Thad Roberts, thumb a fellow in a prestigious NASA program, had an idea – a romantic, albeit crazy, idea. He wanted to give his girlfriend the moon. Literally. Thad convinced his girlfriend and another female accomplice, both NASA fellows, to break into an impenetrable laboratory at NASA – past security checkpoints, an electronically locked door with cipher security codes, and camera-lined hallways – and help him steal the most precious objects in the world: the moon rocks.

But what does one do with items so valuable that they’re illegal even to own? And was Thad Roberts – undeniably gifted, picked for one of the most competitive scientific posts imaginable, a possible astronaut – really what he seemed?

SEX ON THE MOON: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History (Doubleday; 7/12) is based meticulous research into thousands of pages of court records, FBI transcripts, NASA documents, and interviews with most of the participants in the crime. Ben Mezrich – with his signature high-velocity swagger – has reconstructed the madcap story of genius, love, and duplicity, all centered around a heist that reads like a Hollywood thrill ride.

The high-energy tale of how two socially awkward Ivy Leaguers, trying to increase their chances with the opposite sex, ended up creating Facebook.

Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg were Harvard undergraduates and best friends-outsiders at a school filled with polished prep-school grads and long-time legacies. They shared both academic brilliance in math and a geeky awkwardness with women.

Eduardo figured their ticket to social acceptance-and sexual success-was getting invited to join one of the university’s Final Clubs, a constellation of elite societies that had groomed generations of the most powerful men in the world and ranked on top of the inflexible hierarchy at Harvard. Mark, with less of an interest in what the campus alpha males thought of him, happened to be a computer genius of the first order.

Which he used to find a more direct route to social stardom: one lonely night, Mark hacked into the university’s computer system, creating a ratable database of all the female students on campus-and subsequently crashing the university’s servers and nearly getting himself kicked out of school. In that moment, in his Harvard dorm room, the framework for Facebook was born.

What followed-a real-life adventure filled with slick venture capitalists, stunning women, and six-foot-five-inch identical-twin Olympic rowers-makes for one of the most entertaining and compelling books of the year. Before long, Eduardo’s and Mark’s different ideas about Facebook created in their relationship faint cracks, which soon spiraled into out-and-out warfare. The collegiate exuberance that marked their collaboration fell prey to the adult world of lawyers and money. The great irony is that while Facebook succeeded by bringing people together, its very success tore two best friends apart.

From the author who brought you the massive NY Times bestseller Bringing Down The House, unhealthy this is the startling, rags-to-riches story of an Italian-American kid from the streets of Brooklyn who claws his way into the wild, frenetic world of the oil exchange.

After conquering the hallowed halls of Harvard Business School, he enters the testosterone-laced warrens of the Merc Exchange, the asylum-like oil exchange located in Lower Manhattan. A place where billions of dollars trade hands every week, the Merc is like a casino on crack, where former garbage men become millionaires overnight, where fistfights break out on the trading floor and men have been known to bring prostitutes as dates to company dinners.

This ordinary kid has traded Brooklyn for the gold-lined hotel palaces of Dubai. He keeps company on the decks of private yachts in Monte Carlo – teeming with half-naked girls flown in by Saudi Sheiks and makes deals in the dangerous back alleys of Beijing.

But the Merc is just a starting place. Taken under the wing of another young gun and partnering with a mysterious young Muslim, he embarks on a dangerous adventure to revolutionize the oil trading industry – and along with it, the world.

Rigged is the explicit, exclusive, true story behind the headlines that dominate the world stage…

He played in casinos around the world with a plan to make himself richer than anyone could possibly imagine – but it would nearly cost him his life.

Semyon Dukach was known as the Darling of Las Vegas. A legend at age twenty-one, this cocky hotshot was the biggest high roller to appear in Sin City in decades, a mathematical genius with a system the casinos had never seen before and couldn’t stop – a system that has never been revealed until now; that has nothing to do with card counting, wasn’t illegal, and was more powerful than anything that had been tried before.

Las Vegas. Atlantic City. Aruba. Barcelona. London. And the jewel of the gambling crown – Monte Carlo.

