Crime Family Marriage

Historians have only recently awakened to the importance of the family, the basic social unit throughout human history. This book traces the development of marriage and the family from the Middle Ages to the early modern era. It describes how the Roman and barbarian cultural streams merged under the influence of the Christian church to forge new concepts, customs, laws, and practices. Century by century, it follows the development—sometimes gradual, at other times revolutionary—of significant elements in the history of the family.

Christian tradition often seems to give only grudging approval to married life, particularly its sexual aspect. In these sermons of St John Chrysostom, we find an important corrective to this view.

They call me a monster. Murderous and hateful. Beautiful but broken. Nothing can calm the ever raging storm inside of me. As the ruthless leader of the Doubeck family, there is a certain standard of brutality, I have to uphold. Then I meet her. Beautiful, innocent, and so very afraid. Valentina is a rival family's daughter, and the little temptress has purposely tangled herself in my dark web. She seeks me out, needing my help, but the price for what she wants will be steep.

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLING DEBUT PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER YOU CAN'T MISS! The perfect marriage? Or the perfect lie? “A hair-raising debut, both unsettling and addictive...A chilling thriller that will keep you reading long into the night.” —Mary Kubica, New York...

Christopher and Hannah are a happily married surgeon and nurse with picture-perfect lives. All that’s missing is a child. When Janie, an abandoned six-year-old, turns up at their hospital, Christopher forms an instant connection with her, and he convinces Hannah they should take her home as their own.

Dark raven hair and piercing green eyes, sweet and naive Eleanor Romero would make a beautiful bride. Ten million dollars and a forced signature later and she was mine. Like a thief I came in the dead of night and stole her away from her protected castle and placed her in a gilded cage made of gold. The deal had been made. She would become my wife. She would bear my children. She would bend to my will. But most importantly, she would help me destroy the man she loved most, the man who took everything from me: her father.

I knew running from Adrian wouldn't be easy. That there was a risk I would be caught, but I never anticipated he would go to such great lengths to find me. Now that he knows what I've done, I wonder if there will ever be love between us again, or if we were always meant to be enemies?

From the world's number one best-selling writer - three pulse-pounding novels in one audiobook! This collection includes The Family Lawyer, Night Sniper, and The Good Sister.

They call me a playboy. Society’s pretty pet. What they don’t know is I’m so much more. My only directive was to keep her hidden, and safe. After everything she’s been through I’m the last person to offer comfort and care. I have little experience with either. Both of us have been broken by our pasts. But mine is catching up to me, and I would deal with it as I usually do: with total decimation. But that puts her in the crosshairs, and that’s unacceptable.

Ex-journalist Violet Brewster is keen to make a good first impression in her new community, having just moved to the small village of Merrywell. When Violet hears about the mystery of Helen Slingsby, who disappeared from the village forty years earlier, she decides to help uncover what happened. But despite Violet’s best efforts, she can find no trace of the missing woman.

On May 23, 2009, Amanda Stott-Smith drove to the middle of the Sellwood Bridge in Portland, Oregon, and dropped her two children into the Willamette River. Forty minutes later, rescuers found the body of four-year-old Eldon. Miraculously, his seven-year-old sister, Trinity, was saved. As the public cried out for blood, Amanda was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison.

The first ever collection of short stories from the New York Times bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of The Friend Over the course of thirty years, Sigrid Nunez has become one of contemporary fiction’s most beloved and distinctive voices, producing nine profound, penetrating, and...

In the waning days of the turbulent 1970s, in the wake of unsolved child-killings that have shocked Detroit, the lives of several residents are drawn together with tragic consequences. There is Hannah, wife of a prominent local businessman, who has begun an affair with a darkly charismatic stranger whose identity remains elusive; Mikey, a canny street hustler who finds himself on a chilling mission to rectify injustice; and the serial killer known as Babysitter, an enigmatic and terrifying figure at the periphery of elite Detroit.

A novel about the dangerous power of storytelling, set in motion by a chance encounter On an overnight train from London to Edinburgh, a translator becomes engrossed in the stories of the strangers who share her compartment. One has adapted the harrowing childhood experience of an acquaintance...

Author of the New York Times Notable The Great Glass Sea (“The most unexpected second book by a writer of note to appear in years.” –John Freeman, Boston Globe) returns with a gripping adventure story that probes the expansive, shifting wilds of the Sierra Nevada during the Gold Rush...

Just one moment, a single glance into Aoife’s fierce gaze, and I am lost in a way I never want to be found. I’ll do whatever it takes to have her—even accept a seat I never wanted at the head of the Irish family. Aoife guards her heart with a sharp tongue and defiance that should turn me away. Somehow, she only ensnares me further, her moments of vulnerability awakening something inside me I didn’t know existed.

Professor Hans Rekke is a world authority on interrogation techniques, capable of dizzying feats of logic and observation. He was born into wealth and power and has a picture-perfect wife and daughter. But he also has a fragile psyche that falls apart under pressure. Micaela Vargas is a street-smart police officer, the daughter of Chilean political refugees, who grew up in the projects on the outskirts of Stockholm and has two brothers on the wrong side of the law. She is tenacious and uncompromising, and desperate to prove herself to her fellow cops.

Esme and Benedict Werner have an idyllic life in a tight-knit community until an accident in their cul-de-sac ends in the tragic sudden death of one of their dearest neighbors. After vindicating eyewitness accounts morph into contradictory memories, suspicion, and unaccountable accusations, Benedict is arrested. Esme’s life, too, is changed forever.

A profound portrait of contemporary Pakistan from the award-winning author of The Return of Faraz Ali In seven searing, atmospheric stories, Aamina Ahmad finds a world of pathos in the narrowest circumstances, from the fugitive intimacies of villages where nothing escapes notice to the crevices...

“An extraordinary gift to its lucky readers: an enormously full and brilliantly structured novel whose characters come to feel as familiar—and as bottomlessly mysterious—as one's own family.” —Karen Russell, author of National Book Award finalist The Antidote A brilliant, sweeping...