A few days before Christmas, detective Shane Scully and his wife investigate a Hollywood Hills murder. But a mysterious bullet casing at the scene leaves more questions than answers.

What if, under the PATRIOT Act, federal bureaucrats could take murder cases away from local cops—then bury those cases so they're never investigated again? What if government agents could bug your home, your car, your place of business—your entire life—with nothing more than spoken permission from a secret panel of judges? What if the Department of Homeland Security could pull police officers off the street and hold them in cells indefinitely as material witnesses—because they're working on "sensitive" investigations? They can . . . The PATRIOT Act and the Homeland Security Act give enormous power to our nation's top federal law enforcement officials. They operate under the presumption that these officials are honest, diligent, and fair. But what if they're not? In THE COLD HIT, Detective Shane Scully suspects that the regional boss of the Department of Homeland Security is thwarting a major murder investigation. But why? Robert Allen Virtue can act without oversight or accountability. There's no way to question him; there's no way to way to check up on him; there's no way to find out if he's exceeding his authority. Virtually at will, he can bug anyone he considers a threat to national security, take over criminal investigations, and jail cops. Even if he is breaking the law, there's no way to know it. There's nothing to rely on but his integrity. His professional commitment. His good name. Virtue. That may be a very big mistake. Shane and his partner are investigating "the Fingertip Killer," a serial murderer preying on homeless Vietnam vets in Los Angeles. A bullet taken from one victim's skull matches the bullet that killed another man ten years earlier—an unexpected ballistics match linking one unsolved case to another that police call a "cold hit." When the earlier victim turns out to have been an LAPD cop, the investigation becomes very personal for Shane. But there's a problem: Robert Allen Virtue wants him taken off it. To solve the cop's murder, and possibly the Fingertip case, Scully must go behind the powerful bureaucrat's back and deep undercover—where he will begin unraveling a deadly far-reaching conspiracy that threatens to destroy everything he loves: his career, his freedom, and his family.

“An engrossing microcosm of the internet's Wild West years” (Kirkus Reviews), award-winning journalist David Kushner tells the incredible battle between the founder of Match.com and the con man who swindled him out of the website Sex.com, resulting in an all-out war for control for what still powers the internet today: love and sex. In 1994, visionary entrepreneur Gary Kremen used a $2,500 loan to create the first online dating service, Match.com. Only 5 percent of Americans were using the internet at the time, and even fewer were looking online for love. He quickly bought the Sex.com domain too, betting the combination of love and sex would help propel the internet into the mainstream. Imagine Kremen’s surprise when he learned that someone named Stephen Michael Cohen had stolen the rights to Sex.com and was already making millions that Kremen would never see. Thus follows the wild true story of Kremen’s and Cohen’s decade-long battle for control. In The Players Ball, author and journalist David Kushner provides a front seat to these must-read Wild West years online, when innovators and outlaws battled for power and money. This cat-and-mouse game between a genius and a con man changed the way people connect forever, and is key to understanding the rise and future of the online world. “Kushner delivers a fast-paced, raunchy tale of sex, drugs, and dial-up.” —Publishers Weekly

“As dangerous as if she stood on the corner of the street exploding gunpowder.” This was the view of ‘Miles’, a correspondent in the Bedfordshire Mercury, writing about the dangerousness of prostitutes in 1874. They were considered a scourge by the Victorians; a menace to society and a threat to the moral and physical wellbeing of a nation. Carrying disease, committing crime, corrupting others; prostitutes were the most feared ‘social evil’. These women were the focus of controlling and invasive legislation, designed to clear the streets. They were imprisoned and removed from their friends and family. They were scorned and shamed and deemed worthless by much of society. The contemporary view of prostitution in the nineteenth century is colored by years of Ripperology, a grim fascination with the lives of a few mutilated women living in London. However, prostitutes were far more than caricatures of sinners or inevitable victims and lived in every other part of England too. Searching through the plethora of newspaper, census, police, and local history records it is now possible to uncover the lives of prostitutes in greater detail than ever before and discover the real women behind the stereotypes. Piecing together these women’s movements from cradle to grave and from one side of the country to another builds a rich picture of what it meant to be a prostitute, including the lives of prostitutes living in small towns, villages, and islands that have all been previously over-looked. This book explores the lives of the women who were omitted from the genteel history books of the past, aiming to identify what they looked like, what life was like for them, and who the important people in their lives were. It also looks in depth at the lives of a select few prostitutes, examining what drew them into prostitution and what happened to them afterwards. From Whitehaven to North Shields, from Peterborough to Bloomsbury (via Paris), these women led extraordinary, richly textured lives that are still relevant today, and that we can continue to learn so much from. The perfect introduction to Victorian prostitutes for family and local historians, genealogists, and students of the Victorian era.

Vivid narrative-driven account of how current U.S. laws against prostitution harm sex workers, clients, and society

During the late nineteenth century the city of Berlin developed such a reputation for lawlessness and sexual licentiousness that it came to be known as the "Whore of Babylon." Out of this reputation for debauchery grew an unusually rich discourse around prostitution. In Berlin Coquette, Jill Suzanne Smith shows how this discourse transcended the usual clichés about prostitutes and actually explored complex visions of alternative moralities or sexual countercultures including the “New Morality” articulated by feminist radicals, lesbian love, and the “New Woman.” Combining extensive archival research with close readings of a broad spectrum of texts and images from the late Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, Smith recovers a surprising array of productive discussions about extramarital sexuality, women's financial autonomy, and respectability. She highlights in particular the figure of the cocotte (Kokotte), a specific type of prostitute who capitalized on the illusion of respectable or upstanding womanhood and therefore confounded easy categorization. By exploring the semantic connections between the figure of the cocotte and the act of flirtation (of being coquette), Smith’s work presents flirtation as a type of social interaction through which both prostitutes and non-prostitutes in Imperial and Weimar Berlin could express extramarital sexual desire and agency.