Budapest, autumn 1943.

After four years of war, Hungary was firmly allied with Nazi Germany. Budapest swirled with intrigue and betrayal, home to spies and agents of every kind. But the city remained an oasis in the midst of conflict where Allied POWs and Polish and Jewish refugees found sanctuary.

All that came to an end in March 1944 when the Nazis invaded. By the summer Allied bombers were pounding Budapest's grand boulevards and historic squares. By late December the city was surrounded and under siege from the advancing Red Army. Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians died in the savage fighting as Budapest collapsed into anarchy. Hungarian death squads roamed the streets as the city's Jews were forced into ghettos or were shot into the Danube. Russian artillery hammered the city into smoking rubble as starving residents struggled to survive the winter.

Using newly uncovered diaries, documents, archival material and interviews with the last survivors, Adam LeBor has brilliantly recreated life and death in wartime Budapest.

Tower of Basel is the first investigative history of the world's most secretive global financial institution. Based on extensive archival research in Switzerland, Britain, and the United States, and in-depth interviews with key decision-makers -- including Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve; Sir Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England; and former senior Bank for International Settlements managers and officials -- Tower of Basel tells the inside story of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS): the central bankers' own bank.

Created by the governors of the Bank of England and the Reichsbank in 1930, and protected by an international treaty, the BIS and its assets are legally beyond the reach of any government or jurisdiction. The bank is untouchable. Swiss authorities have no jurisdiction over the bank or its premises. The BIS has just 140 customers but made tax-free profits of 1.17 billion in 2011-2012.

Since its creation, the bank has been at the heart of global events but has often gone unnoticed. Under Thomas McKittrick, the bank's American president from 1940-1946, the BIS was open for business throughout the Second World War. The BIS accepted looted Nazi gold, conducted foreign exchange deals for the Reichsbank, and was used by both the Allies and the Axis powers as a secret contact point to keep the channels of international finance open.

After 1945 the BIS -- still behind the scenes -- for decades provided the necessary technical and administrative support for the trans-European currency project, from the first attempts to harmonize exchange rates in the late 1940s to the launch of the Euro in 2002. It now stands at the center of efforts to build a new global financial and regulatory architecture, once again proving that it has the power to shape the financial rules of our world. Yet despite its pivotal role in the financial and political history of the last century and during the economic current crisis, the BIS has remained largely unknown -- until now.

A gripping thriller of international espionage, The Geneva Option by Adam LeBor pits a sexy, young UN staffer against a brutal conspiracy to control Africa's natural resources.

Yael Azoulay does the United Nations' dirty work. Sent by the UN's Secretary General to eastern Congo to negotiate with Jean-Pierre Hakizimani, a Hutu warlord wanted for genocide, she offers a deal: surrender to the UN tribunal, in exchange for a short sentence and a return to politics.

The plan is to bring stability to the region so the West can exploit the region's mineral wealth. But Yael soon realizes that the UN is prepared to turn a blind eye to mass murder.

Yael finds herself on the run, hunted by the world's intelligence and law enforcement agencies--and haunted by her past--ultimately learning that salvation means not just saving other's lives but confronting her own inner demons.

Written by Adam LeBor, a high-profile foreign correspondent and critically acclaimed investigative journalist, The Geneva Option takes readers on a nonstop journey through the secret corridors of international power.

A macabrely fascinating work...recommended.--Booklist

It may seem impossible to explain how an entire nation could allow itself to be seduced by a man such as Adolf Hitler. By examining the everyday lives of Germans under Nazi rule, Seduced by Hitler proposes an explanation more complex, strange and morally ambiguous than one might imagine. In doing so, they bring to life the steady decline in national morality in the Third Reich as the German people let themselves be taken in by Hitler.

Drawing on new research and recently declassified documents, authors Adam LeBor, author of Hitler's Secret Bankers, and Roger Boyes, The Times of London correspondent in Berlin, reveal a tapestry of ordinary lives lived under extraordinary circumstances--ranging from subversion and confrontation to passive acceptance and eager complicity.

Seduced by Hitler shows in startling detail how almost every waking hour of Hitler's reign offered insidious choices--from degrees of compromise to outright resistance--to the average German in their interactions with each other and the regime, whether at work, home or leisure.

From the killing fields of Rwanda and Srebrenica a decade ago to those of Darfur today, the United Nations has repeatedly failed to confront genocide. This is evinced, author and journalist Adam LeBor maintains, in a May 1995 document from Yasushi Akashi, the most senior UN official in the field during the Yugoslav wars, in which he refused to authorize air strikes against the Serbs for fear they would weaken Milosevic. More recently, in 2003, urgent reports from UN officials in the Sudan detailing atrocities from Darfur were ignored for a year because they were politically inconvenient.

This book is the first to examine in detail the crucial role of the Secretariat, its relationship with the Security Council, and the failure of UN officials themselves to confront genocide. LeBor argues the UN must return to its founding principles, take a moral stand and set the agenda of the Security Council instead of merely following the lead of the great powers. LeBor draws on dozens of firsthand interviews with UN officials, current and former, and such international diplomats as Madeleine Albright, Richard Holbrooke, Douglas Hurd, and David Owen.
This book will set the terms for discussion when UN Secretary General Kofi Annan steps down to make room for a new head of the world body, and political observers assess Annan's legacy and look to the future of the world organization.

