Church Women

Lyn Brakeman was among the first women to enter the ordination process in the Episcopal Church just after the General Convention voted in 1976 that women could be priests. The bishop of her diocese had voted against ordaining women priests, and hospitality toward female aspirants was guarded at best. So why would a 40-year-old institutional naïf, suburban housewife, and mother of four enter such unfriendly territory to seek priestly ordination at a time when her personal life was in chaos?

Snow isn't all that's falling in Denver, Colorado, on Christmas Eve. A beautiful, young district attorney tumbles from her balcony to her death. Police suspect suicide, but the DA’s sister, newspaper reporter Samantha Church, isn’t buying it. Samantha discovers evidence linking her sister to a drug smuggling case and quickly learns she has stumbled onto a major news story. She must summon the courage to not only face a cartel of criminals, but her own fears and shortcomings when she is confronted by the inescapable specter of a far greater enemy - her addiction to alcohol.

1914: Sixteen-year-old Etterly, running from something, hides inside the trunk of a tree and disappears. The police search but find no trace. Her family and friends wrack their brains but come up with nothing. And so slowly life returns to normal. The hole in the tree is boarded up, and the village of Sackwater moves on. Only Etterly's best friend, Betty, clings to hope, insisting she can hear her friend calling for help. 1940: A skeleton is discovered buried in the woods....

Eva spends much of her life torn between the man she had and the man she has. On paper they both look like ideal husband material. But looks, as we all know, can be bought, faked, or photoshopped. Everyone around Eva seems to keep shoveling lies to bury their secrets. As Eva starts to dig for the truth, she realizes it's impossible to stay clean, especially while playing in someone else's dirt.

University is supposed to be the best time of your life. But Imo’s first week is quickly going from bad to worse. A stalker is watching her flat, following her every move, and Imo suspects that her new roommates are hiding dark secrets. When one of them suddenly disappears, the trauma of Imo’s recent past comes hurtling back to haunt her. And she begins to realise just how little she knows about the people she lives with....

When Catherine learns that she is dying, she remembers the words her husband once jokingly uttered and decides to leave him the ultimate posthumous gift: a time capsule containing photographs of their life together along with tape recordings in which she recounts every secret she ever kept, every unspoken thought whether loving or treacherous - the things they never said.

Abby Archer, a smart and savvy woman who refuses to be taken in by celebrity culture, becomes fascinated with it girl and media darling Brooke Simmons after she falls into a coma following a car crash. Her loyal security-guard-turned-lover Nick Lawson is implicated in the accident - someone Abby met just days before. One day Abby begins to feel unwell and is shocked to see the face looking back at her in the mirror is no longer her own but that of Brooke Simmons.

Ruby is a vlogger, a rising star of YouTube and a heroine to millions of teenage girls. And she's missing.... But she's an adult - nothing to worry about, surely. Until the video's uploaded...Ruby, in the dirt, pleading for her life. Enter Detective Inspector Kate Riley: the Met's rising star and the head of a new team of investigators with the best resources money can buy. Among them Detective Sergeant Zain Harris, the poster boy for multiracial policing. But can Kate wholly trust him? And, more importantly, can she trust herself around him?

Pools of blood, scenes of carnage, signs of agonising death - who deals with the aftermath of violence once the bodies have been taken away? Judith Kepler has seen it all. She is a crime-scene specialist. She turns crime scenes back into habitable spaces. She is a cleaner. It is at the home of a woman who has been brutally murdered that she is suddenly confronted with her own past. The murder victim knew Judith's secret: as a child Judith was sent to an orphanage under mysterious circumstances - parentage unknown.

Kings Cross station, 1943: As the bombs fall, Rose loses her heart to a pilot but will lose so much more before the war has done its worst. Las Vegas, present day: A beautiful woman in a wedding dress walks into a seedy bar and asks the first man she sees to marry her. So when Jane meets Rose, now a formidable older lady, there's no love lost between them. But with time running out, can Rose and Jane come together to make peace with the secrets that have haunted their lives?

