Books by Pete Earley
Shakedown: A Novel (Mayberry and Garrett, 2)
Mayberry and Garrett, introduced in the national bestseller Collusion, are caught in the middle of a deadly crisis with a pending nuclear bomb attack and little help from the government that sidelined them both.
When an exiled Iranian scientist is assassinated in Washington, DC, the former FBI counterintelligence agent and ex-SEAL are pulled back into the world of clandestine ops—and the fate of the entire East Coast is at stake. Joining ranks with a heralded Mossad agent, Mayberry and Garrett pursue a skilled international killer hired to murder a legendary Israeli spymaster.
Their pursuit draws them into an international conspiracy led by a power-hungry Russian oligarch intent on destroying Washington, DC, and the Navy’s most important Atlantic base. The oligarch plots to unleash a nuclear onslaught first devised by the KGB but shelved by Kremlin leaders during the Cold War. On top of this, Iran’s sudden offer to help the United States raises suspicions about its possible role in a global shakedown.
With too many enemies emerging and too little time, the two Americans are forced to operate outside official channels to stay ahead of naive US politicians and foreign enemies out to entangle their efforts in red tape. Operating in an international tinderbox, Mayberry and Garrett must decipher which players are allies and which are posers—in time to thwart a cataclysmic nuclear attack on US soil and prevent an international incident that could ignite a third world war. And they must keep themselves alive.
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Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness
by Pete Earley
A dual memoir and journalistic investigation into the criminalization of America's mentally ill describes the author's battle with the shortcomings of the nation's mental health system after his son was declared ill, and exposes what the author learned throughout his year-long investigation into the Miami-Dade County jail. 60,000 first printing.
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Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness
by Pete Earley
“A magnificent gift to those of us who love someone who has a mental illness…Earley has used his considerable skills to meticulously research why the mental health system is so profoundly broken.”—Bebe Moore Campbell, author of 72 Hour Hold
Former Washington Post reporter Pete Earley had written extensively about the criminal justice system. But it was only when his own son—in the throes of a manic episode—broke into a neighbor's house that he learned what happens to mentally ill people who break a law.
This is the Earley family's compelling story, a troubling look at bureaucratic apathy and the countless thousands who suffer confinement instead of care, brutal conditions instead of treatment, in the “revolving doors” between hospital and jail. With mass deinstitutionalization, large numbers of state mental patients are homeless or in jail-an experience little better than the horrors of a century ago. Earley takes us directly into that experience—and into that of a father and award-winning journalist trying to fight for a better way.
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Comrade J
by Pete Earley
Traces the story of the double agent who headed Russia's post-Cold War spy program in America, documenting his role in directing spy operations in New York City, recruiting and planting agents, manipulating intelligence, and influencing national policy before his astonishing defection. 80,000 first printing.
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Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia's Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold W ar
by Pete Earley
When the Cold War ended, the spying that marked the era did not. An incredible true story from the Pulitzer Prize-nominated New York Times bestselling author of Crazy.
Between 1995 and 2000, "Comrade J" was the go-to man for SVR (the successor to the KGB) intelligence in New York City, overseeing all covert operations against the U.S. and its allies in the United Nations. He personally handled every intelligence officer in New York. He knew the names of foreign diplomats spying for Russia. He was the man who kept the secrets.
But there was one more secret he was keeping. For three years, "Comrade J" was working for U.S. intelligence, stealing secrets from the Russian Mission he was supposed to be serving. Since he defected, his role as a spy for the U.S. was kept under wraps-until now. This is the gripping, untold story of Sergei Tretyakov, more commonly known as "Comrade J."
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Witsec: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program
by Pete Earley
For decades no law enforcement program has been as cloaked in controversy and mystery as the Federal Witness Protection Program. Now, for the first time, Gerald Shur, the man credited with the creation of WITSEC, teams with acclaimed investigative journalist Pete Earley to tell the inside story of turncoats, crime-fighters, killers, and ordinary human beings caught up in a life-and-death game of deception in the name of justice.
WITSEC
Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program
When the government was losing the war on organized crime in the early 1960s, Gerald Shur, a young attorney in the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, urged the department to entice mobsters into breaking their code of silence with promises of protection and relocation. But as high-ranking mob figures came into the program, Shur discovered that keeping his witnesses alive in the face of death threats involved more than eradicating old identities and creating new ones. It also meant cutting off families from their pasts and giving new identities to wives and children, as well as to mob girlfriends and mistresses.
