handsome American whose business takes him to Japan to close a very big deal. In violation of a timeless taboo, Dick and Kanno spend slow, tantalizing days falling in love. Then Dick discovers that Kanno’s love was paid for by his businessmen hosts. Sensing his rage and hurt, Kanno flees in confusion. And, too late, Dick realizes the truth—that she really loved him. Now, a stranger in a strange, exotic land, he must find her—and seduce her back into his life. Love her for a night… and you will remember her for a lifetime.

    But here I was, on the last day of the year, staring into the eyes of a man who held all my nerves hostage.This was wrong.But I wasn’t looking to be right. Especially not to a husband who doesn’t deserve my loyalty.Still, I should be miles away from here on a yacht circling the Potomac river. My body should’ve been pressed into my husband’s hard chest while his arms held me close as we counted down the last ten seconds of the year. It should’ve been him staring at me like a snack, his eyes slowly undressing me. But it wasn’t my husband, Keith, staring at me.It was this stranger.How could I be so reckless?If anyone saw me walking hand in hand with a man who was not my husband, I could lose more than just a husband. I could lose my opportunity to enact change to New York City’s criminal justice system as a district attorney. Yet, I swatted the red flags away and continued following this stranger into the penthouse suite.Why was I willing to risk it all for a man I didn’t even know?>b>Nicolai:I had one rule. One rule only. Never bring a woman near my home. Yet, here I was, breaking another rule tonight all in the name of the beautiful woman sitting all alone in the grand room of Camilla’s Cuisine.Sixty million dollars was riding on this meeting; yet, my eyes kept roaming over to her. I was supposed to be studying the man sitting across from me—calculating his every move, screening for any deception. Yet, my eyes remained on her, following every graceful move she made.She hadn’t noticed me at first. Hell, I hadn’t realized how long I’d been staring at her until her dark brown eyes rose from her plate to stare into mine. Unlike most women I encountered, she wasn’t intimidated by me openly staring at her. She stared back; yet offered no flirty smile or invitation for me to come over to her. The more I stared at her, the more intrigued I became.Why was she staring back at me?As the acting boss of the Balducci crime family, I’ve spent the past two years restoring order from the chaos left behind when the former Don walked away from the life and family we’d been born and bred into.La Cosa Nostra, this thing of ours, was a matrimony that could never be intercepted or broken. Everything was second to the La Cosa Nostra. It was an oath that my father prepared me to take. It was an oath that authored all decisions that I made.Organizing crime to become a multi-billion-dollar corporate industry, I played every move with careful configurations. Nothing stood in the way. Not a pretty face, friend, foe, or family. Yet, tonight, I ended my meeting before it even started, just so that I could stop her from leaving Camilla’s Cuisine.What was it about her?AUTHOR’S NOTE: This novel is part of the Balducci Family Saga. There are events and characters mentioned in this novel that appeared in previous installments.Please follow the sequence of the Balducci Family Saga listed below:BOOK ONE - Dipping Into SinBOOK TWO- Dipping Deeper Into SinBOOK THREE- Loving Her In The Shadows - Sovereignty

     Even in hell, bitcoin talks. This modern take on an old Japanese saying still holds true. The cryptocurrency was supposed to do for money what the Internet did for information, but it didn’t work out that way. Its virtual existence unleashed real-world chaos—especially in the homeland of its mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Tokyo was the center of the world’s largest bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, until that company collapsed with nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of bitcoin gone missing. It might be the greatest heist in history. If it was a heist. So what really happened? Here’s the true story of the humble-to-hot commodity, from the former geek website that launched the boom to an inside world of absent-minded CEOs, hucksters, hackers, cybercrooks, drug dealers, corrupt federal agents, evangelical libertarians, and clueless techies. You’ll discover bitcoin’s connection to the infamous Silk Road, learn why hell has nothing on Japan’s criminal justice system, and get the lowdown on the high cost of betting with the devil’s dollars. All of this for less than the price of a single bitcoin. ABOUT THE AUTHORS Jake Adelstein has been an investigative journalist in Japan since 1993. Considered one of the foremost experts on organized crime in that country, he works as a writer and consultant in Japan and the United States, writing for the Daily Beast, the Japanese economic monthly ZAITEN, and other publications. He has served as a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and is the author of Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan (Vintage), which has been translated into twelve languages, and Operation Tropical Storm (Kindle Single). Nathalie Stucky is a freelance journalist in Tokyo and Europe. She was an assistant correspondent for the Japanese news agency Jiji Press in Geneva and contributed to the book Reconstructing 3/11. She has written for the Daily Beast, the Los Angeles Times, and several French publications.

