'High energy, highly unique, swashbuckling-cop-epic-noir story. Buy it. BUY IT NOW' Sam Sykes The Greatcoats are back - and this time it's personal. How do you kill a Saint? Falcio, Brasti and Kest are about to find out, as someone is doing just that, and they've started with a friend. The Dukes were already looking for ways to weasel out of their promise to put Aline on her father's throne - but with Saints turning up dead, and Church Inquistitors pushing for control - rumours are spreading that the Gods themselves oppose her ascension. The only way Falcio can stop the country turning into a vicious theocracy is to find and stop the Saint-killer - but his only clue is the iron mask encasing the head of the Saint of Mercy, which prevents her from speaking. And even if he can find the murderer, he will still have to face them in battle - and this may be a duel that no swordsman, no matter how skilled, can win.
"With its raw and vividly drawn characters, this thrill-a-minute adrenaline ride will keep Donald Westlake readers on the edge of their seats."—Library Journal He wants a miracle And he won't stop killing until he gets one Deep in the mountains of Montana, former Homicide inspector Sabrina Vaughn has found the kind of peace she's always dreamed of. And with Michael O'Shea, she's found the kind of love she never thought possible. Together, even under the constant threat of faraway adversaries, they've managed to build the kind of idyllic life they've both longed for. But a life this safe was never meant to last. When twenty-year-old forensic evidence connects her to a string of recent murders, Sabrina must leave her new life behind and return to the place she was brutally raped and tortured in order to search for a killer who's as cunning as any she's ever encountered. Praise for the Sabrina Vaughn novels: "Edge-of-the-seat plotting will keep readers' attention late into the night."—Library Journal "Reads like the transcript of a breathlessly bloody computer game."—Publishers Weekly "Maegan Beaumont's third novel in the impeccable Sabrina Vaughn series delights the reader with more intricately developed plots, higher stakes, and unlikely criminals that astonish by executing twist after unforeseen twist."—Crimespree Magazine Named a Best Debut of 2013 bySuspense Magazine (Carved in Darkness) " Prepare to be overwhelmed by the tension and moodiness that permeates this edgy thriller. Beaumont's ability to keep the twists coming even when the answer seems obvious is quite potent."—Library Journal (starred review) and Debut of the Month "Pulse-pounding terror, graphic violence, and a loathsome killer."—Kirkus Reviews "Beaumont knows how to keep you on the edge of your seat...Buckle up for the ride of a lifetime."—Suspense Magazine "Maegan Beaumont might be new to thriller scene, but her debut thriller, Carved in Darkness, promises to be the first in a long line of novels. Be warned, however, this novel isn't for those who jump a mile every time they hear something go bump in the night. But for anyone who's ever dreamed about enacting a just revenge, this book is for you. Beaumont knows how to cook up and serve a dish called revenge, but she doesn't serve it cold. She serves it sizzling hot."—Vincent Zandri, bestselling author of The Remains and Murder by Moonlight
An instant New York Times bestseller! “Prepare for a snow-frosted, blood-drenched fairy tale where the monsters steal your heart and love ends up being the nightmare.” - Roshani Chokshi, New York Times bestselling author of The Gilded Wolves and The Star-Touched Queen A girl who can speak to gods must save her people without destroying herself. A prince in danger must decide who to trust. A boy with a monstrous secret waits in the wings. Together, they must assassinate the king and stop the war. In a centuries-long war where beauty and brutality meet, their three paths entwine in a shadowy world of spilled blood and mysterious saints, where a forbidden romance threatens to tip the scales between dark and light. Wicked Saints is the thrilling start to Emily A. Duncan’s devastatingly Gothic Something Dark and Holy trilogy. “This book destroyed me and I adored it.”- Stephanie Garber, New York Times bestselling author of Caraval This edition uses deckle edges; the uneven paper edge is intentional.
With swashbuckling action that recalls Dumas's Three Musketeers, Sebastien de Castell has created a dynamic new fantasy series. In Traitor's Blade, a disgraced swordsman struggles to redeem himself by protecting a young girl caught in the web of a royal conspiracy. The King is dead, the Greatcoats have been disbanded, and Falcio Val Mond and his fellow magistrates Kest and Brasti have been reduced to working as bodyguards for a nobleman who refuses to pay them. Things could be worse, of course. Their employer could be lying dead on the floor while they are forced to watch the killer plant evidence framing them for the murder. Oh wait, that's exactly what's happening. Now a royal conspiracy is about to unfold in the most corrupt city in the world. A carefully orchestrated series of murders that began with the overthrow of an idealistic young king will end with the death of an orphaned girl and the ruin of everything that Falcio, Kest, and Brasti have fought for. But if the trio want to foil the conspiracy, save the girl, and reunite the Greatcoats, they'll have to do it with nothing but the tattered coats on their backs and the swords in their hands, because these days every noble is a tyrant, every knight is a thug, and the only thing you can really trust is a traitor's blade.
