There is a serial killer loose on Maui, one with a very particular twist.Cassandra Yeats-Thomason is married to one of the world’s richest men, and to the outside world her life is a dream set on the tropical island of Maui. Anything she desires she can have.But what she really wants is a new future. And that requires Cassandra first shed her present.The problem is, the dream is in reality a nightmare filled with secrets - the type of secrets from which a person cannot just walk away - so, Cassandra formulates a plan and reaches into her distant past for help.William Langdon is an ex-Chicago cop with a notorious past and a personal life turned upside down.William is operating a small private detective agency in New Orleans with his partner and ex-wife, Sandy, when Cassandra saunters into his office seeking his assistance years after she turned her back on him and walked out of his life.Mesmerized by Cassie from the day they met in high school, William considers her the one unfinished chapter in his life.And she considers him the perfect man for her plan.

At noon, on October 25, the Transcontinental Express left Geneva Station with almost a thousand people aboard. Their destination: Basel, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Stockholm. A thrilling adventure ensues as top-secret American military authorities struggle to thwart a highly contagious bacteria carried by one of the train's passengers.

What story would Eve have told about picking the apple? Why is Pandora blamed for opening the box? And what about the fate of Cassandra who was blessed with knowing the future but cursed so that no one believed her? What if women had been the storytellers? Elizabeth Lesser believes that if women’s voices had been equally heard and respected throughout history, humankind would have followed different hero myths and guiding stories—stories that value caretaking, champion compassion, and elevate communication over vengeance and violence. Cassandra Speaks is about the stories we tell and how those stories become the culture. It’s about the stories we still blindly cling to, and the ones that cling to us: the origin tales, the guiding myths, the religious parables, the literature and films and fairy tales passed down through the centuries about women and men, power and war, sex and love, and the values we live by. Stories written mostly by men with lessons and laws for all of humanity. We have outgrown so many of them, and still they endure. This book is about what happens when women are the storytellers too—when we speak from our authentic voices, when we flex our values, when we become protagonists in the tales we tell about what it means to be human. Lesser has walked two main paths in her life—the spiritual path and the feminist one—paths that sometimes cross but sometimes feel at cross-purposes. Cassandra Speaks is her extraordinary merging of the two. The bestselling author of Broken Open and Marrow, Lesser is a beloved spiritual writer, as well as a leading feminist thinker. In this book she gives equal voice to the cool water of her meditative self and the fire of her feminist self. With her trademark gifts of both humor and insight, she offers a vision that transcends the either/or ideologies on both sides of the gender debate. Brilliantly structured into three distinct parts, Part One explores how history is carried forward through the stories a culture tells and values, and what we can do to balance the scales. Part Two looks at women and power and expands what it means to be courageous, daring, and strong. And Part Three offers “A Toolbox for Inner Strength.” Lesser argues that change in the culture starts with inner change, and that no one—woman or man—is immune to the corrupting influence of power. She provides inner tools to help us be both strong-willed and kind-hearted. Cassandra Speaks is a beautifully balanced synthesis of storytelling, memoir, and cultural observation. Women, men and all people will find themselves in the pages of this book, and will come away strengthened, opened, and ready to work together to create a better world for all people.

Since the beginning of the nineteenth-century, many forms of theatre have been called 'popular', but in the twentieth-century the term 'popular drama' has taken on definite political overtones, often indicating a repudiation of 'commercial theatre'. Does this mean that political theatre is or tries to be more attractive to more people than commercial theatre? Does it conversely mean that commercial theatre has no political effects? The articles in this book were submitted as papers for a conference on the theme of 'popular' theatre, film and television. Contributions came from people with very different types of experience: from an ex-animal trainer to a lecturer in film studies; from playwrights, directors and actors to professional critics and academics. Each author focused on a particular problem of defining drama in performance, drawing together the conditions of performance, the types of audience and the political effects of the plays or films in question. The result was a series of fruitful connections and juxtapositions that shows the remarkable continuity of the problems raised in attempts to create a popular political drama.

Imagine what you could do if scalability wasn't a problem. With this hands-on guide, you’ll learn how the Cassandra database management system handles hundreds of terabytes of data while remaining highly available across multiple data centers. This expanded second edition—updated for Cassandra 3.0—provides the technical details and practical examples you need to put this database to work in a production environment. Authors Jeff Carpenter and Eben Hewitt demonstrate the advantages of Cassandra’s non-relational design, with special attention to data modeling. If you’re a developer, DBA, or application architect looking to solve a database scaling issue or future-proof your application, this guide helps you harness Cassandra’s speed and flexibility. Understand Cassandra’s distributed and decentralized structure Use the Cassandra Query Language (CQL) and cqlsh—the CQL shell Create a working data model and compare it with an equivalent relational model Develop sample applications using client drivers for languages including Java, Python, and Node.js Explore cluster topology and learn how nodes exchange data Maintain a high level of performance in your cluster Deploy Cassandra on site, in the Cloud, or with Docker Integrate Cassandra with Spark, Hadoop, Elasticsearch, Solr, and Lucene

A brilliant Covert-One novel from 'the real Titan of the genre' GQ Yuri Danko, an officer in the medical division of Russia's security service, is murdered in a spray of assassin's bullets. Now Covert-One's Jon Smith has Danko's classified papers, and he's unearthed a terrifying global conspiracy. A Serb terrorist has been despatched from Russia to smuggle hazardous vials of a deadly bacteria into the United States. His mission: to deliver them to an unknown US government agent. Then both men are murdered, and the deadly bacteria is stolen...It's up to Lt Col. Smith to find the madman who possesses it, before he holds a defenseless world hostage with the power to render the human race extinct.

Crime is undergoing a metamorphosis. The online technological revolution has created new opportunities for a wide variety of crimes which can be perpetrated on an industrial scale, and crimes traditionally committed in an offline environment are increasingly being transitioned to an online environment. This book takes a case study-based approach to exploring the types, perpetrators and victims of cyber frauds. Topics covered include: An in-depth breakdown of the most common types of cyber fraud and scams. The victim selection techniques and perpetration strategies of fraudsters. An exploration of the impact of fraud upon victims and best practice examples of support systems for victims. Current approaches for policing, punishing and preventing cyber frauds and scams. This book argues for a greater need to understand and respond to cyber fraud and scams in a more effective and victim-centred manner. It explores the victim-blaming discourse, before moving on to examine the structures of support in place to assist victims, noting some of the interesting initiatives from around the world and the emerging strategies to counter this problem. This book is essential reading for students and researchers engaged in cyber crime, victimology and international fraud.

Spanning nearly 50 years of family history, the book chronicles the remarkable lives of two creative talents, Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez. It's a story of father and son set against the backdrop of Hollywood; this narrative is organized around their physical and spiritual journey along the Camino de Santiago, Spain, the thousand-year-old pilgrimage path which traverses Galicia. It is the area from which Sheen's father emigrated to the U.S. and to which Estevez's own son has returned. Along the Waywill focus not just on the lives these men have chosen as artists, but also (and most importantly) on the one they have lived together. It is a story of family bonds and artistic advances and setbacks; of good choices and hard choices; of opportunities lost and opportunities found. Sheen and Estevez will share what they have experienced and learned from each other in their forty eight years as father and son, as fathers of sons, as actors and director, as spiritual seekers, and as concerned citizens of the world. Readers will meet them as real people rather than icons, as two men who have accumulated decades of wisdom and insight they are now ready to share.

When struck by lightning, Jess Mastriani developed a psychic ability to find missing children--but now she wants the government and the media to think she's lost her power.