Dukach and his fellow MIT students hit them all and made millions. They came in hard, with stacks of cash, big, seemingly insane, bets, women hanging on their arms, and fake identities. Although they were taking classes and studying for exams during the week, over the weekends they stormed the blackjack tables only to be harassed, banned from casinos, threatened at gunpoint, and beaten in Vegas’s notorious back rooms.

The stakes were high, the dangers very real, but the players were up to the challenges, consequences be damned. There was Semyon Dukach himself, bored with school and broke; Victor Cassius, the slick, brilliant MIT grad student who galvanized the team; Owen Keller, with stunning ability but a dark past that would catch up to him; and Allie Simpson, bright, clever, and a feast for the eyes.

In the classroom, they were geeks. On the casino floor, they were unstoppable.

Ugly Americans is the true story of John Malcolm, viagra order a hungry young Princeton grad who traveled halfway around the world in search of the American dream and ultimately pulled off a trade that could, for sale quite simply, drugs be described as the biggest deal in the history of the financial markets.

After receiving a mysterious phone call promising him a shot at great fortune in an exotic land, Malcolm packed up his few belongings and took the chance of a lifetime. Without speaking a word of Japanese, with barely a penny in his pocket, Malcolm was thrown into the bizarre, adrenaline-fueled life of an expat trader. Surrounded by characters ripped right out of a Hollywood thriller, he quickly learned how to survive in a cutthroat world – at the feet of the biggest players the markets have ever known.

Malcolm was first an assistant trading huge positions for Nick Leeson, the twenty-six-year-old rogue trader who lost nearly two billion dollars and brought down Barings Bank – the oldest in England . Then he was the right-hand man to an enigmatic and brilliant hedge-fund cowboy named Dean Carney, and grew into one of the biggest derivatives traders in all of Asia . Along the way, Malcolm fell in love with the daughter of a Yakuza gangster, built a vast fortune out of thin air, and came head-to-head with the violent Japanese mobsters who helped turn the Asian markets into the turbulent casino it is today.

Malcolm and his twenty-something, Ivy League-schooled colleagues, with their warped sense of morality and proportion, created their own economic theory: Arbitrage with a Battle Axe. They rode the crashing waves of the Asian markets during the mid to late 1990s, culminating in a single deal the likes of which had never been seen before – or since.

#1 National Bestseller! The amazing inside story about a gambling ring of M.I.T. students who beat the system in Vegas – and lived to tell how.

Robin Hood meets the Rat Pack when the best and the brightest of M.I.T.’s math students and engineers take up blackjack under the guidance of an eccentric mastermind. Their small blackjack club develops from an experiment in counting cards on M.I.T.’s campus into a ring of card savants with a system for playing large and winning big. In less than two years they take some of the world’s most sophisticated casinos for more than three million dollars. But their success also brings with it the formidable ire of casino owners and launches them into the seedy underworld of corporate Vegas with its private investigators and other violent heavies.

Filled with tense action, high stakes, and incredibly close calls, Bringing Down the House is a nail-biting read that chronicles a real-life Ocean’s Eleven. It’s one story that Vegas does not want you to read.

If you’re interested in exploring more about blackjack strategies and the fascinating world of professional gambling, you can find related books and resources here.

He’s a genius. He’s a savior. He’s the most dangerous man alive.

Scientist Jack Collier has achieved the impossible: the conversion of a flesh-eating microbe into a miracle cure. An unqualified genius, he is poised for recognition. A troubled outsider among Harvard’s elite, he is vulnerable to the greed of his peers.

For Jack, there’s only one way to rescue his discovery – run with it. It’s the last option for a desperate man. If only to save the life of the woman he loves. If only he can find her. But Jack’s cross-country pursuit has come with an unexpected – and hazardous – price.