It meant getting late-night phone calls from protected witnesses unable to cope with their new lives. It meant arranging funerals, providing financial support, and in one instance even helping a mobster’s wife get breast implants. And all too often it meant odds that a protected witness would return to what he knew best–crime.
In this book Shur gives a you-are-there account of infamous witnesses, from Joseph Valachi to “Sammy the Bull” Gravano to “Fat Vinnie” Teresa, of the lengths the program goes to to keep its charges safe, and of cases that went very wrong and occasionally even protected those who went on to kill again.
He describes the agony endured by innocent people who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up in a program tailored to criminals. And along with Shur’s war stories, WITSEC draws on the haunting words of one mob wife, who vividly describes her life of lies, secrecy, and loss inside the program.
A powerful true story of the inner workings of one of the most effective and controversial weapons in the war against organized crime and the inner workings of organized crime itself–and more recently against Colombian drug dealers, outlaw motorcycle gang members, white-collar con men, and international terrorists–this book takes us into a tense, dangerous twilight world carefully hidden in plain sight: where the family living next door might not be who they say they are. . .
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The Big Secret
by Pete Earley
Federal Chief Investigator Nick LeRue is an expert on unraveling a crime; he's brought down some of the smoothest operators on Capitol Hill and uncovered dangerous secrets in politicians' pasts. But when word that his ex-girlfriend, investigative journalist Heather Cole, is missing, Nick is about to learn that nothing is ever what it seems. Turning to Heather's twin sister, Melanie, she tells Nick of visions she's had of her sister being held captive by an unseen man, and as these images are quickly becoming darker and more frightening.
Though skeptical of the sisters' psychic connection, Nick follows Heather's trail all the way to Pushmataha, Mississippi. And it appears that Heather may have been close to uncovering this town's darkest and bloodiest secret, but the town's residents will do anything to keep this secret from getting out.
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Vengeance: A Novel
by Newt Gingrich, Pete Earley, Zachary Lazar
In this fast-paced political thriller, Major Brooke Grant joins the president's top-secret CIA team and races around the globe in pursuit of a terrorist known only as the Falcon.
On the day of Major Brooke Grant's wedding, an explosive-packed rental truck detonates a deadly bomb, killing hundreds of her friends and family and endangering D.C.'s most powerful politicians.
Saved by a last-minute fluke, Brooke seeks revenge against the master terrorist responsible, an international radical Islamist who is determined to murder her, bring America to its knees, and create a modern-day caliphate.
With help from an odd duo -- a Saudi intelligence officer and an Israeli Mossad agent -- Brooke goes after her elusive zealot nemesis. But before the team can close in on their target, they discover that America's worst nightmare has come true.
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Pulitzer Prize finalist Pete Earley deliver fast-paced writing and a frighteningly believable plot in this third installment of the bestselling Brooke Grant series. Set against the backdrop of Washington's political intrigue, Vengeance is a heart-pounding thriller that raises serious questions about our national security, the power of religious faith to inspire good and evil, the consequences of revenge, and the validity of our constitutional safeguards.
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Vengeance: A Novel
by Newt Gingrich, Pete Earley, Zachary Lazar
“Tense and evocative . . . Despite its powerful social critique, Vengeance is cautious and prismatic, openly troubled by its own claims to authority.” —Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
As someone who writes “fiction, nonfiction, sometimes a hybrid of both,” the narrator of Vengeance, a character much like Zachary Lazar himself, tries to accurately view a world he knows is “beyond the limits of my small understanding.” In particular, he is compelled to unravel the truth behind the supposed crime of an inmate he meets and befriends, Kendrick King, who is serving a life sentence at Angola for murder.
As the narrator attempts to sort out what happened in King’s life—paying visits to his devoted mother, his estranged young daughter and her mother, his girlfriend, his brother, and his cousin—the writer’s own sense of identity begins to feel more and more like a fiction. He is one of the “free people” while Kendrick, who studies theology and philosophy, will never get his only wish, expressed plainly as “I just need to get out of here.” The dichotomy between their lives forces the narrator to confront the violence in his own past, and also to reexamine American notions of guilt and penance, racial bias, and the inherent perversity of punitive justice.
Inspired by a passion play, The Life of Jesus Christ, he witnessed at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, Vengeance, by way of vivid storytelling, helps us to understand the failure of empathy and imagination that perpetuates the incarceration crisis in our country.
“The state of Louisiana is the world’s incarceration capital, and Zachary Lazar is a world-class novelist, who brings humility and sensitivity" to this book (Rachel Kushner).
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