Life's tough for a Gypsy detective in Budapest. The cops don't trust you because you're a Gypsy. Your fellow Gypsies, even your own family, shun you because you're a cop.

The dead, however, don't care. So when Balthazar Kovacs, a detective in the city's murder squad, gets a mysterious text message on his phone, he gulps down his coffee and goes to work. The message has two parts: a photograph and an address. The photograph shows a man, in his early thirties, lying on his back with his eyes open, half-covered by a blue plastic sheet. The address is 26 Republic Square, the former Communist Party headquarters, and once the most feared building in the country. But when Kovacs arrives at Republic Square, the body is gone.

Inspired by true events, the novel takes the reader to a hidden city within Budapest and an underworld that visitors never get to see: the gritty back alleys of District VIII; the endemic corruption that reaches deep into government as officials plunder state coffers at will; a rule of law bent to serve the interests of the rich and powerful; the rising power of international organized crime gangs who use the Hungarian capital as a springboard for their European operations; and a troubling look at the ghosts of Communism (and Nazism) that still haunt Budapest.

In this action-packed, suspenseful sequel to the international thriller The Geneva Option, U.N. covert negotiator Yael Azoulay is drawn into a web of betrayal and intrigue that leads from deep within America's military-industrial complex to the Middle East and beyond.

Yael Azoulay nearly lost her life while on assignment for the United Nations in the Congo. Though her physical wounds are healed, she still struggles with the psychological trauma. But her safety is jeopardized once again when her job sends her to meet with the CEO of The Prometheus Group, a lobbying and asset management firm with extensive links to the Pentagon and intelligence services.

The U.N. is suspicious about Prometheus's military and intelligence contract operations and wants Yael to quietly investigate. Working under Prometheus's radar, she discovers a chilling conspiracy with ties to Iran . . . and to a shocking source very close to her. And the end game is nothing less than a devastating--and very lucrative--new war in the Middle East.

But the closer she comes to the truth, the more Yael begins to expose herself, revealing a complex and intriguing heroine whose life is riddled with secrets. As she confronts the ghosts of her past, the few certainties of her life begin to crumble around her, laying bare a terrifying truth: that she has enormously powerful enemies who neither forgive . . . nor forget.

Life's tough for a Gypsy detective in Budapest. The cops don't trust you because you're a Gypsy. Your fellow Gypsies, even your own family, shun you because you're a cop.

The dead, however, don't care. So when Balthazar Kovacs, a detective in the city's murder squad, gets a mysterious text message on his phone, he gulps down his coffee and goes to work. The message has two parts: a photograph and an address. The photograph shows a man, in his early thirties, lying on his back with his eyes open, half-covered by a blue plastic sheet. The address is 26 Republic Square, the former Communist Party headquarters, and once the most feared building in the country. But when Kovacs arrives at Republic Square, the body has gone...

Inspired by true events, the novel takes the reader to a hidden city within Budapest and an underworld that visitors never get to see: the gritty back alleys of District VIII; the endemic corruption that reaches deep into government as officials plunder state coffers at will; a rule of law bent to serve the interests of the rich and powerful; the rising power of international organized crime gangs who use the Hungarian capital as a springboard for their European operations; and a troubling look at the ghosts of Communism (and Nazism) that still haunt Budapest.

Adam LeBor, author of critically acclaimed thrillers The Geneva Option and The Washington Stratagem, delivers the final book of this trilogy featuring United Nations covert negotiator Yael Azoulay.

A] series of thought-provoking geopolitical thrillers.... LeBor succeeds in making us care about his two-fisted protagonist and her all-too-human vulnerability.--Wall Street Journal

Yael Azoulay, covert negotiator for the UN Secretary General, has made a powerful enemy in Clarence Clairborne, head of Washington, D.C. lobbying and security firm the Prometheus Group. He's fixated on revenge--and Yael knows it. She's definitely being followed, but Clairborne's operatives are not the only ones tracking her every move. Unexpected visitors from her past have arrived, determined to make her confront the secrets she's been hiding.

Driven by exceptional plotting and electrifying prose, The Reykjavik Assignment follows Yael as she fights the pull of her old life while brokering the triumph of her career: A summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, between the United States and Iran. But when events in Reykjavik take a terrifying turn, the only thing that Yael cares about is preventing a desperate man from taking desperate measures to avenge his own past.

Before his death in March 2006, Slobodan Milosevic was on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague for crimes against humanity. This engrossing biography documents the life of the former Serbian leader, whose policies instigated wars in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo as well as the bloody campaigns of ethnic cleansing that destroyed a once sophisticated multi-national country.

Drawing on his unrivalled access to many of those closest to Milosevic, author and journalist Adam LeBor describes his subject's unhappy childhood, his marriage, and his important friendships. He offers details about the ascendancy of crime over politics in the new republic and the secret channels used by Milosevic and Croatian President Franjo Tudjman as they conspired to carve up Bosnia. LeBor recounts the history of the negotiations between Milosevic and the Western diplomats, politicians, and businessmen with whom he dealt, and tells the tragic story of the wars. Finally he portrays the unprecedented international operation that brought down the Milosevic regime in 2001 and led to his trial at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague.

A gripping account of Europe's first rogue leader in the post-cold war period, this book is also a revelatory look at the tragic story of the collapse of a country and the role played by the West.