Douglas K. Batchelder

Molly Gray is not like anyone else. With her flair for cleaning and proper etiquette, she has risen through the ranks of the glorious five-star Regency Grand Hotel to become the esteemed Head Maid. But just as her life reaches a pinnacle state of perfection, her world is turned upside down when J. D. Grimthorpe, the world-renowned mystery author, drops dead—very dead—on the hotel’s tearoom floor.

Uncertain Voyage is certain to hold you spellbound with its tale of a timid young American woman who finds herself in situations that would test anyone’s courage. Melissa Aubrey is touring Europe alone as part of her quest to establish her self-reliance. Still recovering from a nervous breakdown brought on by a disastrous marriage, Melissa is fragile, to say the least. When one of her fellow travelers makes an urgent plea that she deliver a small package to an address in Majorca, Melissa is thrown into a dizzying whirlwind of romance, mystery, and danger.

A particularly unpleasant murder - that of a very old woman in a housing project - rocks the town of Lafferton. The murderer has left a distinctive "sign" on the body and at the scene of crime. A couple of weeks later, a similar murder occurs, and a month or so later, so does another. Initial investigations discover that the mysterious "sign" left on the body was the calling card of a suspect who was charged with several murders in the northwest of the country, tried but acquitted on the grounds of insufficient evidence.

Detective Chief Inspector Simon Serrailler, first introduced in The Various Haunts of Men, is on a painting holiday in Venice when he is summoned home by a telephone call. He has family problems to face, and the stress and grind of running a busy police station. When a little boy is snatched as he stands with his satchel at the gate of his home, waiting for his lift to school, an ordinary community realises that terror and evil are in their very midst.

Change occurs everywhere, even in the small fictional community of Thrush Green in the British Cotswolds. Dorothy Watson and Agnes Fogerty have taught at the school for as long as anyone can remember, but now they're thinking and talking about retirement. It won't be an easy adjustment for them, or the village residents. Whom can they find that can possibly fill the women's shoes? Meanwhile, the town wonders if the Lovelock sisters will keep their domestic help. And is that young man really an architectural student, as Agnes thinks?

C. S. Lewis is the 20th century's most widely read Christian writer and J. R. R. Tolkien its most beloved mythmaker. For three decades they and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met weekly in Lewis' Oxford rooms and a nearby pub. They read aloud from works in progress, argued about anything that caught their fancy, and gave one another invaluable companionship, inspiration, and criticism.

Charlie Finn had to grow up fast, living alone by age 16. Highly intelligent, he earned a life-changing scholarship to Harvard, where he learned how to survive and thrive on the outskirts of privileged society. That skill served him well in the cutthroat business world, as it does in more lucrative but dangerous ventures he now operates off the coast of Miami. Charlie tries to separate relationships from work.

In this new and substantially expanded Third Edition, Philip Jenkins continues to illuminate the remarkable expansion of Christianity in the global South - in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Drawing upon the extensive new scholarship that has appeared on this topic in recent years, he asks how the new Christianity is likely to affect the poor, among whom it finds its most devoted adherents. How should we interpret the enormous success of prosperity churches across the Global South? Politically, what will be the impact of new Christian movements?