"As she awaits her husband's release from prison, it is evident that Joy Desmond has not lacked for male companionship in his absence. Their lawyer, Bruno Capra, has in fact moved in with her, and it is Joy's desire to make the arrangement permanent. However, Bruno is interested in money as well as love, and the problem is how to gain both his client's wife and fortune, at the same time. It is the calculating Joy who comes up with the macabre means to do this, although their conspiracy is almost revealed when her unexpectedly paroled husband suddenly arrives before Bruno can pack his bag and exit. Dr. Desmond, who is quite a bit older than his wife, is also an eminent herpetologist and he brings with him a rare -- and particularly venomous -- snake to add to his collection. Joy's scheme, in simplest terms, is to plant the deadly reptile where her husband will come upon it by "accident" and receive a fatal bite, and she and Bruno devise a carefully worked out plan of action to abet this."--Publisher.

When Oscar Booze entered West Point in 1898, the older cadets decided that he did not conform to their image of what a cadet should be. After four months of constant torment, including a beating in an organized boxing match, ridicule for reading his Bible, and the forced consumption of hot sauce in the cadet mess hall, he resigned. When Oscar died a year and a half later from tuberculosis of the larynx, his family claimed that the West Point cadets had killed their son by scarring his throat and creating a fertile field for the fatal infection. This is the story of the ensuing scandal that brought West Point under fire in the press nationwide. Investigations following Oscar's death would reveal a long-standing pattern of cruelty that had become inextricably identified with the academy, related to notions of social Darwinism and initiation rituals popular at the time. Both the House of Representatives and the Senate considered closing the Academy in light of testimony by cadets in two separate investigations that revealed cruel and sadistic practices. Distilling startling accounts from trial transcripts, contemporary newspaper stories, archival records and correspondence, this book exposes a little-known chapter in the history of West Point.

A rousing tale of celebrity, sex and, of course, scandal Not only is Ricky Kumar, handsome hunk and mama's boy, being prepared for his launch as a Bollywood star, he has also just managed to score with the love of his life. But things begin to go horribly wrong when London-born playboy and restaurant tycoon Gautam Goyal checks into a drug rehab facility in Mumbai. A case of mistaken identity looks like it will lose Ricky everything he has been poised to achieve and pits the two against each other in a struggle played out in the harsh glare of the media spotlight. A wicked, sharply observed satire of Bollywood, high society shenanigans and our obsession with celebrity, Scandal Point is an unputdownable novel, at once hilarious and thought-provoking.

Many have told of the East India Company’s extraordinary excesses in eighteenth-century India, of the plunder that made its directors fabulously wealthy and able to buy British land and titles, but this is only a fraction of the story. When one of these men—Warren Hastings—was put on trial by Edmund Burke, it brought the Company’s exploits to the attention of the public. Through the trial and after, the British government transformed public understanding of the Company’s corrupt actions by creating an image of a vulnerable India that needed British assistance. Intrusive behavior was recast as a civilizing mission. In this fascinating, and devastating, account of the scandal that laid the foundation of the British Empire, Nicholas Dirks explains how this substitution of imperial authority for Company rule helped erase the dirty origins of empire and justify the British presence in India. The Scandal of Empire reveals that the conquests and exploitations of the East India Company were critical to England’s development in the eighteenth century and beyond. We see how mercantile trade was inextricably linked with imperial venture and scandalous excess and how these three things provided the ideological basis for far-flung British expansion. In this powerfully written and trenchant critique, Dirks shows how the empire projected its own scandalous behavior onto India itself. By returning to the moment when the scandal of empire became acceptable we gain a new understanding of the modern culture of the colonizer and the colonized and the manifold implications for Britain, India, and the world.