Vows (A Memoir) by Peter Manseau

About the book: That's how I imagine the scene of my parents' meeting, as a series of contrasts and contradictions. Standing between a cardboard-patched window and scripture-painted walls, half-buried shards twinkling like stars beneath them, they made their introductions in the middle of a storefront with nothing to sell. He was a Catholic priest wearing a white plastic collar like a lock around his neck. She was a nun in a virgin's black veil. (Prologue)

Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son (2005) is a compelling story of one family's unshakable faith that to be called is to serve, however high the cost may be. 

Peter Manseau's riveting evocation of his parents' parallel childhoods, their similar callings, their experiences in the seminary and convent, and how they met while tending to the homeless of Roxbury, Massachusetts, during the riot-prone 1960s is a page-turning meditation on the effect that love can have on profound faith.

About the author: Peter Manseau is the author of Vows and coauthor of Killing the Buddha. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. A founding editor of the award-winning webzine KillingTheBuddha.com, he is now the editor of Search, The Magazine of Science, Religion, and Culture. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Washington, DC, where he studies religion and teaches writing at Georgetown University.

Finding Suzy (True Crime) by David Videcette

About the book: How can someone just disappear?

Step inside a real-life, missing person investigation in this compelling, true crime must-read. Uncover what happened to missing estate agent Suzy Lamplugh, as David Videcette takes you on a quest to unpick her mysterious disappearance and scrutinise the shadowy 'Mr Kipper'.

One overcast Monday in July 1986, 25-year-old estate agent Suzy Lamplugh vanished whilst showing a smart London property to a mysterious ‘Mr Kipper’.

Despite the baffling case dominating the news and one of the largest missing persons cases ever mounted, police failed to find a shred of evidence establishing what had happened to her.

Sixteen years later, following a second investigation and under pressure from Suzy’s desperate parents, police named convicted rapist and murderer John Cannan as their prime suspect. However, the Crown Prosecution Service refused to charge him, citing a lack of evidence.

High-profile searches were conducted, yet Suzy’s body was never found. The trail that might lead investigators to her, long since lost.

Haunted by another missing person case, investigator and former Scotland Yard detective, David Videcette, has spent five years painstakingly reinvestigating Suzy’s cold case disappearance culminating in Finding Suzy: The Hunt for Missing Estate Agent Suzy Lamplugh and 'Mr Kipper' (2021).

Through a series of incredible new witness interviews and fresh groundbreaking analysis, he uncovers piece by piece what happened to Suzy and why the case was never solved.

People don't just disappear...

About the author: As an investigator, David Videcette has worked on a wealth of famous cases. He has chased numerous dangerous criminals and interviewed thousands of witnesses. With decades of experience working in counter-terror operations and combatting organised crime, David investigated the 7/7 London bombings as a Scotland Yard detective. Today, he uses his policing expertise to investigate cold cases in his true crime series: Investigations by David Videcette. He is also the author of the Detective Inspector Jake Flannagan thriller series. When he is not writing, he consults on security operations for high-net-worth individuals and is a key media commentator on crime and policing for broadcasters and newspapers, both nationally and internationally. David lives in London. 

Find out more at: www.DavidVidecette.com

Terror By Night (True Crime) by Terry Caffey with James H Pence

About the book: In one evening, Terry Caffey lost everything. His wife, Penny, and his sons, Matthew and Tyler, were brutally murdered; his home was burned to the ground, and his sixteen-year-old daughter, Erin, was in jail, charged with three counts of capital murder. In one year’s time, God would restore it all. What happened next is nothing short of miraculous...

At 3:00 a.m. on 1 March 2008, Terry Caffey awoke to find his daughter’s former boyfriend standing in the bedroom doorway with a gun. An instant later the teen opened fire, killing Terry’s wife and wounding Terry six times. As he slipped toward unconsciousness, Terry heard his son crying upstairs. More gunfire followed. When he regained consciousness, he felt the searing heat of his burning house.

Terry knew it was too late to save his family, but he had one thing to do before he died. He fought to stay awake and escaped the burning house through a bathroom window. As Terry stumbled and crawled four hundred yards through pitch darkness, he asked God to keep him alive long enough to identify the killer, and then to let him die.

God allowed Terry to identify the murderer, but He did not let Terry die.

What happened next is nothing short of miraculous.

Terror by Night: The True Story of the Brutal Texas Murder That Destroyed A Family, Restored One Man's Faith, and Shocked A Nation (2009) is the emotionally gripping story of a daughter’s ultimate betrayal, a father’s unfathomable forgiveness, and a miraculous discovery that would restore one man’s faith, spare two young lives, and restore peace to a small Texas town.