The cure has mutated into a terrifying weapon of destruction, marking Jack with the unwitting touch of a killer. His trail of death has turned him into a fugitive charging headfirst into an unstoppable biological nightmare that has only just begun…

Dr. Mike Ballantine is a man of science, fact, and logic – until he sees his best friend, the Governor of Massachusetts, obliterated before his eyes. Until a bizarre specter appears before him. Until a beautiful CIA agent named Amber Chen tells him about an executioner emerged from the depths of the Chinese Revolution, bringing to America a murderous art that is part magic, part science, and pure evil. Now, as Mike and Amber desperately try to unravel a mystery of biomedicine and murder, they face the most chilling revelation of all: that the worst weapon ever invented is not a bomb, a missile, or a toxin – it’s a ghost…

At his research clinic in Boston , renowned specialist Jake Foster uncovers the terrifying secret behind the city’s rapidly rising infertility rate. Meanwhile, in a nearby ER, his wife, Dr. Brett Foster, unsuccessfully tries to save a young man with no visible injuries from bleeding to death – the fifth such fatality in a week. Working together to find answers, Jake and Brett discover that the two epidemics stem from the same diabolical source. And now they will risk everything to expose a sinister plot that could claim thousands of lives… starting with their own.

It’s a fairly common, if ghoulish, procedure: the ?harvesting’ of skin from corpses for temporary use on emergency burn victims until their own grafts are ready. But when a team of moonlighting medical students accidentally takes skin from the wrong donor, the results are catastrophic: a New York City hospital ward is destroyed in a psychotic bloodbath, and an elderly professor, admitted for a routine skin graft, is suddenly the city’s most wanted fugitive.

Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are the only ones to suspect something more ominous than a medical procedure gone awry. As the FBI agents investigating the X-Files, strange and inexplicable cases the Bureau wants to keep hidden, Mulder and Scully are determined to track down the forces they suspect are behind the murderer. While the police hunt the fleeing professor, Mulder and Scully track the skin that was mistakenly grafted onto him. The trail leads from the morgue to the headquarters of a cutting-edge biotech company.

Soon Mulder and Scully are in Thailand , searching the jungles for an abandoned MASH Unit, where napalm victims were treated with an amazing recovery rate even though none of the hundreds of men who were nursed back to health ever returned to their families. Scully is looking for an experimental medical technology with disastrous side effects. Mulder suspects the stakes are even higher, a fear gruesomely confirmed as they begin to uncover an unholy and totally deniable alliance between a battle-trained plastic surgeon, international politicians, and a legendary Thai monster known as the ?Skin-Eater’.

In Boston, nine lawyers on a conference call suddenly convulse with pain, turn chalk white, and die. In Vermont , a young woman watching her favorite sitcom meets the same grisly fate, as does a group of sewer workers in Washington , DC . Whatever has killed these people is spreading fast, and the task of eradicating it falls to young virologist Samantha Craig and paramedic Nick Barnes, whose brilliant surgical career was ruined by a crippling hand injury. When Nick and Samantha discover that the virus, named Reaper, is spread through TVs and PCs, they realize that the information superhighway will become a killing field, with tens of millions dead, unless they can root Reaper out. Their search employs a dazzling array of real-life wizardry, from Mylar body paint to Stealth helicopters to CIA-bred swarms of insects. At the core of Reaper’s madness, they find a suavely megalomaniacal, up-from-the-slums, high-tech billionaire, an icily ingenious hacker, and a high-powered cabal that will do anything to save the world from technology, even if that means annihilating the world.

When Jeremy Ross, a 24-year-old medical student, agrees to help a former girlfriend investigate her father’s death, he has no hint of the gauntlet that lies ahead. Soon he’s confronting both a powerful conspiracy and the recurrence of a serious medical condition that threatens his self-control. Determined to press on, he follows up on his only lead – a colossal research center in South Carolina called Tucsome. Once inside the facility, he makes two startling discoveries: Tucsome receives billions more in government funding than anyone imagines, and its brilliant chief scientist has somehow found a way to crack the genetic code. Amid more revelations and deaths, Ross begins to understand the horrifying implications of what will happen in seventy-two hours. Unless he can stop it. Before he is through, Ross will go up against the government’s most elite agents, nature’s most formidable obstacles, and science’s most daunting mysteries – all with the aid of only one person, the beautiful woman who has reentered his life. At each turn, he will be called on to think his way out of calamity, to draw on the resources of his prodigious mind. And invariably, the solution will emerge. What he doesn’t bargain for are the personal demons that rise up and threaten him at the end, presenting him with his greatest – and perhaps insurmountable – challenge.