China is as tough a business environment as you'll experience anywhere in the world, remaining one of the most complicated places to do business. Just ask all the company executives and entrepreneurs who've tried to do business there, lost money, and closed shop. They learned the hard way that success elsewhere doesn't always lead to riches in China. Alan Refkin and Scott Cray, with Thornhill Capital, have spent years doing business in China, and they have a long-term track record of helping companies navigate the complicated business terrain. In this, their new guide, they share their intimate knowledge of how business is conducted in China. They explore the intricacies of how the Chinese negotiate, discuss ways to better protect yourself from the increased threat of cyberespionage and the theft of your intellectual property, show you how to litigate if necessary, take you through what's needed to successfully interact with government officials, and demonstrate how you can be successful and reap the financial rewards from conducting business in China. Being successful in China is not an accident. What separates the thriving businessperson from those who abandon the country and their dreams for success is preparation. Get the information and tools you need to accomplish your goals, dominate, and win with Conducting Business in the Land of the Dragon. "Conducting Business in the Land of the Dragon is a keen twenty-first-century guide to China and makes excellent reading for both experienced Sinophiles and China novices. ... Everyone will learn from Alan's fascinating experiences and understanding of China, its people, its culture, and its future." -John Lucas, director, Weinberg & Company "You'll never find a better guide to take you through the reality of conducting business in China. Period." -Jose F. Sada, president of DS Capital Partners

General Lin Bogang, Chinas highest-ranking military officer, has a plan that will force the government into naming him his countrys leader. And theres a strong likelihood hell succeed, thanks to secret documents written by Mao Zedong. The general has two problems. He only has copies, which could be discounted as forgeries, and he doesnt know the exact location of the originals. Soon he discovers that the key to finding them lies with Matt Moretti, an alcoholic former Army Ranger currently working as an archivist for the US government. Hunted by the general, a Chinese assassin, European police, and his own government, the archivist goes on the run across Europe as he tries to unravel the clues that will reveal Maos long-kept secret. Along the way he meets Han Li, a beautiful Chinese agent and assassin in her own right who is also seeking the original documents. Only time will tell, however, whether they will manage to keep them out of the hands of the general. In this thriller, an alcoholic former Army Ranger joins forces with Chinas top assassin to recover secret documents that could topple the Chinese government.

Following a gala, the presidents of the United States and China disappear after retiring for the night within their heavily guarded palaces inside the Forbidden City. After an intense investigation ensues, no one can determine how the dignitaries were abducted while under constant surveillance. When an internet video is released that shows the heads of state kneeling before the flag of the Protectors of Islam, the question of who abducted them and what they want is answered. The Islamic terrorists threaten that unless their demands are met within seventy-two hours, both men will be beheaded live on the internet. With each countrys intelligence agencies paralyzed by a lack of clues, Matt Moretti and his Chinese agent counterpart, Han Li, work outside their organizations bureaucracies to find the leaders. After they uncover a conspiracy focused on attaining a singular objective at any cost, Moretti and Li are arrested for interfering with the investigation. Now they must outrun the army, make sense of complex clues, and race to find the presidents before their abductors carry out their evil plan. In this thrilling story of intrigue and murder, an American civilian intelligence officer and Chinese agent must do everything in their power to stop the beheading of two international leaders by Islamic terrorists.

A military drone attacks a small boat off Bali and leaves a disgraced former police detective turned private investigator adrift in the Indian Ocean; an Indonesian attorney is tortured and killed delivering his client’s documents; the head of North Korea’s money-laundering clearinghouse is murdered when his car is forced off a mountain road; a Chinese army lieutenant colonel appears to die of a heart attack while on a flight to Beijing; and a server is taken from what is believed to be an impregnable office on the 101st floor of a building. These are the events that Gunter Wayan and his assistant Eka Endah must piece together if they are to stay alive and solve the mystery handed to them by a client who was on the receiving end of a sniper’s bullet moments after they were hired. Now, whoever killed their client is after them. But Wayan and Eka have no intention of going down without a fight and decide to take the battle to their pursuer. Bodies soon pile up in Indonesia, China, Hong Kong, Macau, and North Korea. As the forces that are after them close in, Wayan encounters an unlikely person who can provide the information necessary to bring down The Organization, the international money-laundering enterprise which they discover is after them. The only problem with convincing this person to help is that she just tried to kill them.

Lieutenant Colonel Doug Cray, the leader of a presidential special ops team, hasn’t been on vacation in years. Recovering from an assassin’s bullet, he decides that taking a cruise down the Amazon River would fulfill his childhood dream of seeing the rainforest and provide a much-needed rest. However, the thin man, who hired the assassin, isn’t going to give up on killing him. After learning that Cray is taking an Amazon cruise, he bribes a corrupt Brazilian Army colonel to shoot down the floatplane taking him to the ship. Although that succeeds, and he’s presumed dead, the thin man wants a photo of the body as proof. However, the only way to get that is for the Brazilian colonel to send his military death squad into the jungle to get a picture of the corpse or put a bullet into the ex-Army Ranger if he somehow miraculously survived. There’s one problem: the coordinates of where the plane went down show it’s in the Javari Valley—the most unexplored area on the planet for which no map exists, headhunters roam with abandon, and the dense jungle canopy blocks all communications and navigational data. Unable to contact his special ops team in Washington, who have vowed to leave him alone, believing he’s having a great time sucking down drinks and eating gourmet meals on the luxury ship, Cray knows he’s living on borrowed time after seeing his badly infected wound and unable to find his way out of the unmapped valley. As if things couldn’t get worse, the military squad finally finds him, and the chase ensues. In this latest Matt Moretti-Han Li thriller, Cray must get out of the most hostile jungle on the planet while being chased by an experienced military death squad and battling an infection rapidly spreading through his body.