This book tells the compelling story of how Terry Caffey found peace after his wife and sons were brutally murdered and his teenage daughter implicated in the crime. Sharing never-before-told details about the night of the crime and subsequent murder trial, Terror by Night shows how Terry was able to forgive the men who murdered his family, and how he even interceded with the prosecutors on their behalf. This story is a powerful example of how the power of forgiveness can bring healing after tragedy and great loss, and how God can bring good out of even the darkest tragedies.

About the authors: Terry Caffey lives in Wills Point, Texas, with his wife, Sonja, and their two sons, Blake and Tanner. Since the tragic loss of his first wife, Penny, and their sons, Matthew and Tyler, he has gone into full-time ministry, speaking and reaching out to others who have suffered unspeakable tragedy and sharing his personal message of God’s faithfulness. Terry continues to visit his daughter, Erin, regularly and remains steadfast in his belief that she did not mastermind the plot to kill her family.

James H Pence is a full-time professional writer, editor and Web designer living near Dallas, Texas. James came to know the Caffey family when Terry's daughter, Erin, and her brother Tyler enrolled in James's "Karate for Homeschoolers" class. Through the karate class, James got to know both Terry and Penny. He later gave Penny a copy of his novel Blind Sight, the source of the mysterious scorched page that Terry found in the aftermath of the fire and credits with turning his life around following the loss of his family. 

A Private Man by Stephanie Sy-Quia

About the book: Set in mid-century Rome and England, this forbidden slow-burn love story will take your breath away!

Rome, 1953. David is young, handsome, charismatic and sworn to celibacy. He is freshly ordained and about to return to England to begin life as a priest. Devotion to God is all he has ever known.

In London, Margaret is entangled in an impossible love affair. Committed to living on her own terms without sacrificing her faith, she becomes drawn to a women’s movement challenging the archaic rules of the Church.

When they are thrown together in David's countryside parish, something ignites in each of them, and so begins a decades-long secret with consequences that will reverberate throughout the generations.

A Private Man (2026) is shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize as well as for the Orwell Prize for Fiction.

About the author: Stephanie Sy-Quia’s first book of poetry, Amnion, won the 2021 Forward Prize for Best First Collection, an Eric Gregory Award, and a Somerset Maugham Award. It was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Laurel Prize, and the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize. Her writing has appeared in the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Boston Review, The White Review, Five Dials and Granta, among others. She lives in London.

Rating: 4/5 

Before The Altar by Concepción Cabrera de Armida

About the book: This future saint, Concepción Cabrera de Armida (Conchita), prepares us, in these short meditations, to further our spiritual growth and union with Jesus.

There are 100 extraordinary meditations of this Holy Mystic which, because of its many editions (twenty five editions in Spanish, French, Italian and English), might be called a classic within the spirituality. 

May all who read this book in the spirit of total self-surrender to her beloved Jesus receive the grace to be similarly transformed from ardour to holiness.

Before The Altar: A Hundred Visits To Jesus In The Blessed Sacrament (2000) is revised by Ronda de Sola Chervin with an Introduction by Msgr Juan Esquerda Bifet.

About the author: Blessed Concepción Cabrera de Armida, better known as Conchita, was born in San Luis Potosi on 8 December 1862 and died in Mexico, DF, on 3 March 1937. 

As a writer, she often aimed to show her readers how to love the Catholic Church:

"To love the Church is not to criticize her, not to destroy her, not to try to change her essential structures, not to reduce her to humanism, horizontalism and to the simple service of a human liberation. To love the Church is to cooperate with the work of Redemption by the Cross and in this way obtain the grace of the Holy Spirit come to renew the face of this poor earth, conducting it to its consummation in the design of the Father's immense love."

Wife, mother, widow, lay apostle, Catholic mystic and writer, Conchita was beatified in Mexico City on 4 May 2019 as the first Mexican laywoman to receive this recognition.

The Color Of Death by Trey Gowdy and Christopher Greyson

About the book: From the number-one New York Times bestselling author and FOX News host Trey Gowdy comes a dark mystery debut about a murder in a small South Carolina town. Assistant DA Colm Truesdale must pick up the pieces of his own life in order to solve the case.

Following the death of his wife and daughter, Colm Truesdale is left mentally scarred. After time off, and with no desire to return to the courtroom, Truesdale is brought back into the investigation of the murder of a young woman who ran a beauty salon outside of town. When a page from her appointment book goes missing, and then the crime scene burns down, it is up to Colm to untangle the web of deception that implicates a powerful judge and his family.

