The bells ring out for Christmas, but Denise is deaf to their message. "Call me Den", she said. It was best to do what she said. The gang always did - she could use a knife! Then she met Mary! The Red Kite circles over the forest, its plaintive cry echoing hauntingly. Barry is lost in a desperate silence, trapped in his own emptiness. Then he meets Bondy and the Red Kite! You'll be hanging by your finger ends and holding your breath as James (Bondy), and Mary tackle the gang leaders. Then the bells fall silent. What will the silence bring?

"In 1576 a catastrophic epidemic devastated Indigenous Mexican communities and left the colonial church in ruins. With its horrific final symptom of hemorrhage from the nose, the unfamiliar disease, which the Nahua named cocoliztli, took almost two million lives. In the crisis and its immediate aftermath, Spanish missionaries and surviving pueblos de indios held radically different visions for the future of church in the Americas"--

Wilderheim’s worst fears have come true. The Veil is shattered and Ragnarok is coming for them all. Prince Fal is now the only one left to stand against the destruction of his kingdom—but how can he save his people, when he can’t even save himself? Overwhelmed by his own magic, Fal is shrouded in constant illusions that make a lie of him as well as the world around him. If he can’t find a cure, he’ll soon lose himself completely, and Wilderheim’s last hope of survival will disappear. His one chance is the old carver’s peculiar daughter, whose very touch somehow makes Fal’s illusions vanish. But Sanja has problems of her own—ones that might kill her before she can do anything to help Fal, or his kingdom. With time quickly running out, Fal and Sanja must find a way to save themselves and stop Ragnarok in its tracks before it’s too late. When armies march, an age will end…

Religious war erupts between church and king and shapes a young man’s fate in eleventh-century France . . . Born of nobility in France in the year 1066, seven-year-old Tristan de Saint-Germain has his fate thrown to the winds upon the execution of his father for treason against William the Conqueror of Normandy. Abandoned by his mother, who remarries and departs for England, Tristan and his four-year-old brother, Guillaume, find themselves thrown into the monastic world of the Benedictine Black Monks of Cluny, France. Under the tutelage of Grand Prior Odo de Lagery, who one day will ascend to the very pinnacle of power within the Catholic Church in Rome, Tristan develops into an academic and linguistic prodigy by the age of twelve and becomes known as the Promise of the Black Monks. Tristan’s unusual talents will become useful to the Benedictines, as well as to Rome—and the boy soon finds himself pulled into the visceral power struggle between Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Heinrich IV as they mercilessly wage spiritual, political, and military war upon each other to claim supremacy over the continent of Europe . . .

“Homemade vintage craft projects that are inventive but also preserve the treasured history of Christmas traditions.” ?Cottages & Bungalows Craft your way through the holiday season with this newest volume by the author of Christmas Memories and other popular books. The forty easy projects range from charming punched-tin votive holders, to Russian teacakes for holiday parties, to your very own edible gingerbread house (complete with miniature snowmen on the front lawn). Supplemented with Christmas cookie recipes and peppered with engaging facts about the holidays gone by, this is the perfect book for crafters who long for that vintage holiday look.

The county of Tripoli in what is now North Lebanon is arguably the most neglected of the so-called ‘crusader states’ established in the Middle East at the beginning of the twelfth century. The present work is the first monograph on the county to be published in English, and the first in any western language since 1945. What little has been written on the subject previously has focused upon the European ancestry of the counts of Tripoli: a specifically Southern French heritage inherited from the famous crusader Raymond IV of Saint-Gilles. Kevin Lewis argues that past historians have at once exaggerated the political importance of the counts’ French descent and ignored the more compelling signs of its cultural impact, highlighting poetry composed by troubadours in Occitan at Tripoli’s court. For Lewis, however, even this belies a deeper understanding of the processes that shaped the county. What emerges is an intriguing portrait of the county in which its rulers struggled to exert their power over Lebanon in the face of this region’s insurmountable geographical forces and its sometimes bewildering, always beguiling diversity of religions, languages and cultures. The counts of Tripoli and contemporary Muslim onlookers certainly viewed the dynasty as sons of Saint-Gilles, but the county’s administration relied upon Arabic, its stability upon the mixed loyalties of its local inhabitants, and its very existence upon the rugged mountains that cradled it. This book challenges prevailing knowledge of this little-known crusader state and by extension the medieval Middle East as a whole. .