Galway private investigator Jack Taylor confronts an evil coterie named Headstone, who have committed a series of random, insane, violent crimes in Galway, Ireland.

A dark, edgy novel from a master of Irish crime fiction who “is threatening to become a mass cult figure in the U.S. as well as a critical favorite” (The Atlantic). An elderly priest is nearly beaten to death. A special-needs boy is brutally attacked. Evil has many guises, and private investigator Jack Taylor has encountered most of them. But nothing before has ever truly terrified him until he confronts a group calling itself Headstone, responsible for a series of random violent crimes in Galway, Ireland. As Headstone barrels along its deadly path right to the center of Taylor’s life, he will need to call upon his own capacity for brutality in order to stop them, in this suspenseful novel from a writer called “a Celtic Dashiell Hammett” (The Philadelphia Inquirer). “A nonstop rampage of intrigue, mayhem, lunacy and dark-dark-dark humor.” —Shelf Awareness

John Headston took a bad step 12 years ago, and it cost him his freedom and his career. But now that he’s been pardoned, and has reopened his Headstone Detective Agency, he’s ready to start again. But into his office walks the woman who was the reason he lost it all, and she wants to use him again. She wants him to find out who’s trying to kill her wealthy, older husband. Will Headston risk it all again, or will he realize the folly of that action and turn her down?

The Restoration and History of Confederate Graves in Atlanta's Oakland Cemetery

Intermingling architectural, cultural, and religious history, Louis Nelson reads Anglican architecture and decorative arts as documents of eighteenth-century religious practice and belief. In The Beauty of Holiness, he tells the story of the Church of England in colonial South Carolina, revealing how the colony's Anglicans negotiated the tensions between the persistence of seventeenth-century religious practice and the rising tide of Enlightenment thought and sentimentality. Nelson begins with a careful examination of the buildings, grave markers, and communion silver fashioned and used by early Anglicans. Turning to the religious functions of local churches, he uses these objects and artifacts to explore Anglican belief and practice in South Carolina. Chapters focus on the role of the senses in religious understanding, the practice of the sacraments, and the place of beauty, regularity, and order in eighteenth-century Anglicanism. The final section of the book considers the ways church architecture and material culture reinforced social and political hierarchies. Richly illustrated with more than 250 architectural images and photographs of religious objects, The Beauty of Holiness depends on exhaustive fieldwork to track changes in historical architecture. Nelson imaginatively reconstructs the history of the Church of England in colonial South Carolina and its role in public life, from its early years of ambivalent standing within the colony through the second wave of Anglicanism beginning in the early 1750s.

“Tom Piccirilli is the master of the Southern gothic, quietly building horror where the chills grow with increasing strangeness.”—Denver Post A haunted man must settle his accounts with the living—and the dead. . . . The night Johnny Danetello drove a dying girl through the streets of Brooklyn in his cab, he was trying to save her life. Instead he ran down a cop and lost her and his freedom. Every day in prison, Johnny knew that Angie Monticelli’s family blamed him for her death, and that going home would be suicide. But Johnny has unfinished business with his former friend turned mob boss, Vinny Monticelli. Now Johnny has returned to converse with the doomed and the dead—and wait for Vinny to make his move. Survivors of a long-ago freak accident, the two men share access to alternate realities no one else can know—and to a past and present that will all become the same in a city only one of them can leave alive. . . . “In a genre where twisted souls and violence are the norm, Piccirilli’s work stands out for how it blends these elements with a literate sensibility.”—Publishers Weekly BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Tom Piccirilli's The Last Kind Words.