Taking readers inside the cat-and-mouse psychology of a killer and the assistant district attorney who must catch him, this thrilling fiction debut, The Color of Death (2025), from bestselling author Trey Gowdy and celebrated author Christopher Greyson will keep you guessing until the very last page.

About the authors: Trey Gowdy is a former state and federal prosecutor who handled thousands of criminal cases and took nearly one hundred cases to jury verdict. He prosecuted scores of murder cases, including seven death penalty trials. He served in Congress for eight years, chairing two committees and leaving in 2019 to return to South Carolina. He hosts the weekend primetime show Sunday Night in America on FOX News Channel and The Trey Gowdy Podcast on FOX News Audio. He and his wife, Terri, have two children - both lawyers - and have had five dogs: Judge, Jury, Bailiff, Justice, and DA.

Christopher Greyson is an award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of mystery, action, and thriller novels. Recognized as one of the top 100 Kindle authors of all time, his acclaimed works have sold over 3.5 million e-books, print copies, and audiobooks. An accomplished speaker, actor, and prolific storyteller, he has written more than twenty novels, ranging from pulse-pounding thrillers to sweet cozy mysteries.

Rating: 5/5

Rise of Religious Literature

A Deadly Marriage (True Crime) by Brian Carroll

About the book: How Molly Martens’ obsession with her stepchildren cost her husband, Jason, his life and legacy.

A story that grips Ireland.

When recently widowed Jason Corbett hired a wholesome young American, Molly Martens, to care for his two young children, there was nothing to suggest she was a fantasist - and that her obsession with his children would end in his death.

In 2011, Jason and Molly married and settled in her native North Carolina. Just four years later, Jason was found beaten to death on the floor of the marital bedroom. The only others in the house were Jason's children, his wife and his parents-in-law. In a stunning twist, Molly and her father Tom, a former senior FBI agent, admitted to killing Jason but claimed self-defence, saying he had a record of domestic abuse.

A Deadly Marriage (2025) is the shattering story of how a wealthy and well-connected American family framed the victim of an horrific killing as the aggressor, destroyed his name and served minimal jail time. Full of fresh on-the-ground reporting by journalist Brian Carroll, who has spent months in North Carolina, it is the definitive account of an extraordinary case.

About the author: Brian Carroll is an Irish journalist and documentary filmmaker. He has covered the case of Tom and Molly Martens extensively for the Irish Times (in print and on podcast) and was co-producer of 'A Deadly American Marriage', the feature-length Netflix documentary on the story that broadcast in spring 2025.

A Mother's Spiritual Diary: Conchita edited by M M Philipon OP

About the book: Conchita (1862-1937) lived her life in Mexico. For more than forty years, on the advice of her spiritual directors, she faithfully kept a spiritual diary. Drawing from 66 handwritten notebooks left by the mystic, Father Philipon has edited and compiled her principal message: the Cross, the Church, the Trinity. From this diary, one can study step by step the journey of a privileged soul.

The life of Conchita is characterized by many facets. She fulfilled all the vocations of a woman: fiancée, wife, mother, grandmother, and even, by a special indulgence of Pius X, without being deprived of her family status, died canonically as a religious in the arms of her children.

She addresses herself to all categories of the People of God, to lay and to married people, to priests and to bishops, to religious and to all consecrated lives. By the profoundness of her writings, Conchita rivals St Catherine of Siena or St Teresa of Ávila.

Conchita dedicated her spiritual diary "To the Mother of the Incarnate Word, whose life was most simple and most divine". 

A Mother's Spiritual Diary: Conchita (1978, 2025) is translated from the French (journal spirituel d'une mere de famille) by Aloysius J Owen SJ. 

About the editor: This is the posthumous work of the great spiritual theologican, Marie-Michel Philipon OP, a theological work on the spirit and doctrine of Blessed Maria Concepción Cabrera de Armida (Conchita). This study occupied much of the last years of Father Philipon's life. He believed that the spiritual message of this work is an important gift of Providence for the Church of today. The first contact Father Philipon had with Conchita's life and doctrine took place during a trip to Mexico in 1954.

Roses And Thorns by Concepción Cabrera de Armida (Conchita)

About the book: Mary's maternal tenderness for each believer (then and now) is apparent at every moment in this little gem of a book. 

The "thorns" or sorrows of the Blessed Mother are an expression of this tenderness. She invites us to receive the "roses" for our consolation and surrender, keeping the "thorns" for herself, so that we might discover her motherly love and might keep her company as she reflects on her separation from Jesus following the Ascension.

