The Judge's List (Lacy Stoltz Series) by John Grisham

Hardback: The Judge's List contains nonstop suspense from the #1 New York Times bestselling author: Investigator Lacy Stoltz follows the trail of a serial killer, and closes in on a shocking suspect - a sitting judge.

    

In The Whistler (2016 - first book in the Lacy Stoltz series), Lacy Stoltz investigated a corrupt judge who was taking millions in bribes from a crime syndicate. She put the criminals away, but only after being attacked and nearly killed. Three years later, and approaching forty, she is tired of her work for the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct and ready for a change.

Then she meets a mysterious woman who is so frightened she uses a number of aliases. Jeri Crosby’s father was murdered twenty years earlier in a case that remains unsolved and that has grown stone cold. But Jeri has a suspect whom she has become obsessed with and has stalked for two decades. Along the way, she has discovered other victims.

Suspicions are easy enough, but proof seems impossible. The man is brilliant, patient, and always one step ahead of law enforcement. He is the most cunning of all serial killers. He knows forensics, police procedure, and most important: he knows the law.

He is a judge, in Florida - under Lacy’s jurisdiction.

He has a list, with the names of his victims and targets, all unsuspecting people unlucky enough to have crossed his path and wronged him in some way. How can Lacy pursue him, without becoming the next name on his list?

The Judge’s List (2021) is by any measure John Grisham’s most surprising, chilling novel yet.

About the author: John Grisham is the author of more than thirty novels, one work of nonfiction, a collection of stories, and seven novels for young readers.

After graduating from law school at the University of Mississippi in 1981, John Grisham began a career practicing law, specializing in criminal defense and personal injury litigation. In 1983, he was elected to the Mississippi state House of Representatives and served until 1990.

Inspired by cases and testimony, Grisham started to write as a hobby, getting up at 5am to write for an hour every morning before work. After three years, Grisham completed his first novel, A Time to Kill, in 1987. Initially rejected by many publishers, it was eventually bought by Wynwood Press, who printed 5000 copies and published it in June 1989.

His second novel, The Firm, was received with wider acclaim, with Grisham selling the film rights to Paramount Pictures and the book rights to Doubleday. The Firm spent forty-seven weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list and became the best-selling novel of 1991.

Since publishing his first novel, Grisham has written at least one novel a year, all of them international bestsellers, including the republished hardcover edition of A Time to Kill by Doubleday in 1993.

Rating: 5/5

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Paperback: 'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'

Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. 

Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the all-seeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party. 

In his longing for truth and liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow-worker Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal.

George Orwell's dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), is perhaps the most pervasively influential book of the twentieth century.

About the author: George Orwell (1903-1950) was a novelist, essayist and critic best known for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). He was a man of strong opinions who addressed some of the major political movements of his times, including imperialism, fascism and communism. Orwell died of tuberculosis in a London hospital on 21 January 1950. Although he was just 46 years old at the time of his death, his ideas and opinions have lived on through his work.

Despite Orwell’s disdain for the BBC during his life, a statue of the writer was commissioned by artist Martin Jennings and installed outside the BBC in London. The eight-foot bronze statue, paid for by the George Orwell Memorial Fund, was unveiled in November 2017. An inscription reads, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." 

The Promise by Damon Galgut

Paperback: The Promise (2021) is the Booker Prize-shortlisted literary masterpiece of a family in crisis. The Promise charts the crash and burn of a white South African family, living on a farm outside Pretoria. The Swarts are gathering for Ma's funeral. The younger generation, Anton and Amor, detest everything the family stand for - not least the failed promise to the Black woman who has worked for them her whole life. After years of service, Salome was promised her own house, her own land...yet somehow, as each decade passes, that promise remains unfulfilled.

The narrator's eye shifts and blinks: moving fluidly between characters, flying into their dreams; deliciously lethal in its observation. And as the country moves from old deep divisions to its new so-called fairer society, the lost promise of more than just one family hovers behind the novel's title.

In this story of a diminished family, sharp and tender emotional truths hit home. 

Confident, deft and quietly powerful, The Promise is literary fiction at its finest.

About the author: Damon Galgut is a novelist who has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (The Good Doctor and In A Strange Room). His most recent novel, Arctic Summer, was nominated for the Walter Scott and Folio prizes and his fiction has been published in sixteen languages. A film adaptation of The Quarry, starring Michael Shannon, was released in 2020. Damon Galgut lives and works in Cape Town.

