The Scorpion, whose mother Cardinal Trebaldi burnt at the stake for loving a man of the cloth, discovers that his father murdered Pope himself. When Trebaldi addresses a huge crowd at the end of the mourning period, the Scorpion is there to tell the truth about how the people's beloved Pope died. Trebaldi claims that the sacred cross of St. Peter miraculously appeared in his castle. The Scorpion must find the real cross if he is to prove Trebaldi's treachery....

Larry B. Max is an unusual specialist from a little-known branch of the I.R.S., the all-powerful tax-collecting agency of the United States, with every technological method at his disposal to link high finance and high crime. In Blue Ice and Narcocracy, Max unravels the financial and logistical organizations that support a huge drug operation between Mexico and the US. In the process, though, the lines between legality and providing jobs for thousands of people, between prosperity and morality, become blurred....