Conchita has Mary say, "The sorrows were all for me, but the precious fruit derived from them - for you." 

As you read this book, you feel invited to live in union with Mary, so that, with her help and by her example, you can better grasp the love and sentiments of the Lord.

Roses and Thorns will be a classic Marian devotion, as The True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin of St Louis Grignon de Montfort and The Glories of Mary of St Alphonsus Maria Ligouri already are. - Msgr Juan Esquerda Bifet, Professor, Urbaniana Pontifical University, Rome, Italy. 

Roses and Thorns (2007, 2023) is revised by Mary McCandless (Sr Dolores Icaza, RCSCJ) and edited by Ron Leonardo.

About the author: Blessed Concepción Cabrera de Armida, better known as Conchita, was born in San Luis Potosi on 8 December 1862 and died in Mexico, DF, on 3 March 1937. 

As a writer, she often aimed to show her readers how to love the Catholic Church:

"To love the Church is not to criticize her, not to destroy her, not to try to change her essential structures, not to reduce her to humanism, horizontalism and to the simple service of a human liberation. To love the Church is to cooperate with the work of Redemption by the Cross and in this way obtain the grace of the Holy Spirit come to renew the face of this poor earth, conducting it to its consummation in the design of the Father's immense love."

Wife, mother, widow, lay apostle, Catholic mystic and writer, Conchita was beatified in Mexico City on 4 May 2019 as the first Mexican laywoman to receive this recognition.

Along with the present work, St Pauls has also published Holy Hours (2006); Seasons of the Soul (2005); A Mother's Letters (2004); and I Am: Eucharistic Meditations on the Gospel (2001). Other works inspired by her and also published by St Pauls include Conchita by M M Philipon OP (1978) and Irresistibly Drawn to the Eucharist edited by Juan Gutierrez Gonzalez, MSpS (2002).

We Were Once a Family (True Crime) by Roxanna Asgarian

About the book: We Were Once A Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America (2023) is the shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six children - and a searing indictment of the American foster care system.

On 26 March 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of two women and multiple children at the bottom of a cliff along the Pacific Coast Highway. Investigators soon concluded that the crash was a murder-suicide, but there was more to the story: Jennifer and Sarah Hart, it turned out, were a white married couple who had adopted six Black children from two different Texas families in 2006 and 2008. 

Behind the family's loving facade was an alleged pattern of abuse and neglect that had been ignored as the couple withdrew the children from school and moved west. It soon became apparent that the State of Texas knew all too little about the two individuals to whom it had given custody of six children.

Immersive journalism of the highest order, Roxanna Asgarian's We Were Once a Family is a revelation of precarious lives; it is also a shattering exposé of the foster care and adoption systems that produced this tragedy. 

As a journalist in Houston, Asgarian sought out the children's birth families and put them at the center of the story. We follow the lives of the Harts' adopted children and their birth parents, and the machinations of the state agency that sent the children far away. Asgarian's reporting uncovers persistent racial biases and corruption as young people of colour are separated from birth parents without proper cause. The result is a riveting narrative and a deeply reported indictment of a system that continues to fail America's most vulnerable children while upending the lives of their families.

We Were Once A Family is the Winner of the 2023 National Book Critics Circle for Nonfiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; a Washington Post best nonfiction book of 2023 Winner of the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction; and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice One of Publishers Weekly's best nonfiction books of 2023.

About the author: Roxanna Asgarian is a Texas-based independent journalist who writes about child welfare and the law. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, New York, and Texas Monthly, among other publications. She received the 2022 J Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for We Were Once a Family. She lives in Texas with her family.

The State Rests by J Caleb Cunningham

About the book: In the heart of “flyover country,” Camden County, Missouri, and the Lake of the Ozarks seem like a sleepy backwater. But beneath that calm surface churns an unruly world of drunks, predators, murderers, and eccentric locals. Join J Caleb Cunningham, an outsider risen to prosecutor, standing on the front lines of justice in rural America - where the distinction between the absurd and the tragic is razor thin. 

In The State Rests: Crime And Punishment At Lake Of The Ozarks (2026), Cunningham dissects real cases with a prosecutor’s precision and a storyteller’s wit, pulling back the curtain on the theatrics of crime and punishment at the Lake of the Ozarks.

More than a collection of cases, this is a deeply human story, where colleagues become family amid the constant demands of community, revealing the power and politics, and the true burdens of public office. As Cunningham’s path builds toward a high-stakes election, the question looms: What does justice really mean and who are we trusting to deliver it?