Rating: 5/5

Holiness Befits Your House: Documentation On The Canonization of Edith Stein edited by John Sullivan OCD STD

Paperback: Holiness Befits Your House (2000) acquaints the reader with major Vatican pronouncements made at the time of Edith Stein's canonization in 1998, as well as the Pope's homily at the Eucharist of her beatification on 1 May 1987.

You can read how the niece of St Edith interprets (Jewish) family sentiment about the canonization, and learn the official position of the United States' bishops clearly outlined by their representative for Catholic-Jewish relations.

About the editor: The editor, Fr John Sullivan OCD, has devised a useful select bibliography to assist further reading. He was last to receive the Edith Stein Award of the Edith Stein Guild, given to acknowledge his efforts "in fostering better understanding between Christians and Jews, specifically by bringing Edith Stein's writings to the English-speaking world."

Start Thinking In A Different Way

What Went Wrong With Vatican II: The Catholic Crisis Explained by Ralph M McInerny

Paperback: What Went Wrong With Vatican II (1996) will show you why the Church has been in crisis since the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) - and what must be done about it.

Dr Ralph McInerny here reveals the causes of the devastation in the Church. You will discover that Vatican II did not:

1) Teach a new Faith

2) Do away with Tradition

3) Set up a new, democratic Church

4) Give Catholics permission to disagree with the Church in the name of conscience.

Read this dramatic narrative to learn how the council was hijacked and how interpretation of its decrees has been controlled since then by Catholics with an agenda different from what the council taught. Best of all, you will learn from Ralph McInerny what must be done now to take back the council and the Church.

Among the many eye-opening things you will learn:

1) Why theologians invoke the so-called "spirit of Vatican II" - against what the council really says

2) Why John XXIII wanted a council: it was not to "throw open Church windows to the modern world"!

3) Authority in the Church: how confusion about it began - and the steps that have to be taken to end it now

4) Humanae Vitae: the appalling story of how the birth-control encyclical was used to start a revolution in the Church - and overwhelm the real message of Vatican II

5) Rejecting the council: why this is not a legitimate option for faithful Catholics

6) The one essential point you must know about the council if you are to understand its significance for the Church in our time - and help restore the Church

Crisis magazine called this book: "The clearest and most comprehensive argument against the theological dissenters ever written."

About the author: Dr Ralph McInerny - teacher, mentor, novelist, husband, father of seven, and grandfather of 17 - was one of the world’s finest Thomistic philosophers.

Dr McInerny was the Director of the Jacques Maritain Center and the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame; he was also the Michael P.Grace Professor of Medieval Studies. Dr McInerny was profoundly influential both in academia and in the broader culture. In the half-century after joining the Notre Dame faculty in 1955, he published more than five dozen scholarly books and edited an acclaimed series of translations of St Thomas Aquinas’ commentaries. He also wrote more than 80 popular novels (most famously The Father Dowling Mysteries), co-founded Crisis and Catholic Dossier magazines, and served on President George W Bush’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities.

The New World Order by A Ralph Epperson

Paperback: The Great Seal of the United States with a pyramid, an eagle, Latin phrases, etc has been reproduced in the two circles on the back of every American dollar bill, but few in America know what these symbols mean. 

The key to understanding the meaning behind these symbols is found in the translation of the Latin phrase Annuit coeptis novus ordo seclorum ("Announcing the Birth of the New World Order"), found on what is known as the Reverse Side of the Great Seal. 

Historian and author, Ralph Epperson, has spent many years researching the history of the Great Seal, and has discovered that those who designed the two circles committed America to what has been called "a secret destiny."

This future "destiny" is so unpleasant that those who wanted the changes it entails had to conceal that truth in symbols. 

This book, The New World Order (1990), is the amply documented explanation of what those symbols mean. The author is making his research available to the American people so that they may know just what their future is, and so that they can take corrective action.

About the author: A Ralph Epperson (b1937) is an American historian, author, and lecturer who has been researching the conspiratorial view of history (the view that the major events of the past have been planned years in advance by a central conspiracy) for 50 years. 

