In this New York Times Notable Book, the Pulitzer Prize–finalist undertakes his own investigation into the murder of a Guatemalan bishop. Named a Best Book of the Year by the Washington Post Book World, the Chicago Tribune, the Economist, and the San Francisco Chronicle Two days after releasing a groundbreaking church-sponsored report implicating the military in the murders and disappearances of some two hundred thousand Guatemalan civilians, Bishop Juan Gerardi was bludgeoned to death in his garage. Gerardi was the country’s leading human rights activist, but the Church quickly realized it could not rely on police investigators or the legal system to solve the crime. Instead, Church leaders formed their own investigative team: a group of secular young men who called themselves Los Intocables—the Untouchables. Author Francisco Goldman spoke to witnesses no other reporter was able to reach, observing firsthand some of the most crucial developments in this sensational case. Documenting the Latin American reality of mara youth gangs and organized crime, The Art of Political Murder tells the incredible true story of Los Intocables and their remarkable fight for justice. “Becoming by turns a little bit Columbo, Jason Bourne and Seymour Hersh, Goldman gives us the anatomy of a crime while opening a window to a misunderstood neighboring country that is flirting with anarchy.” —The New York Times Book Review

'Then fall, Caesar!" -- Talking tyrannicide -- Caesar's murdered heirs -- Aftershocks.

The Herods explores the Herodian rule from Herod the Great's father, Antipater, until the dynastic sunset with Bereniké, Herod's great-granddaughter, describing the theocratic aims that motivated Herod and his progeny, and the groups and factions within Judaism and Christianity that often defined themselves in opposition to the Herodian project.

Ever since Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia, his critics have turned up dead on a regular basis. According to Amy Knight, this is no coincidence. In Orders to Kill, the KGB scholar ties dozens of victims together to expose a campaign of political murder during Putin’s reign that even includes terrorist attacks such as the Boston Marathon bombing. Russia is no stranger to political murder, from the tsars to the Soviets to the Putin regime, during which many journalists, activists and political opponents have been killed. Kremlin defenders like to say, “There is no proof,” however convenient these deaths have been for Putin, and, unsurprisingly, because he controls all investigations, Putin is never seen holding a smoking gun. Orders to Kill is a story long hidden in plain sight with huge ramifications.

The grim role of violence in shaping modern Mexican identity

A Guatemalan-American writer returns to the Boston suburb of his youth in this American Book Award–winning novel “full of rebellious comedy and vitality” (New Yorker). A 2022 Pulitzer Prize Finalist In Monkey Boy, Francisco Goldman’s “brilliantly constructed auto-fiction” (NPR), we meet Francisco Goldberg, a middle-aged writer grappling with the challenges of family and love, legacies of violence and war, and growing up as the son of immigrants. Having fled Mexico after his journalism provokes the wrong people, Goldberg’s attempt to start fresh in New York. But even as he finds himself falling in love, he is drawn away yet again—back to his childhood home in the white, working-class suburbs of Boston. Frankie is beckoned there by a high school girlfriend who witnessed his youthful humiliations, and by his ailing mother, Yolanda, whose intermittent lucidity unearths forgotten pockets of the past. His brief trip is haunted by memories of his recently deceased father, the Guatemalan woman who helped raise him, and the high school bullies who called him “monkey boy.”

Ever since Vladimir Putin came to power, his critics have been turning up dead. According to Amy Knight, one of the West's foremost scholars of the KGB, this is no coincidence. Here, she links together dozens of deaths, exposing a far-reaching campaign of killing that is even tied to the Boston Marathon bombing. Russia is no stranger to political murder, from the Tsars and the Soviets through to the current regime, during which many journalists, activists, and political opponents have been slain. However convenient these deaths are for the Russian president, Kremlin defenders assert that there is no evidence against him. Because he controls all the murder investigations, Putin will never be seen holding a smoking gun. With new information about the most famous cases—such as Alexander Litvinenko, Boris Nemtsov, and the Salisbury poisoning victims—Knight assesses Putin's role in these deaths, and asks: is there nothing we can do to stop him?

It is the story of Roger Graetz, raised in a Boston suburb by an aristocratic Guatemalan mother, and his relationship with Flor de Mayo, the beautiful young guatemalan orphn sent by his grandmother to live with family as a maid.

In Walking Ghosts, Steven Dudley, a journalist who lived in Columbia for five years, expertly chronicles the life and death of the Patriotic Union (UP), the party established by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Colombia's largest guerrilla group. Through stories of the politicians, drug kingpins, revolutionaries, and mercenaries who play key roles in Colombia's civil strife, Dudley maps out the complicated and murderous absurdity that is present-day Colombia, where daily life has devastating consequences: 30,000 murders per year, 75 political assassinations per week, 10 kidnappings a day. As the conflict gets bloodier, international pressure and influence mounts: Worried about the FARC's strength and its role in the drug trade, the United States has sent close to three billion dollars in aid to help the Colombian government fight the FARC. Steven Dudley seeks to make sense of this complicated conflict by focusing on the stories of key actors in the struggle, from the earliest days to the present. He has seen the civil war up close: dead bodies; paramilitaries; guerrillas; victims; and survivors. He has witnessed political parties grappling for power by any means necessary, and he's spoken to all sides and asked the difficult questions. Fast-paced and informative, with a new afterword by the author, Walking Ghosts presents a window into a conflict likely to shape the politics of this hemisphere for years to come.

In the early morning hours of October 1, 1965, a group calling itself the September 30th Movement kidnapped and executed six generals of the Indonesian army, including its highest commander. The group claimed that it was attempting to preempt a coup, but it was quickly defeated as the senior surviving general, Haji Mohammad Suharto, drove the movement’s partisans out of Jakarta. Riding the crest of mass violence, Suharto blamed the Communist Party of Indonesia for masterminding the movement and used the emergency as a pretext for gradually eroding President Sukarno’s powers and installing himself as a ruler. Imprisoning and killing hundreds of thousands of alleged communists over the next year, Suharto remade the events of October 1, 1965 into the central event of modern Indonesian history and the cornerstone of his thirty-two-year dictatorship. Despite its importance as a trigger for one of the twentieth century’s worst cases of mass violence, the September 30th Movement has remained shrouded in uncertainty. Who actually masterminded it? What did they hope to achieve? Why did they fail so miserably? And what was the movement’s connection to international Cold War politics? In Pretext for Mass Murder, John Roosa draws on a wealth of new primary source material to suggest a solution to the mystery behind the movement and the enabling myth of Suharto’s repressive regime. His book is a remarkable feat of historical investigation. Finalist, Social Sciences Book Award, the International Convention of Asian Scholars