Bøger af Phil Bookman

.When Hollywood science celebrity Abe Wiezman invites Silicon Valley software entrepreneur Mike Gold to become CEO of his eight-year-old biotech company, Mike is intrigued. Abe's messianic belief that the company can save the world from pollution and maybe even from global warming is intoxicating. As he dives into the challenges of learning new technology and taking the company public, Mike discovers some of the downsides of running an organization built around a charismatic personality. But these management problems fade into the background when Abe starts receiving death threats. Then those threats escalate into violence, and Mike has to face down his own demons or forfeit not only Abe's life, but that of his own son.

A DEADLY WEB OF VILLAINY AND DECEIT March 19, 2003: The invasion of Baghdad is imminent. Saddam Hussein withdraws over a billion dollars in cash from the Iraqi Central Bank. Within days, the U.S. Army recovers most of the loot. But not all of it. January, 2004: A U.S. Army intelligence investigator is assigned to probe reports of appalling abuse of Iraqi prisoners by Army guards at Abu Ghraib prison. This leads to numerous courts-martial convictions and other disciplinary actions, along with worldwide condemnation of both the atrocities and the complicity of top U.S. government officials. A decade later: Winery executive Lisa Gold is shot trying to prevent a murder in a Napa Valley vineyard. This triggers a series of events that will ultimately expose a shocking connection between Saddam's missing millions and the Abu Ghraib scandal. As threats to her life escalate, Lisa finds herself ensnared in a deadly web of villainy and deceit-a web she and her husband, tech CEO Mike Gold, race to untangle before she's hopelessly trapped. This is the fifth book in the Mike Gold Mystery Series. Mike is a great Silicon Valley CEO, but trouble seems to find him with alarming regularity. This book ties up some loose ends left, intentionally, at the end of Slice: Mike Gold Mystery Book 4.

THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN THE WORLD Silicon Valley billionaire Mike Gold has an audacious idea: Provide everyone on Earth cheap, clean energy by beaming solar power from the Moon. He wants to fund the development and startup costs for this endeavor through donated funds, including a billion dollars of his own money. On the other side of the world, the secretive ruling council of the Saudi Royal Family, the Sab'a, decrees that Mike Gold is the most dangerous man in the world. They instruct the man they call Scorpion to declare all-out but covert war on Mike Gold. He must annihilate Mike Gold and his blasphemous idea. As Mike starts his new venture, Global Lunar Electrical Energy (GLEE), he finds enemies everywhere. Friends of the Moon claims Gold and his billionaire cronies want to rape the Moon, like they have the Earth. A powerful U.S. Senator blocks Mike's access to NASA and introduces a bill to bar lunar power in the United States. GLEE job candidates are being murdered, and Mike is the next target. Now Mike Gold must mobilize all his resources to counterattack or succumb to the Gold Jihad.

Joe Brink is a newly-minted PI who can barely make ends meet. He lives with his parents and struggles to pay for his threadbare office over a frozen yogurt shop and a bakery by getting the goods on disability insurance frauds and errant spouses. On a stakeout of a client's cheating wife, Joe stumbles across and rescues two small children, Sofia and Diego Ramirez, and apprehends their kidnapper. Joe's 15 minutes of fame leads to little new business but earns him the unhelpful moniker Accidental Hero. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Rex Baker is rich, famous, and detested by most who know him, including his family. Known as Mr. Perfect, he reigns like a king over his popular TV show, Venture Capital Pie. Baker is blown up in front of millions of VC Pie viewers during a product demonstration. The entrepreneur, David Novak, is arrested for what everyone calls the Perfect Murder. Anna Novak hires Joe Brink to prove her brother's innocence because she read he was cheap. As he starts work on the case, suspected drug lord Navarro Varga, brother of the kidnapper, threatens the lives of Joe and his parents unless Joe locates the missing mother of the Ramirez children for him. Joe teams up with a grizzled old explosives expert in a desperate effort to prove David Novak's innocence. Meanwhile, Varga's timeline is about to expire, along with, Joe is certain, his and his parents' lives.

Pizza, technology, murder and scandal! Zack Zander, billionaire CEO and founder of MySlice, is on top of the world. Silicon Valley's hottest tech company, MySlice is an ingenious marriage of a pizza chain with social media. But then Zack and three senior executives are savagely murdered onboard his yacht. Lounging in a villa in Maui, Mike Gold is asked to take over as MySlice CEO. He relishes the challenges of rebuilding the executive team, calming dismayed employees and soothing the financial markets. But the murders don't stop, and as the body count climbs, Mike wonders who he can trust and who is killing MySlice executives. As he rushes to find the answers in order to stem the tide of negative publicity swirling around his company, Mike uncovers a secret that could destroy MySlice and derail the presidential ambitions of the nation's hottest politician. But his clever plan to deal with this mess literally explodes in his face. This is the forth novel in the Mike Gold Mystery Series. As the earlier books (Opium, Charisma, Riding the Tiger) showed, Mike is a great Silicon Valley CEO, but trouble seems to find him with alarming regularity.