He has written or produced four "best selling" books entitled The Unseen Hand 1982), The New World Order (1990), Masonry: Conspiracy Against Christianity (1998) and Jesse James: United States Senator 2005), as well as six booklets, and 15 DVDs.

He is a graduate of the University of Arizona, but freely admits that what he has learned since graduation has taught him that most of what he learned in college in History and Political Science simply is not true. He proudly states that his research has proven to him that there has been an active conspiracy in the world planning major wars, depressions, and inflations years in advance. He is known for his anti-Masonic opinions.

The Nameless One (Charlie Parker Series) by John Connolly

Hardback: In Amsterdam, four people are butchered in a canal house, their remains arranged around the crucified form of their patriarch, De Jaager: fixer, go-between, and confidante of the assassin named Louis. 

The men responsible for the murders are Serbian war criminals. 

They believe they can escape retribution by retreating to their homeland.

They are wrong.

For Louis has come to Europe to hunt them down: five killers to be found and punished before they can vanish into the east.

There is only one problem.

The sixth.

The Nameless One (2021) is the nineteenth instalment in the awesome and first-rate Charlie Parker series.

About the author: John Connolly was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1968 and has, at various points in his life, worked as a journalist, a barman, a local government official, a waiter and a dogsbody at Harrods department store in London. (A dogsbody, for our North American friends, is a 'go-fer'.) He studied English in Trinity College, Dublin and journalism at Dublin City University, subsequently spending five years working as a freelance journalist for The Irish Times newspaper. He divides his time between Dublin and Portland, Maine; makes regular donations to the wine industry; and keeps a number of dogs in a remarkable degree of comfort.

Rating: 6/5

Marie-Julie Jahenny: The Breton Stigmatist by Marquis de la Franquerie

Hardback: In all the past centuries, not one will resemble this epoch. - Marie-Julie Jahenny, 24 December 1884.

Marie-Julie, who was known for her admirable obedience to her spiritual directors and her Bishop, received a great number of apparitions of Our Lord, Our Lady, angels, and saints. She was also given prophecies that foretold future events for the universal Church, as well as for the world and, also in particular, the country of France, which has long been called “the first daughter of the Church” since France, under King Clovis of old, was the first country to publicly declare the Catholic Faith as the nation’s religion.

In this comprehensive introduction to the life and prophecies of “The Breton Stigmatist,” the reader will discover that Marie-Julie Jahenny foretold the World Wars I and II, the election of Pope St Pius X, the various persecutions of the Church, the chastisements and the fate of apostate France, the “first daughter of the Church.”

Prophecies of two individuals, a future Great Monarch and of a future Pope, were also given to Marie-Julie, but she is not alone in foretelling these two persons. Other saints and mystics have also predicted the coming of a “Great Monarch” (also known as the “Great Catholic Monarch”), as well as an Angelic Pastor (a holy and firm Pope), both whom will cooperate with God’s will during a formidable period of danger for the Church and the entire world.

Foretelling a terrible crisis in three parts, three days' darkness (as well as a separate two day period of darkness), spiritual and physical protection is also promised to those truly devoted to Our Lady and the Rosary, St Joseph, and St Michael. 

This work is a helpful addition for those who wish to recognize “the signs of the times.”

Lily's Promise: How I Survived Auschwitz And Found The Strength To Live (Non-Fiction) by Lily Ebert and Dov Forman

Hardback: When Holocaust survivor Lily Ebert was liberated in 1945, a Jewish-American soldier gave her a banknote on which he had written ‘Good luck and happiness’. 

And when her great-grandson, Dov, decided to use social media to track down the family of the GI, 96-year-old Lily found herself making headlines round the world. 

Lily had promised herself that if she survived Auschwitz she would tell everyone the truth about the camp. Now was her chance.

In Lily’s Promise, she writes movingly about her happy childhood in Hungary, the death of her mother and two youngest siblings on their arrival at Auschwitz in 1944 and her determination to keep her two other sisters safe. She describes the inhumanity of the camp and the small acts of defiance that gave her strength. From there she and her sisters became slave labour in a munitions factory, and then faced a death march that they barely survived.

Lily lost so much, but she built a new life for herself and her family, first in Israel and then in London. It was not easy; the pain of her past was always with her, but this extraordinary woman found the strength to speak out in the hope that such evil would never happen again.

