A twenty-year-old crime, an accelerated death penalty, and an elitist family cover-up: Nyla races against the death row clock to save a woman the world is rooting for . . . and against. Which side will you choose? Twenty years ago, eighteen-year-old Francis Quick was convicted of murdering her best friend, Cora King, and sentenced to death. Now the highly debated Accelerated Death Penalty Act has passed giving Frankie thirty final days to live. Surprising everyone, one of the King family members sets out to challenge the woefully inadequate evidence and potential innocence of Frankie Quick. The at-first reluctant but soon-fiery Nyla and her unexpected ally—handsome country island boy Sam Stack—bring Frankie’s case to the international stage through her YouTube channel, Death Daze. They step into fame and a hometown battle that someone’s still willing to kill over. But who? The senator? The philanthropist? The pawn shop owner? Nyla’s own mother? Best advice: Don’t go to family dinner at the Kings’ estate. More people will leave in body bags than on their own two feet. And as for Frankie Quick, she’s a gem . . . even if she’s guilty. Praise for We Were Kings: “We Were Kings is the best kind of mystery novel—intelligent and bursting with heart. As Nyla untangled her family’s secrets, the twists left me breathless.” —Brittany Cavallaro, New York Times bestselling author “Bingeable. Atmospheric. A book that grabs hold and doesn’t let go. We Were Kings offers a delicious mystery perfect for fans of We Were Liars and A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. I savored every word from beginning to end.” —Caroline George, author of The Summer We Forgot Young Adult suspense with some romance Stand-alone novel Includes discussion questions for book clubs

When British and American leaders today talk of the nation—whether it is Boris Johnson, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump—they do so, in part, in terms established by eighteenth-century British literature. The city on a hill and the sovereign individual are tropes at the center of modern Anglo-American political thought, and the literature that accompanied Britain’s rise to imperial prominence played a key role in creating them. We Are Kings is the first book to interpret eighteenth-century British literature from the perspective of political theology. Spencer Jackson returns here to a body of literature long associated with modernity’s origins without assuming that modernity entails a separation of the religious from the profane. The result is a study that casts this literature in a surprisingly new light. From the patriot to the marriage plot, the narratives and characters of eighteenth-century British literature are the products of the politicization of religion, Jackson argues; the real story of this literature is neither secularization nor the survival of orthodox Judeo-Christianity but rather the expansion of a movement beginning in the High Middle Ages to transfer the transcendent authority of the Catholic Church to the English political sphere. The novel and the modern individual, then, are in a sense both secular and religious at once—products of a modern political faith that has authorized Anglo-American exceptionalism from the eighteenth century to the present.

An illustrated edition of the traditional Christmas song.

In 1950's Boston, the Irish Republican Army is running guns and killing witnesses. Cal and Dante are committed to stopping them. When a body is discovered at the Charlestown locks--tarred, feathered and shot to death--it appears to be a gangland killing, and is almost immediately dismissed. However, Cal O'Brien's cousin, Boston PD detective Owen Lackey, recognizes the murder style as the typical retribution for IRA informers. Combined with a tip-off about a boat coming into Boston weighed down with stolen guns and ammunition, the body in the locks hints that much more may be at stake than a one-off hit. Serpents in the Cold introduced us to Cal and Dante, whose previous investigation brought them to the highest ranks of Boston's political elite. This time, Cal and Dante descend into the city's shadowy underbelly--a world of packed dance halls, Irish wakes, and funeral parlors. There they discover a terrorist plot that will shake the city to its core and bring them head-to-head not only with Cal's past, but with the IRA Army Council itself.

Both a family history and an exploration of the complications of women attempting to tell their stories, We are the Kings follows Marcella as she grieves the death of her grandmother, unearths family secrets, and refuses to settle for a predictable life or a boring man. Halfway through what should have been a romantic trip to South Africa, 30-year-old Marcella ruins everything, perhaps intentionally, though even she isn't quite sure. She returns to New York to learn that her beloved grandmother Adele has died. Adele's body was found not far from her late husband's grave, by the father of her first child, a relationship Marcella and her family had previously known nothing about and now must come to terms with. No longer employed, and her trip an abject failure, Marcella does what she's always done. She hightails it to Adele's house, a Gilded Age mansion filled with ghosts both figurative and literal. Only slightly humbled by her current circumstances, and drinking no more than is reasonable, Marcella staves off her grief by attempting to understand who exactly Adele had been. She is intermittently aided in this effort by the women in her family, which, unsurprisingly, only obscures things further. Marcella's mother and aunt, a painter and a historian, who came of age amidst the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, see things one way, while her older sisters, each with her own set of problems, including problems with each other, have an entirely different perspective. Marcella's maternal grandmother, a daughter of Jewish immigrants now in her 80s, perhaps the least likely of them to empathize with a woman she'd once considered her rival, and a WASP no less, has perhaps the most nuanced view of Adele, which makes no sense. Except that it does. Marcella does not resolve her romantic predicaments by the close of the novel, and the mysteries of Adele's life remain, for the most part, impenetrable. But in sifting through her family's conflicting and fading memories, Marcella puts into words what no one else will say out loud, revealing not only what may or may not have happened, but what's truly at stake when a woman tells her story.

We were Kings and Queens is a short story illustration of African-American History before the time of slavery. It explores the realities of the rich lineage, royal status, and the truth that must not be forgotten concerning the beginnings of Black History.