From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series For Tres Navarre, English professor turned private investigator, business has lately taken a drastic turn south. But if chasing down bail jumpers, adulterous spouses, and workmen’s comp cases seemed like the dregs of the PI game, it was at least a living. Not as much could be said for tracking down a man like Will “the Ghost” Stirman. The stone-cold killer has just staged a bloody escape from the Floresville State Penitentiary with a gang of violent cons as spooked by Stirman as those on the outside who helped put him behind bars. And no one seems more worried than Navarre’s boss and mentor, Erainya Manos. It was her husband along with rival PI Sam Barrera who built the case that sent Stirman away. But Erainya’s husband is dead and she’s certain Stirman won’t let that stand in the way of his taking revenge against her and her adopted son. All of Navarre’s instincts are screaming that there’s more to this case than meets the eye. But Erainya won’t tell him—and Sam Barrera seems to be escaping into a strange twilight from a truth too terrible to remember. That leaves Tres to dig into a twisted mystery of greed, vigilantism, and murder, where lives are bought and sold and the line between guilt and innocence is razor-thin. Meanwhile, Stirman and his gang are coming, leaving behind them a trail of brutal, unforgiving violence that will end in an area of San Antonio known as Southtown—but that may soon just as well be called hell on earth. Don’t miss any of these hotter-than-Texas-chili Tres Navarre novels: BIG RED TEQUILA • THE WIDOWER’S TWO-STEP • THE LAST KING OF TEXAS • THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO AUSTIN • SOUTHTOWN • MISSION ROAD • REBEL ISLAND

For Irish Americans as well as for Chicago's other ethnic groups, the local parish once formed the nucleus of daily life. Focusing on the parish of St. Sabina's in the southwest Chicago neighborhood of Auburn-Gresham, Eileen McMahon takes a penetrating look at the response of Catholic ethnics to life in twentieth-century America. She reveals the role the parish church played in achieving a cohesive and vital ethnic neighborhood and shows how ethno-religious distinctions gave way to racial differences as a central point of identity and conflict. For most of this century the parish served as an important mechanism for helping Irish Catholics cope with a dominant Protestant-American culture. Anti-Catholicism in the society at large contributed to dependency on parishes and to a desire for separateness from the American mainstream. As much as Catholics may have wanted to insulate themselves in their parish communities, however, Chicago demographics and the fluid nature of the larger society made this ultimately impossible. Despite efforts at integration attempted by St. Sabina's liberal clergy, white parishioners viewed black migration into their neighborhood as a threat to their way of life and resisted it even as they relocated to the suburbs. The transition from white to black neighborhoods and parishes is a major theme of twentieth-century urban history. The experience of St. Sabina's, which changed from a predominantly Irish parish to a vibrant African-American Catholic community, provides insights into this social trend and suggests how the interplay between faith and ethnicity contributes to a resistance to change.

Throughout the United States, groups of individuals have been confronting the issues surrounding sexually explicit materials. Many have concurred in their perceptions of what is pornographic, have assessed pornography to be a problem our society must deal with, and have made organized efforts within their communities to stop or restrict the commercial availability of such materials. Citizens for Decency is an examination of two antipornography crusades, one in the Midwest and the other in the Southwest. It examines the evolution and impact of such crusades, the satisfaction derived from participating, and the relevant characteristics of the participants and their opponents. It is the first systematic, comprehensive, and theory-oriented study of antipornography crusades and one of the few studies that analyze movements to resist change. The book begins with the assumption that the term pornography is a value judgment and that the labeling of sexually explicit materials as “pornographic” can be adequately understood only in the wider context of sociological and psychological structures and processes. In approaching the antipornography crusades, Louis A. Zurcher and R. George Kirkpatrick gathered data by observation and document search and by interviews with persons well informed about and central to the crusades. Their examination of the organizations that directed the two movements is particularly extensive, and their comparative analysis of the two organizations allows them to determine which features are the most important, how these characteristics interact, and what their relationship is to the symbolic crusade. Among their important findings, the authors show that antipornography crusaders are people discontent with their status who have mobilized to protect the dominance and prestige of their traditional life styles. The participants in the crusades are shown to differ from their opponents in a number of significant ways. In the final chapters, the authors analyze their findings with reference to social movement theory and offer predictions concerning future symbolic crusades.