Who was Jesus?Historical sources portray a person who was complex, multi-layered, and often contradictory to the tidy portrait that much of modern Christianity paints him as. Even the gospel accounts render him as both judge and healer, teacher and temple, servant and savior.A Doubter's Guide to Jesus is a persuasive and often challenging investigation into the historical figure found in the earliest sources. These sources, which include references...

This volume will come, I fancy, as a surprise both to my brother folk-lorists and to the public in general. It might naturally have been thought that my former volume (English Fairy Tales) had almost exhausted the scanty remains of the traditional folk-tales of England.

From the extreme West of the Indo-European world, we go this year to the extreme East. From the soft rain and green turf of Gaeldom, we seek the garish sun and arid soil of the Hindoo. In the Land of Ire, the belief in fairies, gnomes, ogres and monsters is all but dead; in the Land of Ind it still flourishes in all the vigour of animism.Soils and national characters differ; but fairy tales are the same in plot and incidents, if not in treatment. The majority of the tales in this volume ha...

For believers and skeptics alike, A Doubter's Guide to World Religions introduces the five major world religions so that you can explore their similarities and differences in a fair and engaging way.The world is a very religious place. Wherever you look, people are worshipping, praying, believing, following, even dying for their faith. But what does it mean to be religious? Are all religions the same? Do they all call on the same God simply using different...

When a spiritual medium is murdered in a locked hut on a haunted estate, Sir Henry Merrivale seeks a logical solution to a ghostly crime.Plague Court is old and crumbling, long neglected after its lord, hangman's assistant Louis Playge, fell victim to the black death hundreds of years before. Famously haunted by Playge's ghost, the property finally has a new owner and banishing the spirit is the first order of business. And when the medium employed with this task is...

Rita Wainwright's love affair with Barry Sullivan is flamboyant enough to deserve a dramatic ending, so that when the pair of them vanish over a cliff one rainy night, leaving a farewell note for Rita's husband, no one doubts for a moment that it is a case of suicide – except for Doctor Luke, one of the few people who genuinely liked her.Sir Henry Merrivale – the fabulous 'H.M.' – is staying in the area, having his portrait painted as a Roman senator. Although confined to a bath-ch...

'The Starberths die of broken necks' goes the legend in the village of Chatterham . . .The Starberth family governed the now-abandoned Chatterham prison for many years, and each male heir must spend the night of his twenty-fifth birthday there, alone, overlooking the hanging site of Hag's Nook.Meanwhile, after a chance encounter on a railway platform, Dorothy Starberth and young American graduate Tad Rampole fall in love. Rampole is here in rural Lincolnshire to se...

In this mystery by the acclaimed author of To Wake the Dead, an inheritance hangs in the balance in a case of stolen identities, imposters, and murder.Banished from the idyllic English countryside he once called home and en route to live with his cousin in America, Sir John Farnleigh, black sheep of the wealthy Farnleigh clan, nearly perished in the sinking of the Titanic. Though he survived the catastrophe, his ties with his family did not, and he...

A corpse in a top hat leads Dr. Gideon Fell to a killer with a sick sense of humor in this mystery by the celebrated author of Hag's Nook.At the hand of an outrageous prankster, top hats are going missing all over London, snatched from the heads of some of the city's most powerful people―but is the hat thief the same as the person responsible for stealing a lost story by Edgar Allan Poe, the manuscript of which has just disappeared from the collection of Si...

Having lost all his money in hare-brained get-rich-quick schemes, old Angus Campbell has nothing to leave his heirs but the proceeds of his life insurance policies. After he falls to his death from a locked bedchamber in the tower of Shira Castle in the Scottish Highlands, his family gather. They are joined by amateur sleuth Dr Gideon Fell, who tries to solve the mystery. Is it suicide, or is it murder?From Shira to Glencoe Gideon Fell trains his forensic intelligence on trying to ...

Three Golden Age British-style whodunits from the Edgar Award–winning writer Agatha Christie called "a master magician . . . the king of the art of misdirection."One of the most popular Golden Age mystery authors, John Dickson Carr was also lauded by his peers. Agatha Christie offered him the highest praise from one mystery writer to another: "Very few detective stories baffle me, but Mr. Carr's always do." And Dorothy Sayers enthused: "Mr. Carr can lead us away fr...

Part 2 picks up after Rodney had murdered several people and had been captured. Through the trial, it was discovered that he and another associate were pawns in a scheme to corner the pharmaceutical market with a cure for several ailments, by Bio Tech. Ultimately, he was found innocent. Luckily for him, during his trial a female attorney fell hard for him and during the long course of the trial, he fell for her. Through their relationship, they were able to live a comfortable and happy lif...