"I subscribed to the idea that church girls cheating was rare when really they just have a better cover/alibi. And when we cheat, we cheat-cheat and hide it behind our long skirts and big hats."—Zandra

Hannah is 38 and the happily married mother of 11-year-old Luke. Her marriage is reassuringly stable and after 15 years she has managed to push the wild dreams of youth from her mind and concentrate on the everyday satisfactions of here and now. The first half of her life hasn’t been as exciting as she had hoped, but then, she reckons, whose has? When she succeeds in convincing husband Cliff to rent a villa in the south of France for a summer vacation with her sister Jill and gay friend Tristan, she’s expecting little more than a pleasant few weeks with her family.

Sam Wylde has fought off Albanian gangsters and vindictive old friends to make it to Bali, hot on the heels of her ex-husband, Matt, and Jess, their daughter, whom he took without Sam’s permission. But a nasty surprise awaits her in paradise: Bojan. A Serbian thug she thought was dead, back to make her life a misery.

A gripping psychological thriller for fans of Gone Girl and Making a Murderer. For four long years, journalist Morgan Vine has campaigned for the release of her childhood sweetheart Danny Kilcannon - convicted, on dubious evidence, of murdering his 14 year-old stepdaughter. When a key witness recants, Danny is released from prison. With nowhere else to go, he relies on single mum Morgan and her teenage daughter, Lissa.

How to connect with what’s most important in a hyperconnected world. Social media has the power to do a lot of good, but it can also get in the way of authenticity and create a sense of disillusionment. In Overliked, pastor and author Rob Singleton asks listeners to take a closer look at the optics in their lives and in the world around them. This is an audiobook about understanding how to see “likes” and “selfie” culture for what they really are and how to connect with the heart of God to build out a new way of thinking about social image.

Many of us as women feel conflicted about Jesus’s calling on our lives because a woman trying to love God beyond her heart and soul, with her mind and strength, can be thought of as crossing some line or unspoken boundary. Bible teacher Kat Armstrong challenges us to ask, “Why am I allowing limitations on my pursuit of Jesus’s calling?”

It’s no surprise to anyone that Jeffrey Sachs, billionaire CEO of his own hotel chain, has a drop-dead gorgeous Estonian mistress. But stepping down to spend his retirement years with her? No one saw that coming - least of all his wife! So now the prize of becoming Sachs CEO is up for grabs - and Jeffrey’s four children have until the day of his wedding to compete for the job. In a game where the ultimate prize is power beyond your wildest dreams, you should never underestimate your competitors, even if they are family.... And, it turns out, twins can be the most dangerous rivals of all....

Sophie, Emily, Amy, and Melissa have been best friends since they were girls. They have seen each other through everything - from Sophie's private fear that she doesn't actually want to be a mother despite having two kids, to Amy's perfect-on-the-outside marriage that starts to reveal troubling warning signs, to Melissa's spiraling alcoholism, to questions that are suddenly bubbling up around the paternity of Emily's son. But could a lie that spans just as long as their friendship be the thing that tears them apart?

Having recently split up from the father of her baby, Lilly is not in a happy place, matters being complicated further by the arrival of her ex-husband, needing a sofa to crash out on, having been thrown out by his girlfriend. In the midst of all this Lilly is asked by a child psychologist if she will help one of her patients: a girl currently sectioned having stolen a car while extremely drunk. While Lilly visits her she is introduced to Chloe, another unstable teenager who slips Lilly a note saying: "Help us". And then Lilly's client is killed and Chloe accused of her murder. Her case is not helped by the fact that the words "Help us" have been carved on the dead girl's stomach....

Anne Willan, multi-award-winning culinary historian, cookbook writer, teacher, and founder of La Varenne Cooking School in Paris, explores the lives and work of women cookbook authors whose essential books have defined cooking over the past 300 years. Beginning with the first published cookbook by Hannah Woolley in 1661 to the early colonial days to the transformative popular works by Fannie Farmer, Irma Rombauer, Julia Child, Edna Lewis, Marcella Hazan, and up to Alice Waters working today.