High tech near-future mercenaries Ripple Creek Security must protect an obnoxious world government minister from the scores of enemies who want her dead¾and killed in the worst possible way. Alex Marlow and Ripple Creek Security's best personal security detail return to action. This time, they really don't like their principal, World Bureau Minister Joy Herman Highland¾a highly placed bureaucrat with aspirations to elected office. But Highland's would-be assassins are up against the best security in the business¾and Ripple Creek has no qualms about seeing their own explosions on galactic news. In fact, they kind of enjoy it. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

North Korea's development of nuclear weapons raises fears of nuclear war on the peninsula and the specter of terrorists gaining access to weapons of mass destruction. It also represents a dangerous and disturbing breakdown in U.S. foreign policy. Failed Diplomacy: The Tragic Story of How North Korea Got the Bomb offers an insider's view of what went wrong and allowed this isolated nation—a charter member of the Axis of Evil—to develop nuclear weapons. Charles L. "Jack" Pritchard was intimately involved in developing America's North Korea policy under Presidents Clinton and Bush. Here, he offers an authoritative analysis of recent developments on the Korean peninsula and reveals how the Bush administration's mistakes damaged the prospects of controlling nuclear proliferation. Although multilateral negotiations continue, Pritchard proclaims the Six-Party Talks as a failure. His chronicle begins with the suspicions over North Korea's uranium enrichment program in 2002 that led to the demise of the Clinton-era Agreed Framework. Subsequently, Pyongyang kicked out international monitors and restarted its nuclear weapons program. Pritchard provides a first-hand account of how the Six-Party Talks were initiated and offers a play-by-play account of each round of negotiations, detailing the national interests of the key players—China, Japan, Russia, both Koreas, and the United States. The author believes the failure to prevent Kim Jong Il from "going nuclear" points to the need for a permanent security forum in Northeast Asia that would serve as a formal mechanism for dialogue in the region. Hard-hitting and insightful, Failed Diplomacy offers a stinging critique of the Bush administration's manner and policy in dealing with North Korea. More hopefully, it suggests what can be learned from missed opportunities.

Describes the history of Iraq, the events during the first Gulf War in 1991, the decade of tension that followed, and actions that led to the United States' attack on that country in 2003.

April, 1622. Matthew Lock arrives in The Hague, determined to learn the truth about the brutal murder of his parents. To survive a terrifying conspiracy, and to save his family, Lock must lean on years of training in the musket drill. But with Europe on the brink of the Thirty Years' War, following his father's guidance will not be easy. He must confront his painful past. He must fight his innermost demons. He must become a legend. Matthew Lock must become Matchlock. Matchlock and the Embassy is the first instalment in a new historical fiction series, brought to you by Zachary Twamley, host of When Diplomacy Fails Podcast.

"As Robert Art makes clear in a groundbreaking conclusion, those results have been mixed at best. Art dissects the uneven performance of coercive diplomacy and explains why it has sometimes worked and why it has more often failed."--BOOK JACKET.

"Thoroughly researched . . . [Hubbard's] interpretation is solid, well supported, and touches all of the major aspects of Confederate diplomacy."--American Historical Review "As the first examination of the topic since King Cotton Diplomacy (1931), this work deserves widespread attention. Hubbard offers a convincingly bleak portrayal of the limited skills and myopic vision of Rebel diplomacy at home and abroad."--Virginia Magazine of History and Biography Of the many factors that contributed to the South's loss of the Civil War, one of the most decisive was the failure of Southern diplomacy. In this penetrating work, Charles M. Hubbard reassesses the diplomatic efforts made by the Confederacy in its struggle to become an independent nation. Hubbard focuses both on the Confederacy's attempts to negotiate a peaceful separation from the Union and Southern diplomats' increasingly desperate pursuit of state recognition from the major European powers. Drawing on a large body of sources, Hubbard offers an important reinterpretation of the problems facing Confederate diplomats. He demonstrates how the strategies and objectives of the South's diplomatic program--themselves often poorly conceived--were then placed in the hands of inexperienced envoys who were ill-equipped to succeed in their roles as negotiators. The Author: Charles M. Hubbard is associate professor of history at Lincoln Memorial University and executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Museum in Harrogate, Tennessee.