Adam Cassidy is a low-level employee at a high-tech corporation who hates his job. When he manipulates the system for a friend, he finds himself charged with a crime. He's given a choice --- prison or become a corporate spy in their chief competitor's headquarters. At Trion Systems, he finds himself a star --- he's rich, drives a Porsche, lives in a fabulous apartment, works directly for the CEO and he's dating the girl of his dreams. All he has to do to keep this life is betray everyone he cares about and everything he believes in. However, when he tries to break off from his controllers, he finds he's in way over his head and he's trapped in a world in which nothing is as it seems and no one can really be trusted.

The book brims with vibrant illustrations, including hundreds of rare photographs, paintings, lithographs, prints and period maps. The narrative incorporates the voices and stories of men and women --- statesmen, entrepreneurs, artists, and visionaries --- who have lived in and built the city: an extraordinary cast of characters that includes Peter Stuyvesant, Alexander Hamilton, John Jacob Astor, Walt Whitman, Boss Tweed, Jacob Riis, Emma Lazarus, J. P. Morgan, Al Smith, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Gershwin, Fiorello La Guardia, Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs.

Charlotte sets off on a mission of love in the backwoods of Louisiana, only to be violated by three soldiers in a lonely section of the forest. Charlotte's young life is destroyed, but another life is growing inside her. Years later, Charlotte comes to House of Gentle Men, a mysterious sanctuary where sad, damaged women are administered to by haunted men wishing to atone for their past crimes.

John Burdett's famed Royal Thai detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep is put to the test both as a Buddhist and as a cop as he confronts the most shocking crime of his career. A rich American film director has been murdered. It is an intriguing case, and solving it could lead to a promotion for Sonchai, but, as always, he is far more concerned with the state of his karma than he is with his status in the earthly realm.