Cupiditas: Evil's Root is set in South America. Like the author's political thriller In Deep, it is full of twists and turns, romance and adventure, with dark underpinnings that show how powerful, ruthless political and corporate structures cast shadows over the lives of all of us. In this exciting mystery, you'll meet fascinating characters you'll never forget: Drug lords, mass murderers, a courageous old grandfather, and two young Americans brave enough to confront the greatest power on earth.

FINALIST IN THE 2014 NATIONAL INDIE EXCELLENCE AWARDWhen American expat journalist Steve Collins sets off for the middle of the Amazon Jungle to cover a plane crash with a U.S senator aboard, he has no idea how his life is about to change. The Peruvian military is claiming the Shining Path rebel insurgency launched a missile attack on the aircraft, and the U.S. embassy is backing the military's claim. Steve's editor informs him that Jennifer Strand, a gorgeous, spunky young journalist embedded with the U.S. embassy, will be accompanying him to the crash site. Though wide apart in their political views, they manage to set aside their differences as they attempt to unravel the dark mystery behind the senator's death. Their investigation places them at the heart of the conflict between the rebels and the Peruvian government while taking them on a terrifying adventure in which they uncover shocking truths that transform their perceptions of the world and of themselves. Evil's Root is not just a political thriller. It is a powerful tale of romance and courage, of dark intrigues and harrowing revelations, of absolute power and secular evil. But more than anything, it is an encomium to brave souls, past and present, who have shown the will and moral commitment to confront the dark forces that threaten civilized life.

In Augustine and the Functions of Concupiscence, Timo Nisula offers a comprehensive analysis of Augustine’s developing views of sinful desire. The book demonstrates how and why concupiscence became such a pregnant concept in Augustine’s theology and philosophy.

Demonstrating how Chaucer uses the Bible in The Canterbury Tales as an authoritative literary source and model for his own literary production, this book explores the ways in which the Bible was a key tool for Chaucer's self-definition and innovation as an author. Chad Schrock unravels Chaucer's Tales in the light of topics important to biblical reception in 14th-century England: authority, textuality, interpretation, translation, rephrasing and marginalia. When the Canterbury Tales are summed up in this way, they show the great extent to which Chaucer was drawing upon the Bible as a meta-poetical resource for his own poetry – its fictional tale-tellers and characters, its quotations, allusions and images, its plots, its imaginative engagement with an audience of listeners and readers, and its hidden intentions. Schrock demonstrates that the Bible is a uniquely potent literary source for Chaucer because it combines infinite authority and plenitude with unprecedented freedom of interpretive invention. As a world-making text, the Bible's authority includes the literary as subcategory but surpasses and contextualizes it, which gives Chaucer's deferential biblical invention a different kind of freedom and safety. Within Chaucer's tales, a biblical image is often where a given narrative peaks and its plot comes clear, but a biblical world also and without strain contains his biblical fictioneers and whatever they make from the Bible, whether orthodoxy or heresy, whether sin or worship.

The Wrath that Came alludes to the preaching of John the Baptist in Mt. 3:7, which serves as the starting point for an analysis of evil and wrath in contemporary society. After establishing the undeniable and inexplicable reality of evil, this book discusses the futile attempts to reconcile evil with the reality of God as well as the modern secularization of evil through psychology, medicine, and philosophy. The primitive concept of divine wrath as “brimstone and fire” is presented, but then rejected in favour of the insight of the Apostle Paul. According to Paul, the wrath of God is manifested not in catastrophic events, but rather in his withdrawal – the silent response to evil. Finally, an analysis of the self demonstrates that evil and wrath have both an individual and a societal dimension.

Augustine's Early Thought on the Redemptive Function of Divine Judgement considers the relationship between Augustine's account of God's judgment and his theology of grace in his early works. How does God use his law and the penal consequences of its transgression in the service of his grace, both personally and through his 'agents' on earth? Augustine reflected on this question from different perspectives. As a teacher and bishop, he thought about the nature of discipline and punishment in the education of his pupils, brothers, and congregants. As a polemicist against the Manichaeans and as a biblical expositor, he had to grapple with issues regarding God's relationship to evil in the world, the violence God displays in the Old Testament, and in the death of his own Son. Furthermore, Augustine meditated on the way God's judgment and grace related in his own life, both before and after his conversion. Bart van Egmond follows the development of Augustine's early thought on judgment and grace from the Cassiacum writings to the Confessions. The argument is contextualized both against the background of the earlier Christian tradition of reflection on the providential function of divine chastisement, and the tradition of psychagogy that Augustine inherited from a variety of rhetorical and philosophical sources. This study expertly contributes to the ongoing scholarly discussion on the development of Augustine's doctrine of grace, and to the conversation on the theological roots of his justification of coercion against the Donatists.