In The Trial of Stephen Alan Watson studies the first Christian martyr, who was stoned to death by a mob outside of Jerusalem around A.D. 36 during his trial by the supreme rabbinic court for blasphemy against the Jewish faith. Watson focuses on Stephen's enthralling defense speech, as found solely in the Acts of Apostles, which is both the pivotal and, until now, least understood part of the fatal proceedings. Watson locates the speech in the well-known genre of criminal trial defenses, which shows that the conduct of the accused was either justified or needs no justification and that the prosecutors themselves are the real wrongdoers. Noting Stephen's departure from mainstream early Christian thought and the enmity he brought down upon all Christians, Watson suggests that Stephen was perhaps not only Christianity's first martyr, but also its first heretic.

A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice • Rex Stout meets Agatha Christie with a fresh twist in the new Pentecost and Parker Mystery, a delightfully hardboiled high-wire act starring two daring women sleuths dead set on justice as they set out to solve a murder at a traveling circus “A delight.... It’s a pleasure to watch [Pentecost and Parker] sifting through red herrings and peeling secrets back like layers of an onion.” The New York Times Book Review Someone’s put a blade in the back of the Amazing Tattooed Woman, and Willowjean “Will” Parker’s former knife-throwing mentor has been stitched up for the crime. To uncover the truth, Will and her boss, world-famous detective Lillian Pentecost, travel to the circus, where they find a snake pit of old grudges, small-town crime, and secrets worth killing for. Will called Hart & Halloway’s Traveling Circus and Sideshow home for five years, and Ruby Donner, the circus’s tattooed ingenue, was her friend. To make matters worse, the prime suspect is Valentin Kalishenko, the man who taught Will everything she knows about putting a knife where it needs to go. To uncover the real killer and keep Kalishenko from a date with the electric chair, Will and Ms. Pentecost join the circus in sleepy Stoppard, Virginia, where the locals like their cocktails mild, the past buried, and big-city detectives not at all. The two swiftly find themselves lost in a funhouse of lies as Will begins to realize that her former circus compatriots aren’t playing it straight, and that her murdered friend might have been hiding a lot of secrets beneath all that ink.

Here is a timely and important book for anyone concerned about the future of bilingual education in America. Written by Stephen Krashen, the nation's foremost expert on second language acquisition, it disproves many of the false assumptions and outright distortions that led to the passage of Proposition 227 in California. Now, as some of those same arguments proliferate in other states, Krashen explains the bases for five of these key beliefs, and proves-step-by-step-why they are wrong: Bilingual education is responsible for the high Hispanic dropout rate. In fact, studies show reduced and even no difference in dropout rates when background factors are controlled. Most immigrants succeeded without bilingual education. Krashen argues that many immigrants arrived here having had a de facto bilingual education in their countries of origin; and that until the last half of this century, economic success was not so strongly dependent on school success. The United States is the only nation that has bilingual education. There is ample evidence of bilingual programs not only existing, but also succeeding in countries like Norway and the Netherlands. Bilingual education failed in California. The author explores flaws in the methods of various studies and counters with other reasons why bilingual education students may not thriveNincluding widespread poverty and lack of reading materials. The public is against bilingual education. This argument, propagated by the media, proves false when one examines the biased language used in survey after survey. In its careful delineation of the real issues, Condemned Without a Trial gives educators, administrators, parents, and voters the essential understanding-and evidence-they have heretofore been denied.

“This strange, subtle story of father-son disaffection and disjointed love is told with [Jones’s] signature narrative inventiveness and dark humor.” —Kris Saknussemm, author of Private Midnight If drinking mercury from a thermometer didn’t kill him, maybe spray painting in an unventilated garage would. Or so Nolan’s father thought. One inspired yet failed suicide attempt after another, each with a note to his son—with only a hint of accusation. But as Nolan sits in an empty office building, the last customer service employee for a nearly obsolete video game, those many suicide notes come back to haunt him. As do the levels of the game that no one plays anymore. And now a homicide detective is on the phone. Maybe his father was right when he wrote that he was teaching Nolan not to give up, that the only way to understand what happened was to make it to the end of the game. But there’s no cheatcode that’s going to get Nolan through this . . . “Two unreliable narrators, a bunch of suicide letters, and a plot that collapses on itself just like the characters do—Stephen Graham Jones is our contemporary Jorge Luis Borges.” —Michael Kimball, author of Big Ray “Like Lethem and Murakami before him, Jones mines his genre fiction past to bring us a work of startling literary merit. Mystery, horror, sci-fi: the ingredients are all in there.” —David Goodwillie, author of Kings County “[A] stark exploration of guilt, grief, and fear. . . . And did I mention that it’s funny? Unplug your consoles, kids, and play this book.” —Zack Wentz, author of The Garbageman and the Prostitute

Acts is the sequel to Luke's gospel and tells the story of Jesus's followers during the 30 years after his death. It describes how the 12 apostles, formerly Jesus's disciples, spread the message of Christianity throughout the Mediterranean against a background of persecution. With an introduction by P.D. James

In the spring of 2007, a brilliant computer programmer named Hans Reiser stands accused of murdering his estranged wife, Nina. Despite a mountain of circumstantial evidence against him, he proclaims his innocence. The case takes a twist when Nina's former lover, and Hans's former best friend, Sean Sturgeon, confesses to eight unrelated murders that no one has ever heard of.At the time of Sturgeon's confession, Stephen Elliot is paralyzed by writer's block, in the thrall of Adderall dependency, and despondent over the state of his romantic life. But he is fascinated by Sturgeon, whose path he has often crossed in San Francisco's underground S&M scene. What kind of person, he wonders, confesses to a murder he likely did not commit? One answer is, perhaps, a man like Elliott's own father.So begins a riveting journey through a neon landscape of false confessions, self-medication, and torturous sex. Set against the backdrop of a nation at war, in the declining years of the Silicon Valley tech boom and the dawn of Paris Hilton's celebrity, The Adderall Diaries is at once a gripping account of a murder trial and a scorching investigation of the self. Tough, tender, and unflinchingly honest, it is the breakout book by one of the most daring writers of his generation.