This is a body of work which gives concerned parents and professionals instructive insight into the personality of "problem children" and gives practical suggestions for taking corrective and remedial steps before it's too late.

Special Agent Meg Jennings and her trusted search-and-rescue Labrador, Hawk, must race against the clock before a diabolical killer strikes again . . . Somewhere in the Washington, D.C. area, a woman lies helpless in a box. Barely breathing. Buried alive. In Quantico, the FBI receives a coded message from the woman’s abductor. He wants to play a game: decipher the clues, save the girl. The FBI’s top cryptanalysts crack the code and Special Agent Meg Jennings and her K-9 partner, Hawk, scramble to the scene of the crime—too late. But the killer’s game is far from over . . . Another message, another victim. The deadly pattern is repeated—again and again. As the body count mounts, Meg decides to break protocol and bring in her brilliant sister, Cara, a genius at word games, to decipher the kidnapper’s twisted clues. Meg knows she’s risking her career to do it, but she’s determined not to let one more person die under her and Hawk’s watch. If the plan fails, it could bite them in the end. And if it leads to the killer, it could bury them forever . . .

Paul McCarahan has killed twice. The first time it was in Germany, his Afro-German mother's country. The second time the theater was Pittsburgh, his hometown. The latter killing made him something of a hero to the local African American community, from which he nonetheless has drifted away. However, it is the violent struggle in the Rhineland when he was nineteen years old that has marked him, apparently for life. This "victory" remains his dark secret. He muses that it might be his guiding light.Paul and his younger brother lost their mother, when Paul was four years old. She returned to Germany due to the psychological abuse meted out by Paul's father and, fearing her husband's threats, did not return to retrieve her children. Paul was conceived in the immediate aftermath of World War II in Germany, but born in the United States. Fifty-eight years later, he is a mathematician struggling to find life's formula. He is at a loss wherever he wanders, be it Germany, Yale College, or the Piedmont region of Virginia and North Carolina, where his paternal ancestors labored in bondage for two centuries. He eventually gives himself up to the possibility of redemption, when fate presents itself in the guise of a manifestly long-shot relationship.

This book offers straightforward answers to the most frequently asked questions about women in controlling or abusive relationships. Robert Ackerman and Susan Pickering reveal the warning signs of controlling relationships and how women get caught in them; the most common reasons for staying in a controlling relationship and how women can protect themselves; how women can leave when they still love their partners or believe they're needed; where safe places for women are and how to get help; how the children are affected and what help is available to them and how alcohol and drug abuse affect controlling behavior and abuse. Also included are self-assessment tests--such as how to determine if you are in a controlling relationship--to help women identify not only high-risk men, but also some of their own high-risk behaviors. This book is the first to handle head-on the role of alcohol and other controlled substances--whether used by the abuser or the victim--in a controlling or abusive relationship. The appendix is an excellent resource for women who need help, giving addresses and phone numbers of supportive organizations in every state. More importantly, this book shows that women still have time to get the help they deserve-before it's too late.