The Kaddish is considered by millions to be a special prayer one recites for the dead. It isn't. This mystical ritual was created during the Crusades as a homage to God. Those who have lost a loved one and recite the prayer faithfully on 52 Friday nights may have wondered why there is no place in the prayer for the name of the lost loved one. This book contains much new information as it traces the evolution of the Kaddish. It will have a ready market with Jews, religious and secular, as well as people who are interested in the history of religion.

The next caper in the Sister Pelagia mystery from the bestselling author of THE WINTER QUEEN. Returning from the Synod in St Petersburg - and an official rebuke of her crime-fighting ways - Sister Pelagia finds herself aboard a steamer dodging pickpockets, zealots and a sinister man with a detachable eye. But a brutal murder in the next cabin spells the end of her sleuthing retirement, and the start of an investigation that will take her to the Holy Land and far beyond. Pelagia's journey is peppered with tales of miracles and roosters, and caves that act as portals to other worlds. But an assassin is closing in, pursuing the sister to the land of the Gospels where her criminal enquiry becomes a spiritual enquiry as she sets down her knitting needles to question the very foundations of her faith...

Hailed by Publishers Weekly as "an A-1 satire on urban living," William Herrick's Bradovich is now available as a New Directions paperbook. Stephen Bradovich--sculptor, widower, former pro ball player, sometime brawler. Why would this complexly human, anarchist protagonist receive a visit from two impassive, square-shouldered operatives with the alarmling news: "You are under surveillance pending review, that's the message The Authority sends you"? Praised for the compassion, humanism, and "truth-seeking" of his earlier novels, Herrick in Bradovich steps beyond the "lean and muscular prose" of his terrorist trilogy (Shadows & Wolves, Love & Terror, Kill Memory) and beyond the working-class realism that won The Present Tense/Joel H. Cavior Award for That's Life (in 1985) to a surreal--if still recognizable--New York where suddenly not only the improbable but the impossible can happen.

Dr Reggie Lee, newly arrived at the National Gallery, is putting together a small exhibition around three Caravaggios depicting 'St Cecilia and the Angel'. One is at the Getty, one at the Louvre, and she hopes it won't be too hard to track down the third. But a series of inexplicable obstacles keep getting in her way - and then, unexpectedly, a fourth Caravaggio turns up. One of them must be a fake. But which? When people start to die, it seems clear that someone doesn't want Reggie's show to go ahead. Why, she can't imagine. But her career is at stake, and she'd damned if she'll let herself be intimidated and bullied by these unseen forces. So Reggie investigates and her research takes her from Surrealist suicides to shady Italian art dealers, from seventeenth-century painting techniques to modern French politics in a viciously-fought Presidential election year. By the end it seems as though nobody in the opaque and ill-defined world of art can really stay incorruptible - perhaps not even Reggie herself.

ANATOMY OF A KILLER Sam Jordan never lets emotion interfere with his work. He is a precise and ruthless killing machine, dealing out death for hire. But his last job had ended wrong for Jordan, and now Sandy is sending him out again--without a break, yet--to take care of someone named Kemp. Hell, he even has to case the job himself. The whole thing feels jinxed. That's when Jordan meets Betty, who works at the diner. To her he is Mr. Smith, a button salesman. But to Jordan, Betty is a sweet moment in his life, a safe haven. And that's where he makes his first mistake--he allows himself to feel human. A SHROUD FOR JESSO Jack Jesso knows that Gluck wants him out of the syndicate. Still, when Gluck sends him on an errand to find a missing guy named Snell for a shady client of his, Johannes Kator, Jesso doesn't figure it to be anything more than a test. He finds the guy alright--sick and rambling--but Gluck double-crosses him, and tosses Jesso onto a Europe-bound steamer with Kator's crew, their orders to kill him. Jesso quickly realizes that he holds the key to a big money deal in Snell's ramblings, information that Kator desperately needs. All he has to do to stay alive is keep Kator interested. It's a simple enough scheme--until Jesso meets Kator's beautiful sister, Renette.

Tova's lacklustre life - days spent running the Kwik Kleen Laundromat, nights spent brooding about being dumped by her girlfriend - picks up its pace when her friend Gina disappears. Gina works as a stripper in a local bar, and the cops don't show much interest when sex trade workers go missing. Reaching for a boldness she didn't think she possessed, Tova begins her own investigation. Throwaway Angels is a compelling whodunit, a fast-paced novel about friendship and living with courage.

