Anonymous Dreams

Snuff films are a myth. Everyone knows that. When a serial killer begins rampaging through Kansas City, Missouri, the press dubs him The Lady Burner, because after he kills his victims, he sets their bodies on fire and burns down their houses. The SCTU knows that the fires are just a forensic counter measure. He’s covering his tracks; he rapes and strangles these women while filming it. He offers the videos up for sale on the dark web, forcing Aislinn Cain and the SCTU to track a killer through the sleazy digital marketplaces where someone can buy anything if they have enough money. However, once inside the marketplaces, Aislinn realizes it’s not just a case of tracking down the person selling the videos. There’s an infrastructure in place that insulates the video maker, the seller, the distributor, and the buyers. Ensuring everything on the dark web, even the makers of snuff films, are anonymous

While modern students of Greek religion are alert to the occasion-boundedness of epiphanies and divinatory dreams in Greek polytheism, they are curiously indifferent to the generic parameters of the relevant textual representations on which they build their argument. Instead, generic questions are normally left to the literary critic, who in turn is less interested in religion. To evaluate the relation of epiphanies and divinatory dreams to Greek polytheism, the book investigates relevant representations through all major textual genres in pagan antiquity. The evidence of the investigated genres suggests that the ‘epiphany-mindedness’ of the Greeks, postulated by most modern critics, is largely an academic chimaera, a late-comer of Christianizing 19th-century-scholarship. It is primarily founded on a misinterpretation of Homer’s notorious anthropomorphism (in the Iliad and Odyssey but also in the Homeric Hymns). This anthropomorphism, which is keenly absorbed by Greek drama and figural art, has very little to do with the religious lifeworld experience of the ancient Greeks, as it appears in other genres. By contrast, throughout all textual genres investigated here, divinatory dreams are represented as an ordinary and real part of the ancient Greeks' lifeworld experience.

Marshal Aislinn Cain and the serial crimes tracking unit are sent to New York City to investigate murders identical to murders committed during the 1980s. However, the serial killer responsible for the original murders is dead, killed in a shootout with the NYPD when they cornered him dumping his last victim. This new series of murders though includes details never released. Only the medical examiner’s office and investigators working the case knew the killer shoved straight pins in the soles of his victim’s feet. Every murdered woman, dumped in the same location as the original victims, in this new series has, not just the straight pins, but the same brand, pushed into the soles of their feet. The SCTU will need to reinvestigate the original case to ensure the NYPD got the correct man, while investigating this new series and identifying reasons someone would replicate this particular series of murders. During their investigation, they’ll meet the nemesis of murdered hero US Marshal Nathan Green. Can they vindicate Marshal Green’s suspicions about his nemesis and solve both series of murders or will they leave NYC questioning if they got the right man too?

With the murder of the serial killer known as The Ghost Maker, the serial killer club he ran became dormant. Now, someone calling themselves Mictlan the Collector has taken control of the defunct club. He’s arranged a competition for a select group of members. The serial killer with the most points at the end will win a million dollars in cryptocurrency, and he’s chosen Kansas City as the hunting grounds. Fearing this could happen after The Ghost Maker’s death, the NSA had an operative infiltrate the nefarious club. The operative gives the SCTU advanced warning of the competition. To stop it, Aislinn Cain and the SCTU must identify and capture Mictlan the Collector before the first day. Identifying and capturing a serial killer is never easy and Mictlan complicates the issue by requiring competitors to take a victim to gain admittance. The competitors have less than one week to complete the entrance task, which divides the resources of the SCTU between trying to identify Mictlan the Collector and identifying the serial killers participating in the competition. For a chance at a million dollars in cryptocurrency, serial killers will travel far and wide to participate. With visiting serial killers comes new signature methods requiring the SCTU to reach out to their law enforcement contacts all over the world to at least attempt to find their place of origin and gain any files on them that might exist. The situation is dire enough that the CIA activates their own special black books operation referred to as The Home Defense Program, forcing the SCTU to coordinate with the CIA as well as local law enforcement. Finally, as the start date of the competition gets nearer, panicked politicians want to enact martial law for the Kansas City Metro area. Convinced that martial law will result in more deaths than the competition, the SCTU is racing against the ticking clock, fighting their limited manpower, and extreme panic to save their home city from becoming a grisly battlefield.

Some American cities thrive on the gilded dreams of young hopefuls. An endless stream of beautiful naïve woman, barely out-of-school ebb and flow through their streets, providing a smorgasbord for predators. Few of these women will see their names in lights, the grim realities of city life forcing them to find alternative income sources; improving their chances of being victimized. Rarely do these missing women get noticed. But when over a dozen of these women disappear in a short time to never reappear, even law enforcement notices. The FBI arrives first on the scene, but no bodies leaves the agents impotent. They pass the case along to the Serial Crimes Tracking Unit. Aislinn Cain instantly realizes there are two major difficulties for her and her team: The victims are prostitutes, and most people don’t care if someone is murdering prostitutes, and without bodies it is impossible to make a case that they have become prey for a serial killer. However, after looking through the case files assembled on the missing women, she knows in her bones that Nashville, Tennessee, has a serial killer stalking the streets at night. This case will test Aislinn Cain as she struggles against people who consider themselves morally superior to the victims and work with academics to invent new search techniques to discover their victims’ remains. This will be the first time she’s using the new investigative skills she’s learned, along with trusting her intuition and knowledge of the killers that hunt in the dark.

Aislinn Cain and the rest of the SCTU have just finished a case in Colorado when they are rushed back to Kansas City to deal with a problem close to home. The person that has been trying quite pathetically to kill Nadine Daniels for the last few years has turned to killing her clients. The newspapers dub him the Family Annihilator because he is killing entire households protected by Daniels’ Security. As Nadine’s files are trucked to the SCTU headquarters to be sifted through, it quickly becomes apparent that Nadine has more enemies than even Aislinn Cain. Aislinn struggles to get into the mind of abusive domestic partners. Most are insecure narcissists not psychopaths or sociopaths unlike the serial killers they normally chase. Also, as is the case whenever Nadine Daniels is involved in something it is more complex and complicated than it appears on the surface. Daniels’ Security has been in business more than fifteen years and they have had a lot of cases both on the books and off. Not to mention it is impossible for Nadine’s private life and business life to not overlap and Aislinn finds her private life and law enforcement life overlapping as a result. Aislinn worries all these distractions will result in the killer getting away or worse, completing their objective – Kill Nadine Daniels.

From angels to demonic specters, astonishing visions to devilish terrors, dreams inspired, challenged, and soothed the men and women of seventeenth-century New England. English colonists considered dreams to be fraught messages sent by nature, God, or the Devil; Indians of the region often welcomed dreams as events of tremendous significance. Whether the inspirational vision of an Indian sachem or the nightmare of a Boston magistrate, dreams were treated with respect and care by individuals and their communities. Dreams offered entry to "invisible worlds" that contained vital knowledge not accessible by other means and were viewed as an important source of guidance in the face of war, displacement, shifts in religious thought, and intercultural conflict. Using firsthand accounts of dreams as well as evolving social interpretations of them, Dreams and the Invisible World in Colonial New England explores these little-known aspects of colonial life as a key part of intercultural contact. With themes touching on race, gender, emotions, and interior life, this book reveals the nighttime visions of both colonists and Indians. Ann Marie Plane examines beliefs about faith, providence, power, and the unpredictability of daily life to interpret both the dreams themselves and the act of dream reporting. Through keen analysis of the spiritual and cosmological elements of the early modern world, Plane fills in a critical dimension of the emotional and psychological experience of colonialism.