Jon Fasman Libri

American police are on the cusp of round-the-clock citizen surveillance, journalist Jon Fasman warns. Many police agencies and departments use license plate readers. Some rely on facial recognition technology or drone surveillance. Fasman analyzes this trend against the backdrop of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches. He makes a compelling case that policing's technology far outpaces society's ability to decide how to oversee this new power.

A twelfth-century Sicilian cat burglar snatches a sack of artefacts from the king's geographer's library, and the tools and talismans of transmutation - and eternal life - are soon scattered all over the world. The bizarre and dangerous circumstances under which these alchemical objects change hands are testament to their extraordinary value, but it is not until nine hundred years later that a young reporter on a local paper, Paul Tomm, stumbles upon evidence that someone is collecting them again. Investigating the suspicious death of a local professor, Tomm finds the dead man's heavily fortified office stuffed with books on alchemy and clues that the man's life was as suspicious as his death ...