Captive Witness

On a student tour through Europe, Nancy discovers that their leader is on a secret mission to transfer ten refugee children from an iron curtain country to freedom! Before the mission is completed, Nancy receives an urgent message from her father concerning a missing entry in a foreign film festival. Undaunted and clever, Nancy pursues an intriguing clue found in a student’s wheelchair and finds herself in great danger.

On a student tour through Europe, Nancy discovers that their leader is on a secret mission to transfer ten refugee children from an iron curtain country to freedom! Before the mission is completed, Nancy receives an urgent message from her father concerning a missing entry in a foreign film festival. Undaunted and clever, Nancy pursues an intriguing clue found in a student's wheelchair and finds herself in great danger.

Trouble plagues a student tour through Europe as Nancy becomes involved in a plot to smuggle refugee children across the Austrian border from Eastern Europe.

When a wedding turns dangerous, the best man and maid of honor must work together to protect a little girl in this inspirational romantic suspense. On his cousin’s Christmas cruise wedding, navy SEAL Jordan Somerton anticipated having the typical best man duties—not facing down criminals boarding the ship. But when the luxury liner is infiltrated by men determined to kidnap the flower girl, he’s plunged into an unexpected mission. Maid of honor and DEA agent Amy Delgado hasn’t forgiven Jordan for a misunderstanding in their past. But with her young niece targeted, she must draw on Jordan’s skills as a protector. Signs point to an inside job. With a traitor in their midst, can they ensure that every passenger returns home safely for the holidays . . . even as they find love amid deepening danger?

Why do narratives of Indian captivity emerge in New England between 1682 and 1707 and why are these texts, so centrally concerned with women's experience, supported and even written by a powerful group of Puritan ministers? In The Captive's Position, Teresa Toulouse argues for a new interpretation of the captivity narrative—one that takes into account the profound shifts in political and social authority and legitimacy that occurred in New England at the end of the seventeenth century. While North American narratives of Indian captivity had been written before this period by French priests and other European adventurers, those stories had focused largely on Catholic conversions and martyrdoms or male strategies for survival among the Indians. In contrast, the New England texts represented a colonial Protestant woman who was separated brutally from her family but who demonstrated qualities of religious acceptance, humility, and obedience until she was eventually returned to her own community. Toulouse explores how the female captive's position came to resonate so powerfully for traditional male elites in the second and third generation of the Massachusetts colony. Threatened by ongoing wars with Indians and French as well as by a range of royal English interventions in New England political and cultural life, figures such as Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, and John Williams perceived themselves to be equally challenged by religious and social conflicts within New England. By responding to and employing popular representations of female captivity, they were enabled to express their ambivalence toward the world of their fathers and toward imperial expansion and thereby to negotiate their own complicated sense of personal and cultural identity. Examining the captivity narratives of Mary Rowlandson, Hannah Dustan, Hannah Swarton, and John Williams (who comes to stand in for the female captive), Toulouse asserts the need to read these gendered texts as cultural products that variably engage, shape, and confound colonial attitudes toward both Europe and the local scene in Massachusetts. In doing so, The Captive's Position offers a new story of the rise and breakdown of orthodox Puritan captivities and a meditation on the relationship between dreams of authority and historical change.

Maryam Rostampour and Marziyeh Amirizadeh knew they were putting their lives on the line. Islamic laws in Iran forbade them from sharing their Christian beliefs, but in three years, they’d covertly put New Testaments into the hands of twenty thousand of their countrymen and started two secret house churches. In 2009, they were finally arrested and held in the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran, a place where inmates are routinely tortured and executions are commonplace. In the face of ruthless interrogations, persecution, and a death sentence, Maryam and Marziyeh chose to take the radical—and dangerous—step of sharing their faith inside the very walls of the government stronghold that was meant to silence them. In Captive in Iran, two courageous Iranian women recount how God used their 259 days in Evin Prison to shine His light into one of the world’s darkest places, giving hope to those who had lost everything and showing love to those in despair.