The Hard Bargain describes in vivid detail and elegant prose the clash of wills between a famous father and his hard-driving middle son. Richard Tucker, the American superstar tenor from the golden age of the Metropolitan Opera, demanded that his son become a surgeon. Rejecting his father’s wishes, David wanted to follow his father onto the opera stage. Their struggle over David’s future—by turns hilarious and humiliating, wise and loving—is played out in medical and musical venues around the world. The father and son strike a bargain, the hard bargain of the title, which permitted both dreams to flicker for a decade until one (the right one, it turns out) bursts into sustaining flame. This heartfelt memoir about a son’s struggle against the looming power of a magnetic father is conveyed in a moving narrative that one reviewer has called “the most dramatic exploration of the private life of a legendary singer in the annals of opera literature.”

The convergence of tough-on-crime politics, stiffer sentencing laws, and jurisdictional expansion in the 1970s and 1980s increased the powers of federal prosecutors in unprecedented ways. In Hard Bargains, social psychologist Mona Lynch investigates the increased power of these prosecutors in our age of mass incarceration. Lynch documents how prosecutors use punitive federal drug laws to coerce guilty pleas and obtain long prison sentences for defendants—particularly those who are African American— and exposes deep injustices in the federal courts. As a result of the War on Drugs, the number of drug cases prosecuted each year in federal courts has increased fivefold since 1980. Lynch goes behind the scenes in three federal court districts and finds that federal prosecutors have considerable discretion in adjudicating these cases. Federal drug laws are wielded differently in each district, but with such force to overwhelm defendants’ ability to assert their rights. For drug defendants with prior convictions, the stakes are even higher since prosecutors can file charges that incur lengthy prison sentences—including life in prison without parole. Through extensive field research, Lynch finds that prosecutors frequently use the threat of extremely severe sentences to compel defendants to plead guilty rather than go to trial and risk much harsher punishment. Lynch also shows that the highly discretionary ways in which federal prosecutors work with law enforcement have led to significant racial disparities in federal courts. For instance, most federal charges for crack cocaine offenses are brought against African Americans even though whites are more likely to use crack. In addition, Latinos are increasingly entering the federal system as a result of aggressive immigration crackdowns that also target illicit drugs. Hard Bargains provides an incisive and revealing look at how legal reforms over the last five decades have shifted excessive authority to federal prosecutors, resulting in the erosion of defendants’ rights and extreme sentences for those convicted. Lynch proposes a broad overhaul of the federal criminal justice system to restore the balance of power and retreat from the punitive indulgences of the War on Drugs.

My Hard Bargain was hailed as an impressive debut by The Wall Street Journal, and substantial and down to earth by the New Yorker. The exalted, memorable characters in Kirn's acclaimed debut short story col lection confront the real hard bargains in life that spring up from the business of simply living, and Kirn transforms these hard-luck stories into strapping moral lessons which evoke the bonds that unite us all.

With Hard Bargain, Robert Shogan offers an account of one of World War II's most dramatic chapters—the story of how Franklin D. Roosevelt secretly brokered a deal to provide the destroyers Winston Churchill needed to save Britain from destruction. At the center of the momentous events of 1940 are two extraordinary leaders: Churchill, the forthright pragmatist, and Roosevelt, the suave politician. As Hitler's war machine threatened to starve England into submission, these two men initiated a complex negotiation that would shatter all precedents for conducting foreign policy. FDR yearned to enter the war, but was handcuffed by domestic politics. Churchill had to plead for American intervention at a time when the United States was intensely isolationist. Drawing on archives on both sides of the Atlantic, Shogan masterfully recreates the President's maneuvers as FDR stepped around the Constitution in order to clinch the deal, a move that has had repercussions from Korea to the Persian Gulf.

"Another winning entry in a consistently strong series." —Booklist Twenty years ago, teenager Callum Hinds went missing in England's Lake District. His uncle, suspected of having done the boy harm, was interviewed by the police. When the uncle committed suicide near his cottage in the Hanging Wood, everyone assumed it was a sign of guilt. The boy's body was never found. Now Callum's sister, Orla Payne, who never believed in their uncle's guilt, has returned to the Lakes and taken up a job in a residential library close to the Hanging Wood. She wants to find the truth about Callum's disappearance. Prompted by historian Daniel Kind, she tries to interest DCI Hannah Scarlett, head of Cumbria's Cold Case Review Team. Hannah is reluctant, but when Orla dies in strange and shocking circumstances, Hannah determines to find the truth about what happened to Callum—and to Orla. Soon Hannah finds herself racing against time as the past casts long shadows on the sunlit landscape of the lakes.

A burned-out attorney investigates a strange small-town suicide in this mystery from the author of The Good Fight. Laura Di Palma’s days as a high-profile San Francisco lawyer are behind her. Four hundred miles north of the city in her peaceful hometown, she now spends her days hiking in the woods and helping her lover cope with his war injuries. But their retreat is soon interrupted by a private detective—Laura’s former flame—who’s looking for help with his disturbing new case . . . Karen McGuin was a troubled woman. Her husband, Ted, claims that, after her first suicide attempt, he’d leave a loaded gun in front of her every day to force her to choose life. But one day she finally chose the gun. Now Karen’s family wants Ted charged with murder. As Laura examines Karen’s past, she’s forced to question the status of her own life. But self-reflection quickly takes a backseat after Ted almost dies in an explosion. Suspicious of foul play, Laura knows she must uncover the truth before a killer strikes again . . . “Matera skillfully weaves Laura’s dissatisfaction with her own circumstances into the investigation of Karen’s death, taking a thought-provoking look at the dangers in relationships that grow too close.” —Publishers Weekly “[A] welcome respite from the mystery-by-formula crowd.” —Kirkus Reviews

The audio CD contains all of the dialogues in the book.