Five by Ilona Bannister

Five passengers. Five minutes until the next train... five minutes until someone dies. Someone will die here this morning, at this suburban train station. It will happen in the next five minutes when the 7:06 to London Victoria arrives.

On a train platform, five strangers unknowingly face a chilling countdown: one of them will die in five minutes. In this gripping tale narrated with a sharp tongue, the five main characters - a child, a mother, a businessman, an old woman, and a gambler - will draw you in with their stories of fate, sacrifice, and the relationships we build and those we break.

As the clock ticks down, we look away from the demonic child Gideon. We judge his mother Emma who must surely be to blame. We are curiously compelled by the successful yet damaged businessman Liam. We pity the furious old Mrs Worth who grew up in a macabre household and failed at being a mother. And we fall in love with the beautiful Sonny who is on the verge of gambling his life away.

Rule of Lies by Jamison R. Firestone

Raised by his father, a multimillionaire conman and crack addict who owned Manhattan’s most expensive brothel, twenty-four-year-old Jamison R. Firestone decided to change the channel. He graduated from law school in 1991 and sought his fortune in Gorbachev’s USSR, establishing Russia’s first independent foreign law firm.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire, Jamison lived in the maelstrom that was Russia, defending himself and his clients from mafia attacks, dealing with corrupt police officers, having his law office raided by armed commandos, and once having to bug the offices of the Russian police.

Jamison was at the centre of some of Russia’s most important events. He employed Sergei Magnitsky who was murdered for uncovering the largest tax theft in Russian history and teamed up with Bill Browder and Alexei Navalny to expose his killers. Along the way he inadvertently taught Navalny to make videos exposing corruption and started a war with the Russian government over passage of the Magnitsky Acts which threatened to sanction Russia’s most powerful people.

A real-life story that reads like a spy novel, Rule of Lies goes deep inside contemporary Russia and events that have reshaped the globe. Darkly comic, sometimes horrifying and deeply moving, it is a chilling warning of what can happen when a nascent democracy succumbs to one man’s corrupt iron rule, becoming not only an authoritarian nation but a profoundly criminal one—a true mafia state.

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