Victor Ostrovsky wants a new toy.He also wants to be a billionaire.He's getting close. His new factory in China has reached full production and he's got a second one planned. Added to his global manufacturing empire, they should catapult Ostrovsky into that elite club to which he has long aspired.To celebrate, Ostrovsky decides to buy himself a superyacht. He asks Silicon Valley finance guru and fabled yachtsman Nick Marchetti for advice.Ostrovsky and Marchetti get together for coffee at a San Francisco marina, a meeting by chance observed by one of drug kingpin Rick Varga's henchmen. His report to Varga, who controls the majority of drug smuggling on the West Coast for the Mexican cartels, triggers a series of events that drags Marchetti and his young friend, private investigator Joe Brink, into a mob war with Varga's ruthless gang.It's a war based on erroneous assumptions, misunderstandings, and old grievances. A war Marchetti and Brink have no business being in. Yet however mistakenly started, this war is no less deadly. The carnage increases as the final battle unfolds and Joe Brink fights for his life in the frigid waters of the Pacific Ocean outside the Golden Gate.

It's the food that nourishes tech startups. O-P-M. Other People's Money. To many entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, it's known irreverently as opium, because once you get on it, it's hard to kick the habit. Silicon Valley software entrepreneur Mike Gold is an expert at using this opium to fund his startups. Mike is between ventures and getting antsy when he's offered an intriguing proposition: start up a new company funded by billionaire tech icon Barry Samson. But when Samson is found murdered, and Gold's friends start disappearing, the FBI targets him as a suspect. To protect his family, his reputation, and his freedom, Mike has to unravel a puzzle involving his best friends, buried events from his childhood, mysterious women, and retired mobsters. And he better move fast, because the FBI is after him and time is running out.

DEADLY PLOTS OF GREED AND DUPLICITY June 1944: Allied forces in England are poised to launch Operation Overlord, the massive invasion of Nazi occupied France. In Normandy, French Resistance operatives Doris Cohen, alias Colette Blanchette, codename Sparrow, and Pierre Dufort, codename Hawk, implement an audacious plan to weaken Nazi forces on D-Day. March 2016: Henri Legrand, leader of French industrial giant Dufort Engineering, confronts tech CEO Mike Gold in his Silicon Valley office with an outlandish claim. He says that billionaire Pierre Dufort, now 95 years old, is Mike's real grandfather. Is it possible that Mike's sweet little Jewish Grandma Doris from Brooklyn, New York, was in the Resistance and had a French lover during World War II? To find out, Mike and Lisa Gold travel to Normandy to visit Pierre Dufort at his majestic château. Over the course of three perilous days, murder engulfs Mike's newfound French family, and he and Lisa must unravel deadly plots of greed and duplicity.

In 2025, what had been Mike Gold's audacious dream has become a reality. Global Lunar Electrical Energy is supplying 80% of the world's population with electricity, beamed to Earth from solar farms on the Moon. As his young grandson says, GLEE CEO Mike Gold is now Boss of the Moon, with ultimate responsibility for protecting the security of the GLEE Zone and the Earth's power supply. But Mike is distracted from this mission when two scientists die under suspicious circumstance at Santa's Village, the scientific enclave at the Moon's north pole. Back on Earth, the wife and daughter of one of the dead scientists mysteriously disappear. Then the self-styled King of Man, chief of a small, isolated tribe in Central Africa, launches a rocket toward the Moon, challenging the United Nations' Lunar Exclusion Zone. The world breathlessly watches the rocket's two-day journey, wondering if Mike will authorize his staff to shoot it down, as he is obliged to do by international treaty and a Security Council resolution. Mike senses that there are powerful forces behind these events. With the security of the world's power supply at stake, he finds himself in a desperate race against time to unravel a murderous conspiracy of greed, intrigue and evil.

When she was two years old, Sally Roquette's mother walked out on her and her father, never to return. But she never missed her mom. Sally was her father's princess, a prop in his well-honed con game featuring a down-on-his-luck single father and his adorable but homeless daughter. Her mother had just gotten in the way between them.Eight years later, as Sally once more played her part in his oft-repeated scam, Emmanuel Roquette left the little girl alone in a park, also never to return. Ten-year-old Sally, devastated at the loss of her beloved father and certain that she was somehow to blame for his disappearance, spent the next several years in a series of foster homes. And grew up believing that she was unlovable and had deserved to be cast aside.Now a grown woman known as Sally Rocket, she spots a man she is certain is her long-lost father in a packed hockey arena, then loses sight of him in the crowd. Next day, Sally asks private investigator Joe Brink to help her find the man who abandoned her in that park years ago. Sally wants to confront him and get revenge. It's a favor Joe is happy to do for his best friend, unaware that he and Sally are entering a maze of treachery, deception, betrayal and murder that will threaten Sally's freedom and unalterably change her life.

