Swiss homicide detective Angeline Devereux arrives on the scene of a murder in gloomy Lindenhof Park. The victim’s lifeless body is found shoved inside the wooden box normally home to the oversized wooden chess pieces for the outdoor chessboard. Devereux’s obsession to uncover the identity of the murdered man takes her to a small Czech village where the mystery continues to take bizarre twists and turns. Discovering a revenge plot between the victim and one of her suspects, she makes her way to a monastery, where she encounters a band of bow wielding monks. Once the hunter, she is now the prey. While back in Zurich, as Devereux works on solving the murder, she also struggles to resolve her own internal demons and an evil past that continues to torment her. Written with extraordinary detail and authenticity, Femme Devereux is a spellbinding page-turner, sure to entrance all armchair detectives.

A dark paranormal romance/urban fantasy with sex, mystery and humor--the ultimate vampire chick lit Kismet Knight is a young psychologist with a growing clinical practice, and she's always looking for something to give her the edge in her chosen career. When her new client turns out to be a Goth teenager who desperately wants to become a vampire, Kismet is inspired to become the vampire shrink, offering her services to people who believe they are undead. Kismet herself, as a scientist, knows it's hokum, but she's looking at it in a purely psychoanalytic light, already imagining the papers she's going to write on this strange subculture. That's until she meets the leader of a vampire coven, a sexy, mysterious man who claims to be a powerful 800-year-old vampire, and she is pulled into a whirlwind of inexplicable events that start her questioning everything she once believed about the paranormal.

At the age of fourteen, Marciano kills a pedophilic abbot with the sharpened point of a crucifix, driving him to take refuge in a remote mountain villa in Corsica, devoted to training assassins and forcing him into a career as a notorious assassin known as The Crucifix. Later, he attempts to break free of his French Milieu masters and is pursued from Morocco to Paris, the Greek island of Mykonos, Messina, and finally, the Spanish Sahara. Throughout, he strives to find a belief, not in God so much, but in something more significant, his true nature.

An adventure tale with murder, intrigue, treasure and romance—amid intimations of a past where Phoenician triremes sailed the Mediterranean Sea—set in 1957 strife-ridden Lebanon. It follows freelance journalist Matthew Thorne from Montreal, Paris, and Beirut to Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, in pursuit of the murder of an old, mercurial college friend.

Transforming the Void: Embryological Discourse and Reproductive Imagery in East Asian Religions considers paths to self-cultivation and salvation that are patterned on human embryological development or procreative imagery in the religions of China and Japan. Focusing on Taoism, Esoteric Buddhism, Shinto, Shugendō, and local religious traditions, the contributors to the volume provide new insight into how the body’s generative processes are harnessed as powerful metaphors for spiritual attainment. This volume offers an in-depth examination of the religious dimensions of embryology and reproductive imagery, topics that have been hitherto solely approached through the lens of the history of medicine. Contributors include: Brigitte Baptandier, Catherine Despeux, Grégoire Espesset, Christine Mollier, Fabrizio Pregadio, Dominic Steavu, Lucia Dolce, Bernard Faure, Iyanaga Nobumi, Anna Andreeva, Kigensan Licha, Gaynor Sekimori.

'Dramma per musica', the most usual term for Italian serious opera from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, was a modern, enlightened form of theater that presented a unified, artistically designed, dramatic enactment of human stories, expressed by the voice and underscored by the orchestra. This book illustrates the diversity of this baroque art form and explains how it has given us opera as we know it.