'The Sleeping Nymph': a work of art of magnetic beauty, painted by a young partisan fighter during the last days of the Second World War. A painting carrying a shocking secret hidden in the red pigment on the canvas, made with the blood of a human heart. But whose heart? There is no body, no confession. Only that faint trace of blood. And that's what leads commissioner Teresa Battaglia - herself hiding an unspeakable truth - to the Resia Valley, in the north eastern part of Italy: a perfect genetic enclave protected for centuries from the outside world. The valley and the portrait are the only clues for a murder that occurred more than 70 years before. A red thread leading to the shadow of someone hell-bent on protecting a sacred secret.

'Pip Vaughan-Hughes has given us a monk, a corpse, a sinister Templar and a terrific adventure that romps across mediaeval Christendom' Bernard Cornwell 1242 AD and Europe is in flames once more. The King of France, Louis, has decided to stamp out the heretic faith of the Cathars once and for all. The trouble is that Petroc and his mentor, Captain de Montalhac are on the wrong side... For the Captain can no longer ignore his Cathar roots and heads for the Languedoc and war with his former patron. He takes with him not only gold, but also something far more valuable - a mysterious relic depicting the face of Jesus. This 'Cathar Crucifix' will rally a full-scale rebellion against the French Monarchy. But Petroc can see the danger to his friend. Louis possesses a huge army and the necessary ruthlessness to crush all in his path. Now - as Montalhac retreats to the mountain fastness of Montsegur - only Petroc can save his friend - and perhaps the most sacred relic of all...

On October 24, 1961, Massachusetts wife and mother Joan Risch vanished seemingly into thin air. Even with her children home and neighbors nearby, Joan disappeared from her upscale suburban house, never to be heard from again. The search that followed was one of the most intensive investigations of its time, but detectives were unable to identify any suspects. Using extensive police casefiles and hundreds of newspaper articles written about the disappearance, this book carefully explores the story of Joan Risch and the investigation into her disappearance. With the assistance of a former FBI criminal profiler and an LA cold case detective, this book reports previously undisclosed facts from the investigation, including multiple witness statements. Also evaluated are the numerous theories on the disappearance, ultimately revealing a possible explanation of what happened to Joan Risch that fateful October afternoon.

Bringing together media studies and environmental humanities, the contributors to Saturation develop saturation as a heuristic to analyze phenomena in which the elements involved are difficult or impossible to separate. In ordinary language, saturation describes the condition of being thoroughly soaked, while in chemistry it is the threshold at which something can be maximally dissolved or absorbed in a solution. Contributors to this collection expand notions of saturation beyond water to consider saturation in sound, infrastructure, media, Big Data, capitalism, and visual culture. Essays include analyses of the thresholds of HIV detectability in bloodwork, militarism's saturation of oceans, and the deleterious effects of the saturation of cellphone and wi-fi signals into the human body. By channeling saturation to explore the relationship between media, the environment, technology, capital, and the legacies of settler colonialism, Saturation illuminates how elements, the natural world, and anthropogenic infrastructures, politics, and processes exist in and through each other. Contributors. Marija Cetinić, Jeff Diamanti, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Lisa Yin Han, Stefan Helmreich, Mél Hogan, Melody Jue, Rahul Mukherjee, Max Ritts, Rafico Ruiz, Bhaskar Sarkar, John Shiga, Avery Slater, Janet Walker, Joanna Zylinska