Bøker av Alan Refkin

For only the fourth time in two centuries, the French have allowed the Mona Lisa to leave the Louvre, this time at the request of the pope, who wants to exhibit it in the Vatican Museums. However, once on display, the Museums' former curator notices a nearly imperceptible discrepancy in the painting, leading to the discovery that it's a forgery. Faced with the crisis of losing the most valuable painting in the world, the pope turns to Mauro Bruno and his associates, who'd previously performed discrete investigations for the Vatican.As they begin, Bruno and his colleagues try to understand how the world's most famous painting, which is kept inside an alarmed environmental enclosure fifteen feet from the nearest person and under constant visual and physical surveillance, could be stolen. Even in transit to the Vatican, it was under continual visual monitoring with a security team inches from the masterpiece's enclosure, leaving the investigators bewildered about how a theft could have occurred. However, they soon learn that the Mona Lisa is one of many heavily guarded museum masterpieces that have been stolen and replaced with a forgery, the thefts having gone unreported.With only two weeks before the Mona Lisa returns to France, and not having a clue as to the identity of the mysterious person they call the Collector, they must find and retrieve the Mona Lisa.

Gunter Wayan is again in over his head, accepting an assignment from the Indonesian Minister of Defense that sends him, Eka, and Persik to Russia to rescue a defecting scientist and his wife from the FSB. Before they leave, the Minister makes clear that if they're captured, the government will deny any involvement and say they acted alone rather than create a diplomatic incident. The defector, a Ukrainian scientist on the brink of achieving the holy grail of camouflage technology, which is making a moving object invisible, was kidnapped from his lab near Odesa and brought to a facility in downtown Moscow. To motivate the scientist to complete his work, his wife is taken to Oymyakon, the coldest inhabited settlement on earth, and placed under FSB guard. If he's unsuccessful in delivering the technology, she'll live the remainder of her life there without him. With the Indonesian embassy across the street from his lab, he finds a way to communicate with an official, offering his technology in exchange for getting him and his wife out of the country. To accomplish this nearly impossible task, they decide to first rescue the wife from the Siberian settlement, which has no airport and is a fourteen-hour drive over snow-covered roads from the nearest town, then evade capture on their thirty-three hundred mile trek across the Russian Federation to retrieve the scientist. As if things couldn't get more complicated, soon after entering the country, they learn that the Minister's plan for getting the couple out of Russia has fallen through and that once they rescue the couple, it's up to them to find a way to get them out of a country which has the tightest border security in the world.

An Italian shipbuilding magnate and a prostitute are found dead beside each other in the bedroom of a luxurious mansion at a famous resort in Bali. A hidden security camera shows the only other person to enter that room was the victim's ex-wife, the resort manager. When the police discover she volunteered to help room service at the last minute and delivered the food, which the autopsy confirmed contained the poison which killed them, she moves to the top of the suspect list. As if to put a cherry on their case, the police find a bottle of that poison in her purse. Turning to the only person she believes can help, the accused murderess asks Gunter Wayan, a disgraced former police detective turned private investigator, to take the case. Believing it to be a waste of time, given the pile of evidence against her, he grudgingly accepts. However, as he delves further into the evidence, he finds that perception is not reality.

Mauro Bruno receives a mysterious envelope containing a letter he wrote to his wife twenty-five years ago on the day she was murdered. The letter was stolen by the killer, who was never caught. The same day he receives the envelope, the desiccated body of a woman is discovered behind the wall in the president of Italy's office with his letter opener lying beside her. For over two decades, a Mafia chieftain has been grooming a government official, killing anyone standing in the way of his progression within the ranks of government. Now running for president, the chieftain's protege is neck and neck with the current president, his victory assuring the Mafia will have a grip on the country for at least the next decade. These are the related events that confront BD&D investigations, which have been hired by Dante Acardi, the deputy commissioner of the Polizia di Stato, to find who this woman was and who killed her before the president's political opponent learns of it. Digging into the woman's background, Bruno discovers that she and his late wife had something in common, which ultimately led to their deaths. But finding her identity and murderer soon takes second place to staying alive. In this latest Bruno, Donati, and Donais novel, the three investigators find themselves pitted against the Mafia, the president's political rival, and an assassin who has never failed to deliver on a contract - all wanting them dead before they can unravel the mystery of the dead woman.

A young girl escapes her kidnappers; the US embassy compound in Athens comes under a devastating missile attack; a US Navy amphibious carrier, returning from a goodwill tour, engages hostile aircraft over the Adriatic Sea; and an abandoned Soviet submarine base in Bulgaria is secretly refurbished. These are the seemingly unrelated pieces of a puzzle that Matt Moretti and Han Li encountered while on vacation. It started innocently enough when the two agents from the off the books White House organization known as Nemesis were walking back from dinner and saw a young girl being chased by three thugs. After dispensing their own brand of justice on her pursuers, and on hearing that she and others like her were kidnapped and being sold into slavery, they decide to get involved. However, they soon find that the tables have been turned and they're being hunted by someone with seemingly limitless resources. Needing to survive long enough to take down the human traffickers, they receive help from where they least expect it.