Widowed writer Loring Neiman, a respected member of the Kingsborough Beach community, tries to borrow money from his wealthy neighbors, gets turned down, but comes up with a scheme to pay off his debts

'Count Dracula meets Bonnie Parker. What will they do together? The vampire you'd hate to love, sinister and debonair, sinks those eye teeth into Bonnie's succulent throat.' Is this the beginning of a sadistic relationship or simply an extract from a psychopath's diary? Either way it marks the beginning of a dangerous game that is destined to end in chilling terror and bloody murder.

When Willie Strayte is murdered the day after he was made editor of a crime magazine, the police suspect Dave Nelson, who was passed over for the job and must now try to prove he's not the killer

Octavius Gaye, founder and creator of the hugely successful magazine empire, Plain Man Enterprises, saw himself as the original 'plain man'. The truth however was rather different and Gaye was an unscrupulous tycoon with a strangely captivating nature who surrounded himself by a series of weak-willed puppets that he manipulated to his heart's content. One such puppet was Francie Lake and as the plot unfolds, Symons reveals how and why Francie simply had to die.

The hero, Christopher Barrington, looks back to his boyhood and recalls the intrigues that happened in the huge house at Belting. This crime novel is from the same author as "The Colour of Murder" and "The End of Solomon Grundy" and he is the Crime Fiction reviewer for "The Independent".

John and Eleanor Midway appear to preside over a happy family. But when outgoing daughter Jenny disappears, the Midway clan starts to unravel. In an about-face, the members of the Midway family start to repel each other, as anger, blame and hatred rage among them. Against undaunting odds, Detective Superintendent Hilary Catchpole is called to uncover the truth.

THE STORY: Raymond Shaw is a young American hero, the first Congressional Medal of Honor winner since Vietnam. Decorated for saving his troops in a peacekeeping mission in the Middle East, he has returned to the U.S. and a career as a journalist in

Peter Santore, the narrator, is an American lawyer in his mid-thirties come to England to track down a certain Hilary Pennels, the daughter of a Korean War hero who died in a POW camp, the same camp in which Peter's own father turned traitor and whose informing became, perhaps, the cause of Hilary's father's death. Only Hilary's guardian, Fox himself a survivor of the camp can explain, if he will, the troubling past that haunts the now fully grown "war babies." As Frederick Busch's relentless narrative bears down upon this complexity of betrayals, the lines between exploiter and exploited become eerily blurred.

Frank Kalinyak, disgraced ex-cop, returns to Pittsburgh, Pa., "Iron City", his hometown, from Tucson where he has been living a desperate existence since the death of his young daughter. He has been summoned home by Bobby Mack, an Assistant D.A., to find out who murdered an old high school friend. Kalinyak is swept into a whirlpool of bizarre killings, religious fanaticism, church duplicity, hustlers, cops, junkies, old friends gone bad. Amid the fractured landscape of Iron City, rusting mills, rotting industry, he struggles to find sense in his life. Ultimately he must ask: who is he and can he survive? "David Scott Milton can write like an angel... a writer hell bent on fulfilling the legacy of John Steinbeck, carrying on the tradition of James Jones and exploring his own heights." -- Alabama Journal "It was my misfortune to have missed 'The Quarterback', and thus be unaware of this fine, unflinching writer. He does not prettify, embroider, ornament of otherwise offend against the utter dignity of his hard, enduring characters; out of their meanness, and misery, he has made a story which I envy, in prose as clean and businesslike as a switchblade. Make sure everybody hears about this book; it's not about a gambler and a broad and a fighter at all-it's about the human condition, and it's beautiful." -- George V. Higgins, author of The "Friends of Eddie Coyle"

At first it was just a lark--bribing the stewards to steal food, bribing the conductors to steal blankets, raiding the club car, becoming a trainful of drunks. But then--then they began stealing morphine, and after that they began swapping mates, and after that... Finally the lights went out. And a modern-day miracle of streamlined engineering was turned into a cage of evil, human beings become beasts, and for three days the meaning of civilization was forgotten, and carnality ruled!

A truly great story about two master arms makers--one Russian, one American--both with the same girl friend, and both wanting to retire. The only problem is they know too much, so their employers want them dead. Their only hope is to look out for each other.