Lily's Promise (2021) is a heart-breaking and unforgettable reminder of both the importance of remembering the Holocaust and the incredible power of hope. 

The book is dedicated to the loving memory of Lily's mother, Nina, and her little brother and sister, Bela and Berta, all of whom were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is also dedicated to the many members of her extended family who were killed, and to all those who have no one to remember them. It includes a Foreword by HRH The Prince of Wales and is The Sunday Times top 10 bestseller.

About the authors: Lily Ebert lives in London near her large and loving family, which includes thirty-four great-grandchildren. She is a founder member of the Holocaust Survivors Centre and was awarded the British Empire Medal for services to Holocaust education. Lily's Promise is her powerful memoir.

Dov Forman is Lily’s great-grandson. At the age of sixteen he was separated from her during the Covid pandemic for the first time, and became determined to record her story for posterity.

Fascism And Democracy by George Orwell

Paperback: 'The feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world ... this prospect frightens me much more than bombs'.

On the 70th anniversary of George Orwell's death, a new collection of his brilliant essays written during the Second World War is published, one of them being Fascism and Democracy, in 2020 by Penguin Random House UK.

Fascism and Democracy collects five brilliant examples of Orwell's writing during the darkest days of World War Two. Grappling with the principles of democracy and the potential of reform, the meaning of literature and free speech in times of violence, and the sustainability of objective truth, Orwell offers a compelling portrayal of a nation where norms and ideals can no longer be taken for granted. 

Like the best of Orwell's writing, these essays also serve as timeless reminders of the fragility of freedom.

About the author: George Orwell (1903-1950) was a novelist, essayist and critic best known for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). He was a man of strong opinions who addressed some of the major political movements of his times, including imperialism, fascism and communism. Orwell died of tuberculosis in a London hospital on 21 January 1950. Although he was just 46 years old at the time of his death, his ideas and opinions have lived on through his work.

Despite Orwell’s disdain for the BBC during his life, a statue of the writer was commissioned by artist Martin Jennings and installed outside the BBC in London. The eight-foot bronze statue, paid for by the George Orwell Memorial Fund, was unveiled in November 2017. An inscription reads, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." 

WE ARE WARNED: The Prophecies of Marie-Julie Jahenny translated by E A Bucchianeri

PDF: Marie-Julie Jahenny (Coyault, Blain, February 12, 1850 to La Fraudais, March 4, 1941) was a Breton mystic and stigmatist. Marie-Julie was the eldest of five children. Her parents, Charles and Marie Boya Jahenny, were pious, hard-working peasants; little did they know that their first child would be chosen by Heaven for a special mission: to spread the love of the Cross, to make sacrifices and suffer for the salvation of sinners, to prepare the world for the prophesied chastisements, and to announce once again the coming of the Great Monarch and the Angelic Pontiff who would restore the glory of Christendom in an unprecedented and miraculous manner.

Marie-Julie later joined the Third Order of Saint Francis. During her life, she reported several apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ through which she received prophecies about the end of the world, the Great Catholic Monarch, punishment for the sins of the people, the destruction of Paris through civil war, the Three Days of Darkness, and the coming of Antichrist.

From the age of twenty-three until her death, she bore the stigmata. According to the testimony of witnesses, she experienced miraculous Holy Communions, miraculous fasting periods to where she lived on no other food but the Eucharist for several years, suffered supernatural attacks from the devil, and had the gift of prophecy and miracles.

Marie-Julie predicted numerous chastisements for sin that would fall first on France then spread to the rest of the world. These include: earthquakes, unprecedented destruction through storms, failed harvests, unknown plagues that would spread rapidly plus the cures for them, a "Blood Rain" that would fall for seven weeks, civil war in France that apparently would be started by conspirators in the government, the persecution of the Catholic Church with the total closure of all churches and religious houses, persecution and slaughter of Christians, the destruction of Paris, a Two Day period of Darkness that would come circa a month before the Three Days of Darkness. 

The coming of the Great Monarch would also be announced by signs in the sky. She also had visions of the Angelic Pontiff who would reign at the same time of the Great Monarch, and that both these great leaders were destined to restore the Catholic Church. Her house has been transformed into a sanctuary, which bears her name, in Blain, near Nantes where she is buried in the cemetery.