About the author: J Caleb Cunningham is a trial attorney. A native of south Alabama, Cunningham earned his bachelor's degree and his Juris Doctor from the University of Alabama. He began his career in Mobile, founding a small firm and trying cases across the state.

In 2017, looking for a fresh start, he took a job as an assistant prosecutor in Camden County, Missouri -  home to the Lake of the Ozarks. He stayed five years, rising to elected Prosecuting Attorney. During his tenure he secured multiple life sentences, prosecuted a double homicide, multiple child abuse cases, was a founding member of treatment courts, and ran an office of more than twenty attorneys and staff. He was named Missouri's DWI Hero of the Year in 2021. The State Rests is his firsthand account of those years - the cases, the characters, and the cost of public service in rural America. Cunningham now practices in complex litigation across the United States. He lives in Pensacola, Florida. The State Rests is his first book.

Sisters Of The Midnight Sun (True Crime) by Rebecca Wright Stevens

About the book: Sisters of the Midnight Sun: A Murder in Arctic Alaska (2026) is the stunning true story of a double homicide in the vibrant native Alaskan Iñupiat community at the arctic edge of the United States written by the public defender at its center.

Rebecca Wright is a defense attorney living in the Lower 48 when she suddenly finds herself a widow and an empty nester. In need of a radical change, she accepts a public defender position in Utqiagvik on Alaska’s North Slope, an oil-rich area the size of Wyoming where the Iñupiat community holds great cultural, political, and economic power. Though she will always be a tanik - an outsider - she works hard to gain the trust and friendship of the folks who call this singular place home.

When two well-known sisters, Bernice and Wanda Ipalook, are found murdered, Wright is tasked with representing Amos Lane, a drifter on the short-list of murder suspects. Criminal charges are looming. But this is summer in northern Alaska, the season of the midnight sun, when twenty-four-hour sunlight makes it difficult for witnesses to confirm the time - or even the day - they last saw the sisters, Amos, or anyone else. 

Wright must navigate an unreliable client, a prosecution willing to entrap her to get a conviction, a budding romance, and a community that believes Amos might deserve a different form of justice from what the tanik legal system can provide.

Weaving a detailed portrait of Utqiagvik alongside Wright’s complex self-portrait of an outsider in an isolated community, Sisters of the Midnight Sun: A Murder in Arctic Alaska is a riveting true account that brings to vivid life a land at the edge of the habitable world.

About the author: Rebecca Wright Stevens is a retired public defender with a double major in English and Spanish from the University of Kansas in Lawrence, and a Juris Doctor degree from Memphis State.

The Devil At His Elbow (True Crime) by Valerie Bauerlein

About the book: Power, privilege, and blood. 

The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty (2025) is the true story of Alex Murdaugh's violent downfall authored by a veteran Wall Street Journal reporter who has become an authority on the case.

Alex Murdaugh was a benevolent dictator - the president of the South Carolina trial lawyers' association, a political boss, a part-time prosecutor, and a partner in his family's law firm. He was always ready with a favour, a drink, and an invitation to Moselle, his family's 1,700-acre hunting estate. 

The Murdaugh name ignited respect - and fear - for a hundred miles.

When he murdered his wife, Maggie, and son Paul at Moselle on a dark summer night, the fragile façade of Alex's world could no longer hold. His forefathers had covered up a midnight suicide at a remote railroad crossing, a bootlegging ring run from a courthouse, and the attempted murder of a pregnant lover. Alex, too, almost walked away from his unspeakable crimes with his reputation intact, but his downfall was secured by a twist of fate, some stray mistakes, and a fateful decision by an old friend who had finally seen enough.

Why would a man who had everything kill his wife and grown son? 

To unwind the roots of Alex's ruin, award-winning journalist Valerie Bauerlein reported not just from the courthouse every day but also along the backroads and through the tidal marshes of South Carolina's Lowcountry. When the jurors made their pilgrimage to the crime scene, trying to envision Maggie and Paul's last moments, she walked right behind them, sensing the ghosts that haunt the Murdaughs' now-shattered legacy.

Through masterful research and cinematic writing, The Devil at His Elbow is a transporting journey through Alex's life, the night of the murders, and the investigation that culminated in a trial that held tens of millions spellbound. With her stunning insights and fearless instinct for the truth, Bauerlein uncovers layers of the Murdaugh murder case that have not been told.

About the author: Valerie Bauerlein is a national reporter for The Wall Street Journal who writes about small-town America and Southern politics, economics, and culture. She has covered the South her entire career, including nineteen years at the Journal and four years at The State in Columbia, South Carolina. Ms Bauerlein graduated from Duke University. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her husband and their two children.