What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Especially murder. Nikki Tate is infamous, even by Las Vegas standards. Her dad is sitting on death row, convicted of killing his best friend in a gambling dispute turned ugly. And for five years, he's maintained his innocence. But Nikki wants no part of that. She's been working on Operation Escape Vegas: playing in illegal card games so she can save up enough money to get out come graduation day.Then her dad's murder conviction is overturned. The new evidence seems to come out of nowhere and Nikki's life becomes a mess when he's released from prison. Because the dad who comes home is not the dad she remembers. And he's desperately obsessed with finding out who framed him-and why.As her dad digs into the seedy underbelly of Vegas, the past threatens everything and Nikki is drawn into his deadly hunt for the truth. But in the city of sin, some sinners will do anything to keep their secrets, and Nikki soon finds herself playing for the biggest gamble ever-her life.

A compelling account of Christianity’s Jewish beginnings, from one of the world’s leading scholars of ancient religion How did a group of charismatic, apocalyptic Jewish missionaries, working to prepare their world for the impending realization of God's promises to Israel, end up inaugurating a movement that would grow into the gentile church? Committed to Jesus’s prophecy—“The Kingdom of God is at hand!”—they were, in their own eyes, history's last generation. But in history's eyes, they became the first Christians. In this electrifying social and intellectual history, Paula Fredriksen answers this question by reconstructing the life of the earliest Jerusalem community. As her account arcs from this group’s hopeful celebration of Passover with Jesus, through their bitter controversies that fragmented the movement’s midcentury missions, to the city’s fiery end in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, she brings this vibrant apostolic community to life. Fredriksen offers a vivid portrait both of this temple-centered messianic movement and of the bedrock convictions that animated and sustained it.

The Adapa myth is a literary work of ancient Mesopotamia with different versions in Sumerian and Akkadian. According to the Adapa myth, the sage and cook from Eridu goes fishing to the Persian Gulf, where the South Wind capsizes his boat. The sage's curse breaks the wing of the South Wind. Adapa lies seven days in the ocean, whence he is summoned to heaven, to be positively judged by the sky god Anu. The present book investigates the literary development of the Adapa myth and argues that it represents an exorcistic version of the flood story with the protagonist as priest. In the Adapa myth, the primordial sage survives the flood, which serves as ideological background for exorcism, ─ ┼ ip┼1/2tu. The exorcist, who used fire and water as sanitizing substances during the rituals, impersonated Adapa, who had gone through an extreme form of purification himself. Adapa's critical period in the sea was the symbolic etiology for illnesses, difficult births, witchcraft, bad omens, sin, and imprisonment, which the exorcist was able to counter. The deluge was a symbol of water ordeal and judgment, for which the exorcist's assistance was sought. Because Adapa was given rebirth from his disaster, the human exorcist as his embodiment possessed the powers of the flood in manipulating the purifying substances and incantations against all misfortune. The identity constituting narrative of ancient Mesopotamian exorcism is explored with a methodology combining the intertextual studies with cognitive neuroscience.

The year is 2021, and abortion is illegal in the United States. A young, unidentified female is found dead from an alleged "termination" in an abandoned tenement. The girl is identified as the daughter of a conservative, right-wing senator. "Overturned!" takes an extremely controversial issue and wraps it in fiction. The novel attempts to answer the question, "What if?" and finds that we should be very careful what we ask for, as we may actually get it. "Overturned!" does not take a moral position but unravels the complicated emotions humans face when personally dealing with such issues. A senator who helped outlaw abortion is faced with the devastating news that his only daughter died from an illegal termination. As the case is investigated, we find that love is the ultimate factor in transcending all political, religious, and social opinions. "Overturned!" is a political thriller that combines the business of politics, social reform, and conspiracy into a story that brings us full circle on the issue of reproductive rights.

