Originally published: Great Britain: Biteback, 2015.

Martin Packard is an extraordinary man who has led an extraordinary life. An idealist and a man of liberal instincts, his enthusiasms resulted in him having an inside track in several major events of recent decades, including the coup and bloody dictatorship in Greece and the unravelling of the Soviet Union. Easy going, warm and generous with his friendship, his life story is a ripping read. – Peter Murtagh, journalist and author of The Rape of Greece (Simon & Schuster, London, 1994) His story needed telling. – Peter Preston, editor of The Guardian 1975-1995 This gripping biography is a classic tale of fact being stranger than fiction. Martin Packard was an incurable romantic who thought he could do ethical business in the chaos of Gorbachev's perestroika Russia, but was constantly thwarted by more ruthless rivals or incompetent partners. He was a Don Quixote of the Cold War. His story is a fascinating, alternative and very personal view on the confrontations of his times, from the cynical US and UK policies towards Greece and Cyprus, to the chaotic collapse of the USSR. His tale suggests that cock-up, not conspiracy, is usually the most plausible explanation of history. - Quentin Peel, former Moscow Correspondent and Foreign Editor of the Financial Times. Wonderful. They don’t make men like that anymore. - Helena Smith, Correspondent of The Guardian for Greece and Cyprus. This biography describes how a British naval officer became a Kremlin favorite and CIA target as Gorbachev’s Kremlin decided to open the Soviet economy to the west. In 1985, Moscow reached out to Martin Packard, a retired British naval commander. He was promised unrivalled access to the hidden riches of the Soviet Empire with a cornucopia spread before him as he traveled this long closed land from the Baltic to the Bering Sea. A harbinger of the technology and foreign exchange needed to halt the Soviet decline, to some Russians he was the most important foreign businessman in the Soviet Union. But, as the Communist Party imploded, this previously-undescribed offer turned into a Faustian bargain, and his life became a captivating saga of rags-to-riches-to-rags. This book describes his rise, the details of his freelancing for Gorbachev – and his fall. A former intelligence analyst at the British Mediterranean command in Malta, Packard’s role as Scarlet Pimpernel of the Greek Colonels saw him forced out of the Royal Navy. He then became one of the largest jeans manufacturers in Europe. In this capacity, the insiders of Gorbachev’s perestroika identified him to help them lift the life of the Soviet peoples, an unlikely partnership of the Kremlin and a quintessential Briton, a scion of Empire, Church and Navy, but a non-conformist in every sense. It is a political tale, where Packard clashes with the British Foreign Office and the CIA in Cyprus and the Colonels’ Greece. Forced out of the Navy, he heads the English Cell of the Greek resistance, shipping printing presses, passports and petards across Europe to Athens. He then becomes an intimate of the wayward but brilliant Dom Mintoff and survives a mysterious poison attempt by ‘Erica’ at a Moscow airport. It is also a deeply human tale, of a charismatic figure who rose so high, mingled with the mighty of East and West, and then lost it all.

Quincy couldnt believe the words on his paternal twin sons birth certificates. According to the legal documents, the boys had two different fathers, Quincy just one of them. His wife, Madge, has betrayed him, although hes not surprised. She cajoled him into marriage through drugs and sexual assaultan assault that created the twins. Now, Quincy is resolute in discovering the identity of the second father. Imagine his horror when he finds it to be Adam Collier, his own best friend. The betrayal is twofold as his wife and friend were once lovers. To make matters worse, Adam has asked Quincys sister, Olivia, to be his wife; how can Quincy break the news to Olivia without breaking her heart? With the terrible truth out on the table, Quincy is unwilling to let Madge anywhere near their children. He will raise them himself, but to do so, he must move beyond incredible past pain and become the father the boys need, even if only one of them is his biologically. He will give them a good life, but first, Quincy must remember how to live again.

The primal image of the black-caped vampire Dracula has become an indelible fixture of the modern imagination. It's recognition factor rivals, in its own perverse way, the familiarity of Santa Claus. Most of us can recite without prompting the salient characteristics of the vampire: sleeping by day in its coffin, rising at dusk to feed on the blood of the living; the ability to shapeshift into a bat, wolf, or mist; a mortal vulnerability to a wooden stake through the heart or a shaft of sunlight. In this critically acclaimed excursion through the life of a cultural icon, David Skal maps out the archetypal vampire's relentless trajectory from Victorian literary oddity to movie idol to cultural commidity, digging through the populist veneer to reveal what the prince of darkness says about us all.

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