This is of the most amazing stories I have ever read. Not only does it embody what it truly means to be a warrior, but it also leads readers on an amazing journey of humility, self-reflection, and accomplishment. This novel will challenge you to explore who you are and who you want to become.

Decorated US Navy SEAL lieutenant Jason Redman served his country courageously and with distinction in Colombia, Peru, Afghanistan, and Iraq, where he commanded mobility and assault forces. He conducted over forty capture/kill missions with his men in Iraq, locating more than 120 al-Qaida insurgents. But his journey was not without supreme challengesboth emotional and physical. Redman is brutally honest about his struggles to learn how to be an effective leader, yet that effort pales beside the story of his critical wounding in 2007 while leading a mission against a key al-Qaida commander. On that mission his team was ambushed and he was struck by machine-gun fire at point-blank range. During the intense recovery period that followed, Redman gained national attention when he posted a sign on his door at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, warning all who entered not to "feel sorry for [his] wounds." His sign became both a statement and a symbol for wounded warriors everywhere. From his grueling SEAL training to his search for a balance between arrogance and humility, Redman shares it all in this inspiring and unforgettable account. He speaks candidly of the grit that sustained him despite grievous wounds, and of the extraordinary love and devotion of his wife, Erica, and his family, without whom he would not have survived. Vivid and powerful, emotionally resonant and illuminating, The Trident traces the evolution of a modern warrior, husband, and father, a man who has come to embody the never-say-die spirit that defines the SEALs, one of America's elite fighting forces.

Having lived in Paris, I have always been enamored of the world-famous Hotel Ritz. I even featured the Ritz in one of my own novels, Path of the Assassin. The Hotel on Place Vendome reads like a real-life thriller and will have you turning its pages well into the night.

Established in 1898 in the heart of Paris on the Place Vendome, the Hotel Ritz instantly became an icon of the city frequented by film stars and celebrity writers, American heiresses and risque flappers, politicians, playboys, and princes. By the 1920s the bar became a favorite watering hole for F. Scott Fitzgerald and other writers of the Lost Generation, including Ernest Hemingway. In June 1940, when France fell to the Germans, Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister of the Third Reich, famously declared that the nation's capital would remain a high-spirited placeor else. Orders from Berlin specified that the Hotel Ritz would be the only luxury hotel of its kind in occupied Paris. Tilar J. Mazzeo traces the history of this cultural landmark from its opening in fin de siecle Paris to the modern era. At its center, The Hotel on Place Vendome chronicles life at the Ritz during wartime, when the hotel simultaneously served as headquarters to the highest-ranking German officers, such as Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring, and home to wealthy patrons (and to the spies among them) who stayed on in Paris. At Coco Chanel's table in the dining room on any given evening, one might find the playwright and screenwriter Sacha Guitry, the lithe Russian ballet star Serge Lifar, or Jean Cocteau and his handsome boyfriend. Mazzeo takes us into the grand palace's suites, bars, dining rooms, and wine cellars, revealing a hotbed of illicit affairs and deadly intrigue, as well as stunning acts of defiance and treachery, in which refugees were hidden in secret rooms, a Jewish bartender passed coded messages for the German resistance, and Wehrmacht officers plotted to assassinate the Fuhrer. By the spring of 1944, as the tides of the war shifted, these stories were all coming to their dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking conclusions. There were celebrations as well: when Ernest Hemingway returned in the last hours of the occupation with his rogue band of "irregular" troops to liberate the Hotel Ritz, they also liberated many bottles of vintage wine from its cellars. The result is the story of The Hotel on Place Vendomea singular season at the world-class hotel, an intimate and riveting portrait of the last days of the Second World War.

A classic, which was only topped by its film adaption starring Clint Eastwood. This fantastic international thriller is one of the novels that made me want to become an author. I read it again this year and loved it just as much as the first time.

Jonathan Hemlock lives in a renovated Gothic church on Long Island. He is an art professor, a mountain climber, and a mercenary, performing assassinations (i.e., sanctions) for money to augment his black-market art collection. Now Hemlock is being tricked into a hazardous assignment that involves an attempt to scale one of the most treacherous mountain peaks in the Swiss Alps, the Eiger. In a breathtakingly suspenseful story that is part thriller and part satire, the author traces Hemlocks spine-tingling adventures, introducing a cast of intriguing charactersvillains, traitors, beautiful womeninto the highly charged atmosphere of danger. The accumulating threads of suspicion, accusation, and evidence gradually knit themselves into a bizarre and death-defying climax in this exciting, entertaining novel that will keep readers on the edge of their seats until the last absorbing page. From the Trade Paperback edition.