Imagine being convicted of a crime you didn't commit and spending years behind bars. Since 1989 more than 1,400 Americans who experienced this injustice have been exonerated. Some of the people who have won their freedom include Ronald Cotton, who was falsely convicted of raping a college student; Nicole Harris, who was unjustly imprisoned for the death of her son; and intellectually disabled Earl Washington Jr., who was unfairly sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a young mother. Wrongful convictions shatter lives and harm society by allowing real perpetrators to potentially commit additional crimes. How can such injustices happen? Overturning Wrongful Convictions recounts stories of individuals who served someone else's prison time due to mistaken eyewitness identification, police misconduct, faulty forensic science, poor legal representation, courtroom mistakes, and other factors. You'll learn about the legal processes that can lead to unjust convictions and about the Innocence Project and other organizations dedicated to righting these wrongs. The sciences—including psychology, criminology, police science, and forensic science—work hand in hand with the legal system to prosecute and punish those people whose actions break laws. Those same sciences can also be used to free people who have been wrongfully convicted. As a society, can we learn from past mistakes to avoid more unjust convictions?

The history of Protestant mission in the world has unfolded in step with the history of the modern marketplace, defining missions success in marketplace terms. Scott Bessenecker points toward a view of missions freed of false attachments to material paradigms and tailored toward a kingdom vision.

Even in murder, the music lives on. When rising star Paris Secord (aka DJ ParSec) is found dead on her turntables, it sends the local music scene reeling. No one is feeling that grief more than her shunned pre-fame best friend, Kya, and ParSec's chief groupie, Fuse -- two sworn enemies who happened to be the ones who discovered her body. The police have few leads, and when the trail quickly turns cold, the authorities don't seem to be pushing too hard to investigate further. But nobody counted on Paris's deeply loyal fans, ParSec Nation, or the outrage that would drive Fuse and Kya to work together. As ParSec Nation takes to social media and the streets in their crusade for justice, Fuse and Kya start digging into Paris's past, stumbling across a deadly secret. With new info comes new motives. New suspects. And a fandom that will stop at nothing in their obsessive quest for answers, not even murder...

"Now with a new afterword by the author"--Back cover.

Three centuries after Columbus, uprisings in South America still held out the hope of a Pachacuti, or world-turning, which would reverse the fortunes of the Spanish and the Indians. One such revolt in the eighteenth-century Kingdom of Quito entwines the lives of three people in a story of desire and unextinguished hope that mirrors the complex relations between conquerors and the conquered. For Santiago Huamán the revolt sparks a quest to become a medicine man; for young Ana Alfaro it brings exile and an illicit love affair; and for the Jesuit inquisitor Gregorio Moncada, it precipitates spiritual doubt. From the baroque city of Quito to a remote hacienda in South America's largest crater, Pachacuti: World Overturned captures the grandeur and decay of the Spanish Empire on the eve of disintegration.

"Maureen Baird-Murray tells her story with astonishing, but convincing, recall and with a childlike freshness which vividly recaptures the time and place." THE SPECTATOR "This wholly delightful book belongs on the shelf beside that other classic of childhood, Mi Mi Khaing's Burmese Family." COUNTRY LIFE Stationed in Burma in the early 1930s, young Edward Rossiter, Assistant Superintendent of Lashio, married a beautiful peasant girl. When their daughter, Maureen, was only four, she was left at an English speaking convent school. The child, bewildered and lonely, spoke no English. Maureen was shuttled between the idyll of her peasant grandparents' bamboo house and the fierce discipline of the Italian nuns at school. At the end of one term no one came for her. Gradually almost all the children disappeared from school until only three girls and the ten nuns remained. When the Japanese arrived, the Mother Superior was dragged out at bayonet point. Maureen's book describes life under Japanese occupation as seen by a nine-year-old; the arrival of the British; and, with the war's end, the devastating news that she is an orphan. The final twist to the story is as unexpected as it is heartening. This is a completely captivating narrative. Cover designed by Justinia Baird-Murray