INTERNET PIONEER MURDERED! Barely a week before Internet pioneer Hunter York, founder of Yippee, died in an auto accident, he gave his old friend Mike Gold an envelope. "Just something I'd like you to open when I die," he said with a big grin. But when Mike opens the envelope, he finds an enigmatic letter from Hunter, stating that he had uncovered serious wrongdoing of some sort and was concerned about how long he had to live. The letter also asks Mike to help Hunter's estranged 21-year-old son and only heir, Jason, cope with his inherited wealth and controlling interest in Yippee. To do that, Mike becomes CEO of Yippee, where his main task is to break up and sell the fading portal company. Mike soon uncovers evidence that Hunter York was murdered. Then Jason's Uncle Albert is killed in a drunken shootout with police, and is named by the cops as Hunter's murderer and, perhaps, the murderer of Jason's mother and brother five years earlier. But Mike Gold discovers that he has only scratched the surface of the insidious conspiracy behind the Yippee murders. And, if he doesn't solve this mystery quickly, more deaths may be on the way.

This is the third novel in the Mike Gold Mystery Series. When Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike Gold's plans for an IPO falter, his old college buddy Stew King calls out of the blue with a great offer to buy Mike's company. They meet for a quiet weekend at Mike's Napa Valley winery to negotiate the sale. But this is hardly an ordinary business deal. Mike soon discovers that the White House is behind it, the Chinese want to scuttle it, and the ecology of a million square miles of ocean may be at stake. Then the body of a beautiful, seductive woman is found in the vineyard and Mike is arrested for her murder. With his freedom and maybe his life at risk, Mike uses all his resources to try to discover who framed him and why. When he gets too close to the answer, his beloved Lisa is kidnapped to lure him to a life or death showdown with ruthless killers.

In 1945, an infant was discovered in a basket on the front porch of the Katz farmhouse in Camino County, in the remote northeast corner of California. Sarah and Morris Katz adopted the foundling and named him Joshua. Now an old man, Josh Katz hires private investigator Joe Brink to find out who his birth parents were.Joe heads to Manning Cross, county seat of Camino County. In stark contrast to the suburban sprawl, diversity and liberal culture of Silicon Valley, he finds himself in a rural, lily-white, conservative region. Manning Cross is a dying town in a dying county, running out of people, money and hope.As Joe looks for clues to his client's origin, he finds people more interested in talking about the death of Josh's wife decades ago. Some say it was an accident; others, that Rachel Katz was murdered, perhaps by her husband. Then Joe's car is torched, and the county sheriff advises him to get out of town, telling him that local folks don't take kindly to outsiders, especially those digging up the past.After Joe reveals the astonishing identity of Josh's biological parents, Josh asks him to return to Manning Cross, this time to get to the bottom of Rachel's death. Soon Joe and Josh are ensnared in a tangled web of corruption and crimes spanning decades, led by ruthless, powerful men desperate to keep Manning Cross alive, including a conspiracy that extends all the way to the White House.

Protect your crown jewels. Attack theirs. How do companies like Microsoft, Google and IBM protect themselves against strategic competitive threats and grow their revenue and profit at the same time? In this groundbreaking book, Silicon Valley veteran Phil Bookman reveals the strategy they use to divert their competitor's resources away from the product that threatens them. This book introduces the Strategic Competitive Defense Planning Process. Step-by-step instructions walk you through assessing competitive threats, selecting the ones to focus on strategically, and planning defenses against them. Worksheets and a case study help guide you through the process. Highlights include: The three key factors that determine which competitive threats are truly strategic. How to defend your strategy and build a new growth line of business. How to get another company to defend your strategy. How to protect your strategy with almost no investment. The eleven steps to assuring attack success.

When sales superstar Bobby Bradshaw fails to close four big deals in the last week of the quarter, he is outraged. One deal he could understand. But four? No way. That just doesn't happen to the Rainmaker. Bobby is convinced the deals were sabotaged, each in a different way. But who would do such a thing? And why? To get some answers, Bobby hires private detective Joe Brink.The last thing Jessica Kraft, Bobby's CEO at software giant Forward Data Systems, needs is a sales shortfall. She's just taken over for venerable Eli Applewhite, whose death allowed Kraft to finally move into the top position she long coveted. Now she must prove to the board that she's up to the job. But Kraft must first fend off infamous corporate raider Damon Remington. And Remington is sure to pounce on the sales miss as proof that he should be allowed to take over the company and put a new management team in charge. Even after several attempts on Remington's life, his specter looms over Kraft.What starts out for Joe Brink as a case undertaken to soothe Bobby Bradshaw's bruised ego soon exposes a web of villainy that includes multiple murders. And Joe may just become the next victim.