Over the Labor Day weekend, sixteen-year-old Karen Lindquist was brutally raped by the sons of the town's elite then denied justice in the name of political expedience. Twenty-five years later she's getting even and getting off. When her latest lover is accused of molesting her teenage daughter, defense investigator Clint Wells is called in. He uncovers a twisted plot of revenge and sexual depravity as he follows a trail of broken lives and broken men. His investigation leads him from the heart of Texas to the sun-drenched coast of Florida; from the Ozark Mountains to the sun-baked desert of Arizona as he discovers the sickening truth about Karen and her quest for vengeance.

Rachel Irmina Rache's world ended with a gunshot wound. However, she was brought back from beyond the grave, by Death herself. Now she has been given a new mission and a new purpose. She must act as the spirit of vengeance, bringing death to those who kill with impunity and would avoid any form of punishment for their crimes. She also finds lost pets and goes to football games with her father...

“What did you do in the war, Grandpa?” asked my eleven-year-old great-granddaughter one evening. In the time it took her to ask that one innocent question, my thoughts slipped back more than seventy years to the summer and fall of 1943 and to the airfields of East Anglia and into the death-laden skies over Nazi-occupied Europe. The Eighth Air Force’s rule was simple: “Complete twenty-five bombing missions, and you can go home.” The problem was, the odds of completing those twenty-five missions was almost nil. In our B-17 Flying Fortress, my friends and I had to fight off Germany’s finest fighter pilots in their Messerschmitt’s and Focke-Wulf’s and fly through flak barrages so thick it looked, felt, and sounded like we were caught in the middle of a Texas tornado. We risked asphyxiation in the thin air at altitudes of twenty-five thousand feet or higher and endured temperatures so low that without the forty pounds of protective clothing covering us from head to toe, including electrically heated bunny suits, we would have frozen to death in a matter of minutes. That one simple question convinced me that it was time that my family learned what I had done and the price my friends and I had paid during our war against fascism and tyranny, a topic that I had never really spoken about before.

Feuding had an effect on the history of most of Europe. Scotland provides a fascinating focus for the study of the bloodfeud because feuding survived until remarkably late there, and thus is much better documented than in other European societies. This examination of the Scottish evidence shows its relevance to the wider European community to which the Scots belonged, reveals much about the nature of the bloodfeud in general, and explores the changes in society which at last brought about its suppression. The bloodfeud has been the subject of anthropological rather than historical investigation, partly because it largely disappeared at an early stage in the development of literacy in Europe and has never been a fashionable research topic for historians. In this study of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century feud in Scotland, Keith Brown focuses on its context in society, politics and the ideology that served to uproot the tradition. The book will be of value to historians of many different cultures and periods.

This collection focuses on 1970s films from a variety of countries, and from the marginal to the mainstream, which, by tackling various 'difficult' subjects, have proved to be controversial in one way or another. It is not an uncritical celebration of the shocking and the subversive but an attempt to understand why this decade produced films which many found shocking, and what it was that made them shocking to certain audiences. To this end it includes not only films that shocked the conventionally minded, such as hard core pornography, but also those that outraged liberal opinion – for example, Death Wish and Dirty Harry. The book does not simply cast a critical light on a series of controversial films which have been variously maligned, misinterpreted or just plain ignored, but also assesses how their production values, narrative features and critical receptions can be linked to the wider historical and social forces that were dominant during this decade. Furthermore, it explores how these films resonate in our own historical moment – replete as it is with shocks of all kinds.

Renowned scholars explore and discuss Nietzsche's desire to challenge the very conception of philosophy, and his methods of doing so.

During the U.S. Civil War, a combination of innovative technologies and catastrophic events stimulated the development of news media into a central cultural force. Reacting to the dramatic increases in news reportage and circulation, poets responded to an urgent need to make their work immediately relevant to current events. As poetry's compressed forms traveled more quickly and easily than stories, novels, or essays through ephemeral print media, it moved alongside and engaged with news reports, often taking on the task of imagining the mental states of readers on receiving accounts from the war front. Newspaper and magazine poetry had long editorialized on political happenings—Indian wars, slavery and abolition, prison reform, women's rights—but the unprecedented scope of what has been called the first modern war, and the centrality of the issues involved for national futures, generated a powerful sense of single-mindedness among readers and writers that altered the terms of poetic expression. In Battle Lines, Eliza Richards charts the transformation of Civil War poetry, arguing that it was fueled by a symbiotic relationship between the development of mass media networks and modern warfare. Focusing primarily on the North, Richards explores how poets working in this new environment mediated events via received literary traditions. Collectively and with a remarkable consistency, poems pulled out key features of events and drew on common tropes and practices to mythologize, commemorate, and ponder the consequences of distant battles. The lines of communication reached outward through newspapers and magazines to writers such as Dickinson, Whitman, and Melville, who drew their inspiration from their peers' poetic practices and reconfigured them in ways that bear the traces of their engagements.

"Migra! is the first and only substantive history of the U.S. Border Patrol. Hernandez breaks new ground in this deeply researched account of its formation and development."--George Sanchez, author of Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945

In 1831, philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer pushed his neighbour down the stairs of their Frankfurt residence. Inspired by this true event and his actual writings, the novel reimagines the life of the fractured thinker as it blurs the boundaries between Arthur's theoretical beliefs and his physical existence. Caroline Marquet, a talented painter, has endured her own dark past, but her future is about to become even darker at the hands of the man across the hall. For although Arthur lectures on kindness, he views the world through a prism of metaphysical Nature where all human desires are the work of a malevolent will. Unleashed from its theoretical constraints, the will burdens the philosopher with an aggressive pessimism, festering an obsessively vengeful relationship with Caroline which results in a missing student, criminal charges, and shattered lives. Arthur's thesis on will, natural law, and morality, which develops through the novel, ultimately determines its outcome. Can the philosopher escape the fate he has written for himself, or must he, and indeed humankind, forever suffer In Arthur's Nature?

Dickens scholar Jerome Meckier's acclaimed Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction examined fierce literary competition between leading novelists who tried to establish their credentials as realists by rewriting Dickens's novels. Here, Meckier argues that in Great Expectations, Dickens not only updated David Copperfield but also rewrote novels by Lever, Thackeray, Collins, Shelley, and Charlotte and Emily Brontë. He periodically revised his competitors' themes, characters, and incidents to discredit their novels as unrealistic fairy tales imbued with Cinderella motifs. Dickens darkened his fairy tale perspective by replacing Cinderella with the story of Misnar's collapsible pavilion from The Tales of the Genii (a popular, pseudo-oriental collection). The Misnar analogue supplied a corrective for the era's Cinderella complex, a warning to both Haves and Have-nots, and a basis for Dickens's tragicomic view of the world.