When her elderly mother suffers a stroke, Ivy Lutz leaves her life as a Buddhist nun in Sri Lanka and returns home to northern California. Her sheltered life is blasted apart by a series of murders, which she attempts to solve with the help of a smitten detective. She understands why someone might want to kill her stepfather, who it turns out is a smuggler on the run, but what about her mother? Was she was murdered, too? As Ivy struggles to live by her Buddhist principles and employ her mindfulness skills, she discovers they both hinder and help in her search for the truth.

The author of Feather Crowns examines the girl detective in her various guises--including Cherry Ames, Nancy Drew, and Trixie Belden--in a work first published in 1975 recalling a rural youth spent longing for mysteries. Reprint. UP.

A collection of thirty short crime stories set in Texas by a variety of writers, including Kinky Friedman, Mary Willis Walker, and Carolyn Hart.

Modern politics is highly science-dependent and knowledge-driven. What is the rightful role of expert knowledge in political life? How can the truth claims of science be reconciled with principles of democratic control and lay participatory rights in decision-making? This collection of essays by political scientists, sociologists and economists from Germany, France and Norway provides different empirical and theoretical analyses of the complex organising and legitimising power of knowledge in political governance. The authors shed light on key dimensions and dilemmas that have shaped the world-changing interrelations between politics, social institutions and scientific knowledge in the past century. The contributions cover issue-areas and policy-fields such as population control, health economics, ICTs and higher education reform, and the politics of productivity and economic pre-eminence.

Anxiety about the threat of atheism was rampant in the early modern period, yet fully documented examples of openly expressed irreligious opinion are surprisingly rare. England and Scotland saw only a handful of such cases before 1750, and this book offers a detailed analysis of three of them. Thomas Aikenhead was executed for his atheistic opinions at Edinburgh in 1697; Tinkler Ducket was convicted of atheism by the Vice-Chancellor's court at the University of Cambridge in 1739; whereas Archibald Pitcairne's overtly atheist tract, Pitcairneana, though evidently compiled very early in the eighteenth century, was first published only in 2016. Drawing on these, and on the better-known apostacy of Christopher Marlowe and the Earl of Rochester, Michael Hunter argues that such atheists showed real 'assurance' in publicly promoting their views. This contrasts with the private doubts of Christian believers, and this book demonstrates that the two phenomena are quite distinct, even though they have sometimes been wrongly conflated.