Father Columba rides again This time he is on leave from his abbey in Pennsylvania to do a retreat on the Holy Isle of Iona, just off the west coast of Scotland. It is the tiny dot in the ocean where his namesake, Saint Columba, took refuge and built an abbey over a millennium and a half ago. While there, the new Columba is called upon to solve a murder mystery and unknowingly follows in the footsteps of his predecessor, who had to solve a similar mystery in the distant but not so misty past. At the turn of this millennium, in 2001, author James Baker discovered a journal in the archives of Columba's abbey in Pennsylvania which detailed Columba's dithering attempt to solve a murder in a priory in Mississippi. That account is now the book Prior Knowledge. Five years later he discovered a second journal, which comprises half of Good for the Soul, in the Vatican Library in Rome. He learned the story of the first Columba from an Irish priest studying at Rome's Angelicum Institute. Seeing the striking similarities in the two stories, he combined them for this book. The priest hinted several times that he knew about another of Columba's journals concerning a murder in Rome, but Baker has not been able to track it down. Still another journal, the story of a murder in Korea which Columba helped solve and which he mentioned in the "Good for the Soul" journal, is missing. It is possible that Columba destroyed it because it was dangerous. Only last year Baker's collaborator Cheryl Greer Reels found another of Columba's journals in Nashville's Convent of St. Mary Magdalene. This journal will eventually be published in book form. Look for it.

This changes everything we thought we knew about John Steinbeck. After languishing in the CIA's archives for 60 years, a letter is uncovered in John Steinbeck's own hand that shatters everything history tells us about the author's life. Written in 1952, to CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith, Steinbeck makes an offer to become an asset for the Agency during a trip to Europe later that year. More shocking than Steinbeck's letter is Smith's reply accepting John's proposal. Discovered by author Brian Kannard, these letters create the tantalizing proposal that John Steinbeck was, in fact, a CIA spy. Utilizing information from Steinbeck's FBI file, John's own correspondence, and interviews with John's son Thomas Steinbeck, playwright Edward Albee, a former CIA intelligence officer, and others, Steinbeck: Citizen Spy uncovers the secret life of American cultural icon and Nobel Prize-winner, John Steinbeck. Did Steinbeck actively gather information for the intelligence community during his 1947 and 1963 trips to the Soviet Union? Why was the controversial author of The Grapes of Wrath never called before the House Select Committee on Un-American Activities, despite alleged ties to Communist organizations? Did the CIA influence Steinbeck to produce Cold War propaganda as part of Operation MOCKINGBIRD? Why did the CIA admit to the Church Committee in 1975 that Steinbeck was a subject of their illegal mail-opening program known as HTLINGUAL? These and a host of other resources leave little doubt that there are depths yet unplumbed in the life of one of America's most treasured authors. Just how heavily was Steinbeck involved in CIA operations? What did he know? And how much did he sacrifice for his country? Steinbeck: Citizen Spy brings us one step closer to the truth. This text includes a note in the introduction from Thomas Steinbeck.

The story of Toussaint Louverture and the tragic nation of Haiti that he founded has never been told with such power and imagination as respected historian and master story teller James Baker does in his novel "Sex and Bondage in Three Colors." In this revolutionary book he has created a new literary genre, one critics have called "historical fantasy." History limits itself to known facts. Historical fiction limits itself to creating scenes and dialogue only in places where facts are not known and only if the created scenes and dialogue do not violate known facts. Baker's historical fantasy tells a story of historical figures without limits, setting his fantasy free to soar. This novel ranges over the interconnected lives of such men as Toussaint, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Thomas Jefferson and demonstrates how their distinct and often conflicting visions of the future collide. He describes in delicious detail the sexual exploits, many of them with disastrous results, of white, black, and brown men who break free of their bonds only to be shackled by their desires. There is rape, incest, miscegenation, and unbridled lust as a host of men and women conceive and give birth to our cruel modern world.

"Prior Knowledge," what a great story, religion, sex, and murder all in one volume. Master story teller James Baker here follows the wild excursion of the aging Benedictine monk Father Columba as he is called out of retirement to reform a troubled priory and ends up becoming a sleuth. Upon arriving at his new post, a priory commissioned to train "belated vocations" for the priesthood, he learns that his predecessor has mysteriously disappeared; and before he can solve that puzzle he finds himself in the middle of a bloody murder. Someone has killed a seminarian Getting to the bottom of this crime will require all his theological training, some trial and error good luck, and of course prior knowledge. As he probes the varied and sundry secrets of his monks and seminarians, he discovers for the first time the many facets of love and hate. At age 65 he himself finds the kind of love he long ago promised never to experience: sex with a young Chinese American newspaper woman. Join Father Columba in his quest for truth--religious, legal, sexual--which just could all be cut from the same holy cloth.

"The darkest hour is just before dawn." An old adage, a true statement. In "Faith for a Dark Saturday," the noted theologian and historian James Baker shows how nine men from the Bible prove the point. Each man tells, in his own words, the misery of his darkest hour, a time that he did not know but we do was just before the dawning of a morning of hope. There is Abraham as he prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac; Jacob as he prepared to meet his hostile brother and possible death; Moses in desert exile before he sees the burning bush and receives the commission of his life; King Hezekiah as he awaits assault from the invincible Assyrian army; Joseph as he contemplates the scandal caused by his finance's pregnancy, the apostle Peter on the Saturday between the crucifixion and resurrection; Paul as he prepares to leave for Damascus to round up Christians; the jailer of Philippi before the earthquake that will bring his salvation; and John in exile on Patmos before his vision. You will be inspired to lean on your own faith as you share the experiences of these men, caught in fear and despair, during the agony of their dark Saturdays, just before the dawn of a new day of hope.

"Peter Peacock Passes" proves the commonly held perception that for Preachers the pursuit of God and Sex are twin obsessions. Master story teller James Baker has captured with the most vivid prose the pitfalls and pratfalls of a young Texan who feels equally the desire to fulfill his Divine Vocation and his Natural Urge to find a mate. In his quest Petie Peacock struggles to survive the seductions of a college beauty queen, a delectable farmer's daughter, a high school cheerleader with Italianate mammary endowments, and a strange pair of twins named Golda and Silvia before at last he finds his Mary Sontag. He participates in the annihilation of a Homecoming float, pranks that result in blood, and the destruction of a prominent Baptist minister when pornographic pictures end up in his slide show of the Holy Land. He is humiliated in Indiana, abandoned in Chicago, and deluged in Texas before he discovers in his tumescence a way to face this brave new world. Share the fun.