Detectives Mauro Bruno and Elia Donati, surviving numerous attempts on their lives while bringing Duke Rodolfo Rizzo to justice, decide to take a vacation in Paris to celebrate and relax. However, not long after they arrive Donati is cleverly framed for a murder he didn’t commit, but which he finds impossible to refute since the killing was captured on the hotel’s camera security system. With Donati in jail, Bruno tries to discover why he’s been framed and who’s behind it. Helping him is a French investigator, Lisette Donais. Together they uncover a web of deceit that involves a Saudi official, the French mafia, a recluse in the wealthiest residential area of Paris, and a suicide in Milan. Not long after, Bruno is also framed for murder. On the run, he and Donais discover that the key to vindication is in their past.

Gunter Wayan is again in over his head, accepting an assignment from the Indonesian Minister of Defense that sends him, Eka, and Persik to Russia to rescue a defecting scientist and his wife from the FSB. Before they leave, the Minister makes clear that if they’re captured, the government will deny any involvement and say they acted alone rather than create a diplomatic incident. The defector, a Ukrainian scientist on the brink of achieving the holy grail of camouflage technology, which is making a moving object invisible, was kidnapped from his lab near Odesa and brought to a facility in downtown Moscow. To motivate the scientist to complete his work, his wife is taken to Oymyakon, the coldest inhabited settlement on earth, and placed under FSB guard. If he's unsuccessful in delivering the technology, she’ll live the remainder of her life there without him. With the Indonesian embassy across the street from his lab, he finds a way to communicate with an official, offering his technology in exchange for getting him and his wife out of the country. To accomplish this nearly impossible task, they decide to first rescue the wife from the Siberian settlement, which has no airport and is a fourteen-hour drive over snow-covered roads from the nearest town, then evade capture on their thirty-three hundred mile trek across the Russian Federation to retrieve the scientist. As if things couldn't get more complicated, soon after entering the country, they learn that the Minister’s plan for getting the couple out of Russia has fallen through and that once they rescue the couple, it’s up to them to find a way to get them out of a country which has the tightest border security in the world.

The United States' most highly classified military weapon, code-named Vigilant, has been stolen from an unmarked Navy ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Consisting of ninety-seven missiles, each with multiple nuclear warheads housed in a crush-proof capsule, they're to be lowered to undiscoverable locations in the deepest depths of the Atlantic Ocean. However, before the system is deployed, an unknown group seizes Vigilant, making them the third-largest nuclear power on Earth. Only a handful of people knew about the ship and its route. Since most were at the highest level of the government's intelligence community and alphabet agencies, the president doesn't trust any of them to investigate what happened. Knowing the threat of Armageddon could be used for political and economic blackmail, he turns to Nemesis, tasking the off-the-books special operations team led by Matti Moretti to find Vigilant at whatever cost. But as he begins the investigation, Moretti learns that a triple homicide in Prague is connected to the theft, with the investigating detective, Juraj Adamik, holding the key to discovering Archangel, the highly elusive spy believed to be behind what happened. Working together, with the detective focusing on unmasking Archangel while Moretti finds Vigilant, it isn’t long before they discover that those who stole America's newest weapon aren’t their only adversaries. The CIA and FSB also have reasons for wanting Moretti and Adamik's efforts to be unsuccessful, and each is willing to go to great lengths to protect what neither wants revealed.

Milan’s chief prosecutor is killed when his car is pushed off a narrow mountain road, the city’s mayor is shot by an assassin on the steps of his office building, and an abbot and his librarian are killed in a monastery. This occurs days before Chief Inspector Mauro Bruno, whose father is one of the victims, comes to Milan to arrange for the funeral. Suspicious by nature and generally acknowledged within the Polizia di Stato as being the best detective in Italy, Bruno uncovers clues that lead him to believe that a man known throughout Italy as the patriarch, the head of the wealthiest and most powerful family in the country, is behind these murders. But he needs proof. He soon discovers that that the reason for these killings resides within centuries-old papers stored within the Vatican’s secret archives, to which only the pope has access. Hunted by the patriarch’s men, Bruno attempts to stay alive long enough to find out what the patriarch and the Vatican have been hiding for seven centuries, and why a multibillionaire is willing to risk everything to protect that secret.

​"Alfred Russel Wallace- His Predecessors and Successors. Naturalists, Explorers and Field Scientists in South-east Asia and Australasia. An International Conference" will be the premier forum for the presentation of new advances and research results in the fields of studies on Alfred Russel Wallace and other natural historians, past and present, as well as contemporary research on South-east Asian and Australasian biological diversity. The conference will bring together leading researchers including biologists, ecologists, zoologists, botanists, geologists, anthropologists, social scientists and others from around the world. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: history of biology, biodiversity, anthropology, geology, conservation, ecosystem management, environmental impact assessments, environmental law, environmental policies, landscape management and habitat restoration and management.