Blake opened the door and took his first step into Hell. He had come to his apartment with a lilt in his walk, pleasantly burdened with candy and flowers. This was to be a reconciliation with his wife, Stella. Stella, who hated private investigators—“private snitches,” she called them. So he had resigned from the firm of Bricker and Blake: Investigators. Too bad it had to be in the middle of the tough Arrenhower job. But Stella was worth it. The room was in shambles. There was Stella, battered and bloody, sprawled on a chair. She had been brutally bludgeoned to death. I’m dead, Steve black thought, and I can’t cry. Who will I cry for? For Stella, who’d never hear me now? Maybe I’ll cry for the man who killed her. Maybe I’ll cry for him when I find him—and maybe God himself will cry for him before I’m through...
The central question for both the victors and the vanquished of World War II was just how widely the stain of guilt would spread over Germany. Political leaders and intellectuals on both sides of the conflict debated whether support for National Socialism tainted Germany's entire population and thus discredited the nation's history and culture. The tremendous challenge that Allied officials and German thinkers faced as the war closed, then, was how to limn a postwar German identity that accounted for National Socialism without irrevocably damning the idea and character of Germany as a whole. In the House of the Hangman chronicles this delicate process, exploring key debates about the Nazi past and German future during the later years of World War II and its aftermath. What did British and American leaders think had given rise to National Socialism, and how did these beliefs shape their intentions for occupation? What rhetorical and symbolic tools did Germans develop for handling the insidious legacy of Nazism? Considering these and other questions, Jeffrey K. Olick explores the processes of accommodation and rejection that Allied plans for a new German state inspired among the German intelligentsia. He also examines heated struggles over the value of Germany's institutional and political heritage. Along the way, he demonstrates how the moral and political vocabulary for coming to terms with National Socialism in Germany has been of enduring significance—as a crucible not only of German identity but also of contemporary thinking about memory and social justice more generally. Given the current war in Iraq, the issues contested during Germany's abjection and reinvention—how to treat a defeated enemy, how to place episodes within wider historical trajectories, how to distinguish varieties of victimhood—are as urgent today as they were sixty years ago, and In the House of the Hangman offers readers an invaluable historical perspective on these critical questions.
Preacher Nathaniel Rix and his sons bring the Word of the Lord to the lost souls settled on the Western frontier—and deliver salvation from the end of a pistol barrel. Homesteaders and heathens alike are sinners in Rix’s eyes . . . and removing them from temptation provides him with such Earthly rewards as gold and weapons for his gospel spreading crusade. Jordan Gray still mourns the loss of his wife and son, their murders gnawing away at his soul. A long winter of self-imposed exile in the Big Horn Mountains has given him an enlightened perspective on the nature of good and evil. And when he finds himself wanted for a murder committed by the Rix family, Jordan takes it upon himself to deliver vengeance. “Rarely has an author painted the great American West in strokes so bold, vivid, and true.” —Ralph Compton
"The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter" tells the tale of 17th century monk Ambrosius, who meets a young girl named Benedicta, a hangman’s daughter, who is shunned by her community because of her father’s profession. A friendship develops between the two, and when the girl’s virtue gets corrupted, Ambrosius is ready to fight for her. It is a story of friendship, love, morality, and redemption. Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) was an American writer, journalist, critic, poet, and Civil War veteran, best known for The Devil's Dictionary (1911). He dominated the horror genre as the preeminent innovator of supernatural storytelling in the period between the death of Edgar Allan Poe and the rise of H.P. Lovecraft. Bierce’s death was as mysterious as his strange stories; sometime around 1914 he left for Mexico, wanting to experience the Mexican Revolution firsthand, and was never to be seen again.
Two literary classics of human self-understanding: The Trojan Women, one of the most powerful indictments of war ever written, and Hippolytus, a gripping depiction of the struggle to master human passion.
In his sixth adventure, Sergeant Verity returns to London's 1860s underworld of alleys and brothels, peopled with sneak thieves, dancing girls, thugs, murderers and pimps. From Newgate Gaol come sinister rumours of a man to be hanged for a murder he did not commit. 'Handsome' Jack Rann, safebreaker extraordinary, has been snared by the rival Swell Mob, and a corrupt policeman, 'Flash' Charley Fowler. To reach America and be lost for ever, Jack must escape the death-cell and pull off the robbery planned by his dead accomplice, Pandy Quinn. From Newgate prison to the stage of the Penny Gaff, from bank vaults under Cornhill to rotting sewers below Wapping and Shadwell, Rann flees - while Sergeant Verity closes on the forces of evil with awesome tenacity.
Jim McGill, the first private eye to live in the White House, calls himself The President’s Henchman. As the husband of President Patricia Darden Grant, he can call himself pretty much what he wants.But with privilege comes obligation. When Patti travels to a G-8 meeting in England, McGill is fitted for evening wear and drafted to be Patti’s escort at a gilded dinner. He’s okay with that. But while Patti is busy reshaping the world, McGill fears his time will be occupied cutting ribbons.Then Glen Kinnard’s daughter, Emilie, asks for help. McGill knows Kinnard from their days as Chicago cops. They were never friends and once almost came to blows. But McGill is a soft touch for a young woman looking out for her dad, and, oh, does Kinnard need help.Taking the ashes of his late wife to her native Paris, Kinnard got into a fight with the star player of the French national soccer team. The brawl under the Pont d’Iéna, the bridge at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, left Kinnard unconscious and the Frenchman dead. Kinnard swears he was only trying to protect a woman the Frenchman was beating. But the woman has disappeared.The French allow McGill to investigate, provided he accepts Gabriella Casale, a State Department Security Officer as his bodyguard, that he works with the investigating magistrate assigned to the case, and that he wraps things up in a week.In Paris, McGill encounters gypsy con artists, British soccer hooligans and a monstrous brute known as The Undertaker. And he tries to ignore rumors reaching him that the president of France was Patti’s old college boyfriend, and things back in England are heating up once again.Time is short and there’s a lot to do— because at the end of the week McGill still has to don his white tie and tails for dinner with Patti and the Queen at Buckingham Palace.
