Alex Harrington's genteel southern world shatters when two strangers drag her from a tourist bus while she's on vacation in Mexico City. She wakes on a grit-covered cement floor, head throbbing, looking up into the terrified faces of a dozen women and the brutal world of human trafficking. A champion runner, Alex escapes and returns to run her free clinic in North Carolina, haunted by the faces of the women she was unable to save. When a battered woman seeks refuge at her clinic, only to die moments later, Alex learns that human traffickers don't only exist in Mexico. They are operating even in her home town, targeting her, and she has no idea why. Alex wants answers, but when the trail leads back to those she loves the most, she finds that sometimes it's the most innocent and ordinary places that hide the most terrible secrets

Here is where she buried the bodies. She buried all the skeletons of her past in one location. She buried how she did it and even why she did it. The only thing that matters is that everything is buried, until everything is no longer concealed. All Almond ever wanted was to be happy, and she thinks she's found that happiness until time freezes one day as she steps from the hot, steamy shower into an icy reality. She notices the one thing that makes absolutely no sense in her life, until it strangely does. From there, all the joy and energy that she's put into that one special person for months on end escape her grasp, leaving her with no choice but to bury the body in front of everyone but while no one watches. While people attempt to gather all the pieces to a situation that appears open and shut, they are completely unaware that the answers lie before their very eyes. The answers are all right Here. If you’re going to kill them, bury them in plain sight.

Contemporary popular culture is riddled with references to Mexican drug cartels, narcos, and drug trafficking. In the United States, documentary filmmakers, journalists, academics, and politicians have taken note of the increasing threats to our security coming from a subculture that appears to feed on murder and brutality while being fed by a romanticism about power and capital. Carlos Alberto Sánchez uses Mexican narco-culture as a point of departure for thinking about the nature and limits of violence, culture, and personhood. A Sense of Brutality argues that violent cultural modalities, of which narco-culture is but one, call into question our understanding of “violence” as a concept. The reality of narco-violence suggests that “violence” itself is insufficient to capture it, that we need to redeploy and reconceptualize “brutality” as a concept that better captures this reality. Brutality is more than violence, other to cruelty, and distinct from horror and terror—all concepts that are normally used interchangeably with brutality, but which, as the analysis suggests, ought not to be. In narco-culture, the normalization of brutality into everyday life is a condition upon which the absolute erasure or derealization of people is made possible. "The study is original, bringing a wide range of voices into dialogue to present a problem that is pressing and deserving of careful analysis. The study will contribute to the field of Latin American philosophy in important ways... This is the only book by a philosopher on the topic of narco-culture, and I think it’s an important contribution to a topic that should be addressed by philosophers." —Elizabeth Millán, DePaul University

Now the subject of the Lifetime original movie An Amish Murder Sworn to Silence is the first in Linda Castillo's New York Times bestselling Kate Burkholder series. Some secrets are too terrible to reveal. Some crimes are too unspeakable to solve. . . . In Painters Mill, Ohio, the Amish and "English" residents have lived side by side for two centuries. But sixteen years ago, a series of brutal murders shattered the peaceful farming community. A young Amish girl named Kate Burkholder survived the terror of the Slaughterhouse Killer . . . but ultimately decided to leave her community. A wealth of experience later, Kate has been asked to return to Painters Mill as chief of police. Her Amish roots and big-city law enforcement background make her the perfect candidate. She's certain she's come to terms with her past—until the first body is discovered in a snowy field. Kate vows to stop the killer before he strikes again. But to do so, she must betray both her family and her Amish past—and expose a dark secret that could destroy her.