In 1894 a Muslim mystic named Muḥammad al-Kattānī abandoned his life of asceticism to preach Islamic revival and jihad against the French. Ten years later, he mobilized a Moroccan resistance against French colonization. This book narrates the story of al-Kattānī and his virtual disappearance from accounts of modern Moroccan history.
Babylon in Revelation, is a key to proper understanding of "the end times." She is described as "the mother of harlots." Most commentators ignore the OT marriage covenant language of the term "harlot." It is assumed that a "harlot" was simply an immoral woman. Not so! As Temple effectively shows, in scripture, a harlot was a wife who had become unfaithful. This has tremendous implications for the dating and understanding of Revelation. Temple does a marvelous job of documenting the temporal setting, the language of marriage covenant and thus, the proper identity of the harlot city Babylon. This is a tremendously important book that you definitely want in your library!
2008 Catholic Press Association Award Winner! This magnificent new publication distinguishes itself from others by its comprehensiveness, and in its coverage of Eastern, as well as Western, saints. The book contains approximately 7,000 Saints and Blesseds. Entries are placed in alphabetical order according to name. Where there are numerous saints with the same name (for example John) these are now listed chronologically. The entries include date and place of birth and death as well as family background, education, activity for which the saint is remembered, and whether he/she is a patron saint. In order to be comprehensive, even possibly mythical saints are included 'Barbara, Christopher and Katherine of Alexandria, because their stories have been so important in art, literature and popular devotion. This is the most complete and accurate Dictionary of Saints available.
This book is an exploration of illness and healing experiences in contemporary society through the veneration of saints: primarily the twin doctors Saints Cosmas and Damian. It also follows the author's personal journey from her role as a hematologist who inadvertently served as an expert witness in a miracle to her research as a historian on the origins, meaning and functions of saints. Sources include interviews with devotees in both North America and Europe. Cosmas and Damian were martyred around the year 300 A.D. in what is now Syria. Called the "Anargyroi" (without silver) because they charged no fees, they became patrons of medicine, surgery, and pharmacy as their cult spread widely across Europe. The near eastern origin explains their popularity in Byzantine and Orthodox traditions and the concentration of their shrines in Eastern Europe, Southern Italy, and Sicily. The Medici family of Florence also viewed the "santi medici" as patrons, and their deeds were depicted by great Renaissance artists. In medical literature they are now revered as patrons of transplantation. Duffin's research focuses on how people have taken the saints with them as they moved within Italy and beyond. It also shows that their veneration is not confined to immigrant traditions, and that it fills important functions in health care and healing. Duffin's conclusions are situated within scholarship in medicine, medical history, sociology, anthropology, and popular religion; and intersect with the current medical debate over spiritual healing. This work springs from medical history and Roman Catholic traditions; however, it extends to general observations about the behaviors of sick people and about the formal responses to individual illness from collectivities in religion, medicine, and, indeed, history.
Many scholars, according to Bertram Wyatt-Brown, have mistakenly attributed the coming of the Civil War solely to the slaveholding South’s determination to retain black bondage as a means of economic and political advantage. That view, he maintains, too readily diminishes the ethical dynamics involved in the chasm between antebellum North and South. In Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners, Wyatt-Brown explores in a series of wide-ranging essays the ethical differences—epically with regard to honor, liberty, and slavery—that divided the two regions of the country. Slavery was, of course, the crucial issue in the conflict, but such moral concerns as honor and shame, conscience and guilt were inextricably a part of the dispute as well. Northerners, under abolitionist and antislavery guidance, came to regard slavery as a violation of American conscience and understandings of individuality, personal liberty and civic responsibility, whereas soothers adhered to an ethical scheme based on traditional concepts of honor. Wyatt-Brown suggests that to most southern whites the rubric of honor was much more than a matter of duels and political posturing. It was instead an integral part of the moral and cultural heritage of the region, affecting a variety of social relationships. Sometimes the dictates of honor were even more powerful than the Christian morality that nearly all Americans espoused. Using Stanley Elkins’ antislavery interpretation as a point of departure, Wyatt-Brown devotes the first part of the book to the abolitionists’ dynamic relationship to evangelical culture in which conscience, implanted in childhood, became the primary ethical code guiding reformers. In the most dramatic and probing chapter in this section, he shows how the violent “antinomian” John Brown capitalized on the tensions between Christian conscience and primal manhood to gratify his own and his fellow countrymen’s desire for righteous glory, albeit for noble ends. The second half of the book reveals the contrasting ethical spirit of the South, as explained in W.J. Cash’s Mind of the South. After placing the proslavery argument in the context of evangelical and, later, secular “modernity,” Wyatt-Brown analyzes the ethical texture of secessionism in one of the book’s most original and intriguing arguments. Differences over the meaning and applicability of honor and shame, he contends, played a major part in the South’s struggle in 1860 and 1861 over secession and the North’s response to it. Making abundant use of anthropological, sociological, and psychological insights, Bertram Wyatt-Brown offers here an interpretation of the causes of the Civil war that is both provocative and persuasive.