In her apparitions, Jahenny was told to promote a Purple Scapular, which was to be displayed in homes and worn to provide protection during the End Times and the Three Days of Darkness. 

She was approved by her local bishop, Bishop Fournier of Nantes, in 1875. (Wikipedia)

We Are Warned: The Prophecies of Marie-Julie Jahenny is edited and translated from the French by E A Bucchianeri with added commentary.

About the translator: E A Bucchianeri, an Irish-Italian American author, hails from the old Wild West, Virginia City, Nevada. She later moved to Co Tipperary Ireland, finished High School at Loreto Academy and graduated from University College Cork. While classical music and musicology was her major, she loves to write. When not roughing through a case of writer's block, the author enjoys writing non-fiction. When the author is suffering that dreaded affliction, drowning in chocolate is the next best thing. Bucchianeri currently lives in Fatima, Portugal. 

The Nobel Literature Prize 2021 Goes To Abdulrazak Gurnah (b1948), Zanzibari Novelist Based In London

What Really Happened In Wuhan: A Virus Like No Other, Countless Infections, Millions of Deaths by Sharri Markson

Hardback: November 2019, Washing DC. Wrapped in a coat and scarf, Wei Jingsheng strode with purpose through an edgy Washington suburb, lowering his face from the winter chill. He managed to blend in easily among the rush-hour crowd making their way home from work at dusk. But Wei was no ordinary American. He was one of the biggest defection coups the US had pulled off from inside communist China...  Wei leant back and pulled out one of his cherished French cigarettes. He took his time, passing one to Bob as well. Wei looked at Dimon and Bob. "There is a new, dangerous virus spreading in China," he said.

Walkley Award-winning journalist, Sharri Markson is the Investigations Editor at The Australian and host of prime-time show Sharri on Sky News Australia.

The origins of Covid-19 are shrouded in mystery. Scientists and government officials insisted, for a year and a half, that the virus had a natural origin, ridiculing anyone who dared contradict this view. Tech giants swept the internet, censoring and silencing debate in the most extreme fashion. Yet it is undeniable that a secretive facility in Wuhan was immersed in genetically manipulating bat-coronaviruses in perilous experiments. And as soon as the news of an outbreak in Wuhan leaked, the Chinese military took control and gagged all laboratory insiders.

Part-thriller, part-expose, What Really Happened in Wuhan (2021) is a ground-breaking investigation from leading journalist Sharri Markson into the origins of Covid-19, the cover-ups, the conspiracies and the classified research. It features never-before-seen primary documents exposing China's concealment of the virus, fresh interviews with whistleblower doctors in Wuhan and crucial eyewitness accounts that dismantle what we thought we knew about when the outbreak hit.

With unprecedented access to Washington insiders, Markson takes you inside the White House, with senior Trump lieutenants revealing first-hand accounts of fiery Oval Office clashes and new stories of compromised government advisors and censored scientists.

Bravely reported and chillingly laid out, Markson brings to light the stories of the pandemic from the people on the ground: the scientists and national security officials who raised uncomfortable truths and were labelled conspiracy theorists, until government agencies began to suspect they might have been right all along. These brave individuals persisted through bruising battles and played a crucial role in investigating the origins of Covid-19 to finally, in this book, bring us closer to the truth of what really happened in Wuhan.

What Really Happened in Wuhan is dedicated to every soul who has lost their life to this cruel virus, and to their loved ones left behind.

About the author: Sharri Markson is a two-time Walkley Award-winning journalist, investigations writer at The Australian and host of Sharri on Sky News Australia. She has been at the forefront of breaking news regarding the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic since early 2020. Sharri was previously national political editor at The Daily Telegraph, media editor at The Australian, editor at Cleo magazine, news editor at Seven News, and political reporter and chief of staff at The Sunday Telegraph. 

She was the recipient of the 2018 Sir Keith Murdoch Award for Excellence in Journalism, the winner of the 2020 News Award for Investigative Journalism, a winner of four Kennedy Awards - 2018 Journalist of the Year, Political Journalist of the Year and Scoop of the Year, and 2019 Columnist of the Year - and joint winner of the 2019 Press Gallery Political Journalist of the Year award.

She lives in Sydney, Australia, with her husband and child.