When seventeen-year-old Jill Hanson and two of her friends witness a fatal pedestrian accident, Jill sets out to prove that the victim was predestined to suffer that fate. Her belief is based on her classroom reading of Thorton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Several weeks later, she has another opportunity to investigate the same theory. A well-liked teacher in her high school is brutally murdered. As this story unfolds, she becomes acquainted with a small-town newspaper reporter, Josh Solomon, who is investigating why everyone in authority, including his own editor/publisher, appears to want any interest in the murder of Teresa Owens to simply go away. Although approaching the subject from widely disparate perspectives, both want similar results. In Josh's case, it is justice for a murder victim while Jill is searching for an answer to the deep philosophical question raised in Wilder's book. Do we live by accident and die by accident, or do we live by plan and die by plan? Why are so many people set on making Teresa disappear?

One night Teresa decides to change the way she deals with men, especially when meeting them for the first time. She wants to experience old-fashioned romance from the get-go. Teresa meets Erik on a Saturday night and sees the opportunity to have the love she longs for with him. But will Erik be able to give her what she desires?

A refreshingly modern reconsideration of Saint Teresa (1515-1582), one of the greatest mystics and reformers to emerge within the sixteenth-century Catholic Church, whose writings are a keystone of modern mystical thought. From the very beginning of her life in a convent, following the death of her mother and the marriage of her older sister, it was clear that Teresa's expansive nature, intensity, and energy would not be easily confined. Cathleen Medwick shows us a powerful daughter of the Church and her times who was a very human mass of contradictions: a practical and no-nonsense manager, and yet a flamboyant and intrepid presence who bent the rules of monastic life to accomplish her work--while managing to stay one step ahead of the Inquisition. And she exhibited a very personal brand of spirituality, often experiencing raptures of an unorthodox, arguably erotic, nature that left her frozen in one position for hours, unable to speak. Out of a concern for her soul and her reputation, her superiors insisted that she account for every voice and vision, as well as the sins that might have engendered them, thus giving us the account of her life that is now considered a literary masterpiece. Medwick makes it clear that Teresa considered her major work the reform of the Carmelites, an enterprise requiring all her considerable persuasiveness and her talent for administration. We see her moving about Spain with the assurance (if not the authority) of a man, in spite of debilitating illness, to establish communities of nuns who lived scrupulously devout lives, without luxuries. In an era when women were seldom taken seriously, she even sought and received permission to found two religious houses for men. In this fascinating account Cathleen Medwick reveals Teresa as both more complex and more comprehensible than she has seemed in the past. She illuminates for us the devout and worldly woman behind the centuries-old iconography of the saint.

South Africa needs no introduction to the global narratives of violence and crimes against women and children. With reported sexual offences exceeding 60000 and incidents of murder totalling 17805 for the 2014/2015 period, our countrys notoriety in this arena contributes to the landscape within which The Symbol of No Escape plays out. As forensic thriller The Symbol of No Escape is an emergent property of qualities that not too many authors are able to harness. These include Dr Tanya Robinsons practical experience and extensive work with the abused child, her knowledge in forensic psychopathology and her laudable scholarly credentials that underpins each page with legitimacy whilst powerfully infusing the characters of protagonist Dr Claire and villain Dann Carmen. The reader is systematically drawn in and absorbed in the lifeworld of Dr Claire, a profiler and expert assessor who is tasked to create a profile that would help close the case against depraved child serial murderer and family killer, Dann Carmen. His crimes are brutal and bizarre, yet Dr Claires assertion that Dann instils no fear in me paves the way for explicating her goal which is to establish what contributed to him becoming a monster (Marcel Van der Watt, University of South Africa, Department of Police Practice).

This volume is the first translation of Romano Bilenchi’s 1940 masterpiece to appear in English. This is surprising since The Conservatory of Santa Teresa is much more than an invaluable historical document of life in provincial Tuscany around the time of the First World War. It is truly one of the most important works of fiction published in Italy under Fascism. In telling of the pre-adolescent Sergio’s encounter with the larger world of sex, politics, and the violence and cruelty of adult life, Bilenchi succeeds in representing a universal paradigm, that of the clash of innocence with experience. But what makes Sergio’s trajectory unique is that he goes through it in the company of three extraordinary women who are at once femmes fatales and benevolent guides: his mother, his aunt, and his tutor, all almost unbearably beautiful, as least in Sergio’s eyes. These women, plus the dazzling landscape of the Sienese countryside as captured by Bilenchi, make Sergio’s journey an enviable even if sometimes painful and bewildering experience.