From the mysterious confidence of Cal Turner to the irrepressible insouciance of Kathryn Blake, very little is what it seems. There are stones with a secret and stones with a purpose, answers found and answers withheld, eleven little tales of lies told and lies uncovered ... some with more excuse than others.

In Honest Patriots, renowned public theologian and ethicist Donald W. Shriver, Jr. argues that we must acknowledge and repent of the morally negative events in our nation's past. The failure to do so skews the relations of many Americans to one another, breeds ongoing hostility, and damages the health of our society. Yet our civic identity today largely rests on denials, forgetfulness, and inattention to the memories of neighbors whose ancestors suffered great injustices at the hands of some dominant majority. Shriver contends that repentance for these injustices must find a place in our political culture. Such repentance must be carefully and deliberately cultivated through the accurate teaching of history, by means of public symbols that embody both positive and negative memory, and through public leadership to this end. Religious people and religious organizations have an important role to play in this process. Historically, the Christian tradition has concentrated on the personal dimensions of forgiveness and repentance to the near-total neglect of their collective aspects. Recently, however, the idea of collective moral responsibility has gained new and public visibility. Official apologies for past collective injustice have multiplied, along with calls for reparations. Shriver looks in detail at the examples of Germany and South Africa, and their pioneering efforts to foster and express collective repentance. He then turns to the historic wrongs perpetrated against African Americans and Native Americans and to recent efforts by American citizens and governmental bodies to seek public justice by remembering public injustice. The call for collective repentance presents many challenges: What can it mean to morally master a past whose victims are dead and whose sufferings cannot be alleviated? What are the measures that lend substance to language and action expressing repentance? What symbolic and tangible acts produce credible turns away from past wrongs? What are the dynamics-psychological, social, and political-whereby we can safely consign an evil to the past? How can public life witness to corporate crimes of the past in such a way that descendents of victims can be confident that they will never be repeated? In his provocative answers to these questions Shriver creates a compelling new vision of the collective repentance and apology that must precede real progress in relations between the races in this country.

Dogwood trees are blooming, migrating birds are arriving, and spring has finally made it to the village of Riley Creek, Tennessee. Martha Sloane, owner of Birds ‘n’ Beans coffee and birding shop and recently-elected President of the Retailers’ Collective, are preparing to host the First Annual Nature Writers’ Retreat. Feathers are ruffled when the keynote speaker goes belly up, the murder is pinned on one of Martha’s BFFs, and Martha is pressed back into service to solve the case. Can Martha enlist Mother Nature’s help to track down the killer and spring her gal pal before Mary Jane is sent to the slammer for good?

Lord Tristan Adair is a highly capable young Englishman. Born into a privileged class, circumstances have convened to make survival a grim strugglethough not in the ordinary way. He takes over the maintenance of an estate in Ireland at the request of his uncle. While there, he is made uncomfortably aware that some personmaybe more than oneis determined to murder him. Riona Murdock has a harrowing and tragic past. Her uncle, William Murdock, had jealously coveted his brothers wife for years. He arranges for Rionas home to be burned, her father to be murdered in cold blood, and her mother to die of grief. Rionas brother is set to sail on a slave ship bound for Australia. As for herself, she gets to marry the man who played a significant part in the events which destroyed her family. Or so her uncle tells her.

When the remains of a previously missing man are unearthed at a construction site, Jake Connors is forced to deal with a past that he had hoped to never see again. Jake's world comes crashing down just as he is on the verge of fulfilling his career dream as a college football coach. Jake finds himself in a struggle not only over inner anguish but also for life itself.

Contains papers from several 1992 conferences, directed toward a general audience wanting to learn more about the complexities of the US-Mexico relationship. Contributors concentrate less on technical details and more on explanations of events and individual and national motives. They focus on the Mexican experience, dissecting political, social, and economic differences between the countries and tracing the relationship from its beginnings to the present day. Subjects include the loss of Texas from a Mexican perspective, the US government versus the 1910-1917 Mexican Revolution, and Mexican immigration. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Fred and Bessie grow up almost as brother and sister on neighboring orchards. As was expected of them they marry and have a family but as soon as they able to they escape the relentless monotony of farm life and purchase a rundown motel. Through hard work they turn it into a successful business and their dreams are about to come true. George and Edith are a predatory young couple out to take what they feel the world owes them, and now they set their sights on new victims. By the time George and Edith have had their fun, Fred and Bessie will have lost their livelihoods, their possessions ... and their lives. But George's callous greed has created a new set of problems: Jimmy and Lucy will stop at nothing to avenge the destruction of their parents. As they move closer to their revenge, George and Edith worry that secrets they'd rather keep buried will surface. But when George focuses on the troublesome siblings his attempts to silence them fails. His failures and antics do not go unnoticed by George's corrupt business associates and now the predator becomes the prey. Edith is now the one seeking revenge—but can she avenge her murdered husband and regain her own self-respect before her enemies exact their own revenge?

Business in ruins: one. Money in the bank: $4.82. Crime scene: one and counting. Sadie Quinn’s been down on her luck before, but never like this, and the moment of folly that forces her to go on the run has pushed her out of the fire and into a thermo-nuclear disaster. Fleeing to the one place she knows she can get her life back on track – her grandfather’s small-town home – presents a complication: The Misdeeds List. Her grandfather’s non-negotiable condition for letting her live with him is that she must help him relive the misdemeanours of his youth. The problem is, the wilder the acts become, the more attention she gains from the handsome local cop, and for all the wrong reasons. At first Sadie thinks the misdemeanours are just random acts of madness brought on by an elderly mind that’s beginning to lose its hold on reality. But as she helps her grandfather tick off the items on his list, she begins to see the pieces of a puzzle slotting together – a puzzle that offers clues to her own troubled past. Now, not only does Sadie need to redeem herself to win the right kind of handsome-cop attention, she must also commit one last and spectacular misdeed to fit the final piece of the puzzle into place. Something has to give. The Misdeeds of Sadie Quinn is the third of four stand-alone novels in the award-winning Good Life series.