Interesting bits.

Even though right now I’m not focusing my energy on my mob novel, I still love to read all sorts of things related to it and its purpose. Here are bits of online articles as well as recommendations for books on related subjects that have occupied my thoughts on and off for the last few months.

The Untold Story of the World’s Biggest Diamond Heist – Something so dangerous and complex that accomplishing it appears ludicrous, and yet the resolution was so simple as to boggle the mind. (Note to self: Receipts for lunchmeat are dangerous.)

A Perfect Crime? – How the specificity of the law can simultaneously limit abuses of power and prevent the carrying out of the law itself.

The Merger: The Conglomeration of International Organized Crime : This book is the absolute best. It’s written in the grand tradition of scholastic work with a works-cited that boggles the mind, yet it’s got the kind of delightful ear for pacing and the occasional wry humor that you don’t see very often in organized crime nonfiction. (This, I feel, is because many authors tend to expect the atmosphere or inclusion of criminal events should carry all the titillation for them without requiring them to actually develop storytelling skills.)

The Book of Assassins: A Biographical Dictionary From Ancient Times to the Present: Now this book is interesting. As the author admits is the premise, this book contains biographies of the assassins themselves, rather than their victims. Most fascinating to me is the discussion in the introduction of the way the meaning of “assassinate” has changed. In modern terms, there is the idea of completed assassination (death) or attempted assassination (not death); but up until the last hundred years or so, even the attempt was considered assassination, whether or not successful. A very, very interesting book.