    

    Into this tumultuous age of constant warfare came three remarkable individuals: Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582), Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598), and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616). Each would play a unique role in the re-unification of the disparate, fragmented collection of warring provinces which constituted Japan in the sixteenth and early seventeenth-centuries. This new narrative history of the sengoku era draws together the epic strands of their three stories for the first time. It offers a coherent survey of the Azuchi-Momoyama Period (1568-1600) under both Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, followed by the founding years of the Tokugawa shogunate (1600-1616). Every pivotal battle fought by each of these three hegemons is explored in depth from Okehazama (1560) and Nagashino (1575) to Sekigahara (1600) and the Two Sieges of Osaka Castle (1614-15). In addition, the political and administrative underpinnings of their rule is also examined, as well as the marginal role played by western foreigners ('nanban') and the Christian religion in early modern Japanese society. In its scope, the story of Japan's three unifiers ('the Fool', 'the Monkey', and 'the Old Badger') is a sweeping saga encompassing acts of unimaginable cruelty as well as feats of great samurai heroism which were venerated and written about long into the peaceful Edo/Tokugawa period.

    Here's the story of the Imperial Hotel diamond robbers, who attempted (and may have accomplished) the biggest heist in Tokyo's history. Here is Rikidozan, the professional wrestler who almost single-handedly revived Japanese pride, but whose own ethnicity had to be kept secret. And here is the story of the intimate relationships shared by Japan's ruling party, its financial combines, its ruthless criminal gangs, the CIA, American Big Business, and perhaps at least one presidential relative. Here is the underside of postwar Japan, which is only now coming to light.

    Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century makes a powerful case that wealth, and accumulated wealth, tends to stay where it lands: and with the passage of time, just gets bigger…and bigger.But how many of us who bought or borrowed the book–or even, perhaps, reviewed it–have read more than a fraction of its 696 pages? How many more shuddered at the thought of committing $40 to such a venture? And how many of Piketty’s groundshaking concepts have gone unappreciated, all for want of intellectual stamina?Deliverance is at hand in the form of Pocket Piketty, written in clear and accessible prose by an experienced economist and teacher–and one whose work was relied on by Piketty for his masterpiece. In this handy and slim volume, Jesper Roine explains all things Piketty.

    Published only recently, it set sales records in the millions of copies and soon crossed over to other media as well--first as a radio and TV drama, then as a blockbuster movie. The popularity of the novel has spread across Asia as well, with hugely successful translations into Korean and Chinese. In the West, readers may be reminded of The Bridges of Madison County, another best-selling novel of blazing midlife passion--one with a very different outcome.Here the lovers are Kuki, a 54-year-old employee in a publishing company, and Rinko, a childless, 37-year-old woman unhappily married to a cold fish of a husband, a professor of medicine. Stuck in a dead-end job and an uneventful marriage, Kuki is irresistibly drawn to Rinko from their first encounter, seeing through her demure demeanor to the passionate woman beneath. She returns his feelings with ever-increasing abandon, despite lingering fears about where her sexual awakening may lead her. In the end, both are prepared to risk all for their relationship: family, career, and social standing, even life itself.The story contrasts the lovers' defiantly freewheeling passion--described in imaginative, smoldering detail--with a rigid society where people are expected to play a prescribed role, whether as dutiful wife or compliant office worker. In escaping these conventional roles, the lovers often escape the city as well, immersing themselves in the traditional beauties of Japanese nature and art as they give themselves over to each other and the pleasure of the moment. And ultimately they make a much more radical escape: one that will ensure that they are left in peace, to enjoy an abiding love.Perhaps not all the choices they make will seem reasonable, or even understandable, to Western readers. But their story, with elements as modern as yesterday's headlines and as timeless as the tug between love and death, opens a window into the secrets of the Japanese soul.