Church Women

Every female minister knows, deep within her heart, she has a special calling to serve God's people. Your passion and your servant’s heart have led you to this point, and you have only just begun to step into your power in service to the church you love so much. But the church's patriarchal roots run deep. With one hand, the institutional church raises you up, lauding your leadership and praising your calling, and with the other hand, it tears you down, silencing your voice and breaking your heart.

Sharon Osbourne's life has always been full of drama, heartbreak and passion. When she completed her best-selling first book, Extreme, she had hoped to find some peace and stability after her rollercoaster years. It was not to be. In Survivor, her brand-new memoir, she reveals what really happened next. From famous celebrity feuds, to her eventful experiences on The X Factor, to her turbulent relationship with her father and the tragic impact of his death, Sharon remains as frank and insightful as ever.

Fifth-generation Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong is back, pursuing justice the Ranger way. She takes on the case of a Mexican girl on the run from white slavers. For Caitlin, the case evokes memories of her legendary grandfather's run with the Rangers, even as it brings her face-to-face with a serial killer who's left a trail of bodies along the Mexico border. Pursuing the killer brings Caitlin to a sleepy Texas town suddenly riddled by violence and to the site of a major water find. The connection between these two disparate places lies buried beneath the plains of West Texas.

Carl Weber is the New York Times best-selling author of such fan favorites as So You Call Yourself a Man. The First Lady is the tale of a preacher's wife who learns she's dying and vows to find her husband another woman. There is no shortage of ladies who want her man, but will she be able to find a suitable replacement among the conniving church women?

'This was where her dreams drifted to if she didn't blot her nights out with drink; this was where her thoughts settled if she didn't fill her days with chat. She remembered this tiny, remote foreign village on a molecular level and the sight of it soaked into her like water into sand, because this was where her old life had ended and her new one had begun.'

The Holy Spirit wrote the vision of Recovery Church on the hearts of strangers from across the country and then formed this rag-tag group into a family. The story of Recovery Church is His Story. The story of how a Holy God went through extravagant measures to reach junkies, drunks, crackheads, outcasts, sinners, wayward children, the lepers of today, us.

On a hot and dusty December day in 1980, the bodies of four American women - three of them Catholic nuns - were pulled from a hastily dug grave in a field outside San Salvador. They had been murdered two nights before by the US-trained El Salvadoran military. News of the killing shocked the American public and set off a decade of debate over Cold War policy in Latin America. The women themselves became symbols and martyrs, shorn of context and background.

New York Times best-selling author Carl Weber is a master at portraying unforgettable characters and complex, passionate relationships. Voluptuous Loraine Farrow is as successful as she is curvy, but life is never easy when you want to have your cake and eat it too. With her husband Leon confronting issues from his past, trouble arises on the homefront - and more drama is on the way in the form of Michael, an ex-lover desperate to rekindle his and Loraine’s once torrid flame.

When Jess and Rupert parted ways, it was the end of a great love story that might have been. Now, 10 years later, the very different paths they have taken in life will bring them back together for a chance meeting. But with so much left unsaid about the break-up neither ever recovered from and with each keeping their own devastating secrets, will they finally be able to make the fractured pieces of their love for one another whole again?

The hot topic of feminism has been well documented and debated in mainstream media and yet, as Christians we come to the conversation from a slightly different vantage point. For starters, we have the benefit of a personal relationship with our creator plus the ultimate handbook in the Bible to work out what is right and just when it comes to equality. So why do many Christians feel the Bible presents a barrier rather than a boost when it comes to championing equality between the sexes?

A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged.

It's June in Virginia, and the scent of flowers and the sound of wedding bells are in the air, an unwelcome reminder to Cooper Lee of the long-distance relationship she recently ended. When Cooper and her Bible study group are invited to spend a weekend at a newly renovated historic inn, it's the perfect chance to get away with friends and put her bittersweet memories behind her - until the inn's pompous co-owner is murdered and one of the suspects is Cooper's own mother.

Kit Pelham is a professional fan, interviewer, host of the podcast The First Cult is the Deepest, and occasional obituary writer. Except this time the obituary is for her friend, maverick podcaster Wolf Tyler, who is murdered in his shed during a live broadcast, moments before revealing a huge secret about the cult TV show Vixens from the Void. Kit and her group of friends and fellow superfans soon realise Wolf had discovered something about the disappearance of Lily Sparkes, an extra on Vixens from the Void, back in 1986. And it was a secret worth killing for.

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.

A serial killer is on the loose in Hamburg, targeting dancers from The Acapulco, a club in the city's red-light district, removing their scalp as a gruesome trophy and replacing their hair with plastic wigs. Chastity Riley is the state prosecutor responsible for crimes in the district, and she's working alongside the police as they investigate. Can she get inside the mind of the killer?

In Writing Worship: How to Craft Heartfelt Songs for the Church, the Christian songwriter will explore the depths of the heart, immersing in relationship with God before learning practical worship songwriting skills. Award-winning songwriter Krissy Nordhoff helps lyricists and musicians sharpen their skills in starting songs, adding dimension, removing distractions, maintaining momentum, and co-writing.

Louise Bridges has the perfect life. A loving husband, Patrick. Two adorable children. A comfortable home. So when PC Becca Holt arrives to break the news that Patrick has been killed in an accident, she thinks Louise’s perfect world is about to collapse around her. But Louise doesn’t react in the way Becca would expect her to on hearing of her husband’s death. And there are only three plates set out for dinner, as if Louise already knew Patrick wouldn’t be home that night.

Alice has been lying to herself for years, holding fast to the belief that the needs of her family far outweigh her own. But her outwardly successful marriage hides dark secrets, and for much of her life the children were the only reason she stuck around. These days, though her successful banker son lives nearby, his young wife seems to do everything she can to keep Alice at bay. As for Alice's other son, he has always been something of a stranger and has been traveling for so long that Alice isn't even sure what continent he is on anymore.

Beth Haldane is getting ready for a quiet Christmas with her son and their beloved grumpy cat when fellow single mother Nina begs her for help. Something fishy is going on with Mr. Potter, the solicitor she works for.... Business is slow, with the accounts empty. So why does his wife have such an impressive collection of designer dresses? Unable to resist a puzzle, Beth agrees to cover Nina’s job as a receptionist to get a closer look. But just as she finds a mysterious key hidden away in the office, Mrs. Potter arrives in floods of tears with terrible news for her husband.

There is a church not too far from us that recently added a $25 million addition to their building. Our local newspaper ran a front-page story not too long ago about a study revealing that one in five people in our city lives in poverty. This is a book about those two numbers. It's a book about faith and fear, wealth and war, poverty, power, safety, terror, Bibles, bombs, and homeland insecurity, It's about what happens when Christians support, animate, and participate in the very things Jesus came to set people free from.