Travel with Oden Lawson last heir of the Lawson family bloodline. When Oden loses both of his parents to the plague it leaves Oden devastated, not to mention the deception of his current betroth Rosaline. Oden turned his back on high society until his lifelong friend Caspian Monroe shows up at Lawson Castle. Caspian convinces Oden to return to London and seek out a wife. The problem is Oden has taken interest in Inez a mere chambermaid in his employ. Inez is a beautiful young woman that loves Oden unconditionally. Oden refuse to accept his undeniable attraction for Inez because society will never condone such a match. Will Oden succumb to the intensity of desire and continue taking Inez to his bed during the late night hours?

On September 20, 1587, Walpurga Hausmännin of Dillingen in southern Germany was burned at the stake as a witch. Although she had confessed to committing a long list of maleficia (deeds of harmful magic), including killing forty—one infants and two mothers in labor, her evil career allegedly began with just one heinous act—sex with a demon. Fornication with demons was a major theme of her trial record, which detailed an almost continuous orgy of sexual excess with her diabolical paramour Federlin "in many divers places, . . . even in the street by night." As Walter Stephens demonstrates in Demon Lovers, it was not Hausmännin or other so-called witches who were obsessive about sex with demons—instead, a number of devout Christians, including trained theologians, displayed an uncanny preoccupation with the topic during the centuries of the "witch craze." Why? To find out, Stephens conducts a detailed investigation of the first and most influential treatises on witchcraft (written between 1430 and 1530), including the infamous Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches). Far from being credulous fools or mindless misogynists, early writers on witchcraft emerge in Stephens's account as rational but reluctant skeptics, trying desperately to resolve contradictions in Christian thought on God, spirits, and sacraments that had bedeviled theologians for centuries. Proof of the physical existence of demons—for instance, through evidence of their intercourse with mortal witches—would provide strong evidence for the reality of the supernatural, the truth of the Bible, and the existence of God. Early modern witchcraft theory reflected a crisis of belief—a crisis that continues to be expressed today in popular debates over angels, Satanic ritual child abuse, and alien abduction.

A heritage of conflict in author-character relations emerges through works by Dostoevsky, Mauriac, O'Connor, and DeLillo, where the issue of a character's freedom from the author's perspective proves essential to understanding narrative form.

After spending most of his life in the public eye, the old sheriff was enjoying his retirement living on Ambergris Caye Island off the coast of Belize. The only worries he had involved how many cigars to smoke each day or which fly rod to use. Strangely, it was a friend request on Facebook that caused the investigative juices to once again flow in the tanned body of one of the most infamous lawmen in Southern history. Within days, he found himself in an run-down old plantation house in the Louisiana swamps, enjoying a smoke with a dying psychopath who wanted to confess all the brutal murders he had committed over a twenty-five-year span. Had the sheriff been summoned to hear a confession or was he to be added to the list of this criminals victims?

A multi-authored study of the emergence and transmission of fictional writing in Europe in the seventeenth century, with the aim of improving understanding of the origins of the novel.