Ki Longfellow, acclaimed author of Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria, The Secret Magdalene, and Houdini Heart has penned Walks Away Woman, a remarkable story of an ordinary woman driven to an extraordinary decision. Overwhelmed, overwrought, and overweight, an everyday housewife walks into the Sonoran Desert to die. But there is more to a desert than sand: thorns, venom, heat, man, beast-and adventure.

Sam Russo, Private Eye, is back, after hotfooting it around America's oldest and classiest racetrack in Shadow Roll, the case that saw him chasing the killer of three promising jockeys. Shadow Roll brought him two good things: a yodeling dog named Jane, and an upper crust sharp-tongued dame called Mrs. Willingford. Now he's home again, in his one room fourth floor walk-up on Staten Island. Not much doing but going to the movies, lying in bed reading crime novels, and laying low with Jane. That first big case flattened him, shook his outlook on life. Getting a taste of real killings was bad enough to make small town detecting look good. As long as his dime doesn't run out. But dimes always run out. All it takes is a knock on the door for Sam and Jane to find themselves careening along naughty gaudy Broadway, in and out of one high-stepping star-studded show after another, in hot pursuit of a giant killer.

It's 1948. We're on Staten Island where no one who is anyone would ever set foot. We're with Sam Russo, a neglected graduate of the Staten Island Home for Children. Self-named and self-styled, Russo's not long back from World War II where his unit fought on the Pacific Front with the very last of America's mounted troops. A dreamer with the gift of gab, Russo is now a young private eye who'd like to follow in the hard-boiled footsteps of Bogart's Philip Marlowe or Bogart's Sam Spade-if only he was hard-boiled. In this, his first serious case, it's a dream come true. Sam has two loves: racehorses and books. Now he's up to his hocks in the murders of three promising young jockeys in Saratoga Springs at America's oldest race track. The police want it all shoved under the carpet, the track wants three deaths to be three strange accidents, Sam Russo wants to prove he's a real Private Eye. Race horses, a gorgeous sassy dame, the Season at Saratoga, what more could a PI want? To survive it.

Stapleton, Staten Island. Holding on to the rest of New York by a ferryboat, it's not the kind of place where a real Private Eye would live. But Sam Russo does. In Good Dog, Bad Dog, he and his dog Jane barely missed gruesome deaths. That's twice now. The 1949 Kentucky Derby is about to run. Sam, who counts out his life by Derbies, has his seat by the radio all picked out. He'll be listening with Jane and his new friend Holly. Holly lives right next door to him in a room as shabby as his. She's a man. He's a woman. Sam doesn't care. He likes Holly. Jane likes Holly. She's the best thing Sam has if he doesn't count the love of his life, Jane. Or Mrs. Willingford-who's married to a rich someone else. Everything's set for the Derby until a rare and classy Lagonda rolls through Stapleton. Getting into that Lagonda, Holly's turned the worst trick of her life and threatened to ruin Sam's in the bargain. When the girl in the next room disappears, Russo and Jane find themselves lost in sordid world of hidden mansions, a twisted social club, and high society secrets.

HOUDINI HEART harkens back to the masters of suspenseful supernatural horror: Poe, Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, but speaks with a wholly fresh voice. Once caught in its pages, there's no escaping Longfellow's terrible tale. Weeks ago, she was one of Hollywood's biggest writers, wed to one of its greatest stars. The doting mother of their golden child. But now? She's alone, tortured by a horrifying secret no woman could bear. Pursued by those she can't outrun, anguished by a guilt she can't endure, and driven close to madness, she flees to the one place she's ever called home: a small town in Vermont where River House still stands. To a child, the splendid hotel was mysterious and magical and all its glamorous guests knew delicious secrets. Cocooned in its walls, she will write one last book. Her atonement? Or her suicide note? But life is never as you dream it, and River House isn't what she'd always imagined it was. Intense, literary, and harrowing, Houdini Heart is a tale of bone-chilling horror, emotional torment, and psychological terror. Gripped by River House, trapped in an aging hotel of mirrors only Houdini could escape, how much can haunt a mind before it too is only a thing once imagined? "A haunting and disturbing journey through the psyche."-Erika Mailman, Author of "The Witch's Trinity"

Ki Longfellow, author of the acclaimed The Secret Magdalene, has now written the astonishing life of Hypatia, famed throughout the Mediterranean world, a beauty and a genius, yet for 17 centuries ignored by history. As the Roman Empire fights for its life and emerging Christianity fights for our souls, Hypatia is the last great voice of reason. A woman of sublime intelligence, Hypatia ranks above not only all women, but all men. Hypatia dazzled the world with her brilliance, was courted by men of every persuasion and was considered the leading philosopher and mathematician of her age...yet her mathematics, her inventions, the very story of her life in all its epic and dramatic intensity, has gone untold. A heart-breaking love story, an heroic struggle against intolerance, a tragedy and a triumph, Hypatia walks through these pages fully realized while all around her Egypt's Alexandria, the New York City of its day, strives to remain a beacon of light in a darkening world.

Poderosa evocacion de una Maria Magdalena que fue, a su vez, filosofa, viajante, maestra y profeta. Esta Magdalena fue mas que una esposa, mas que la seguidora preferida, mas aun que la Amada Discipula. Mariamne Magdal-eder entendio el Todo. "Saber el Todo" es el centro mismo de las ensenanzas Gnosticas de Cristo. Fue "la revelacion del Senor" que cego al Apostol Pablo en el camino a Damascos. El propio corazon de los primeros anos de la Cristiandad. Aun latiendo, Gnosis o 'sabiduria' fue arrancada del cuerpo de la Iglesia hace mas de 1,600 anos. Pero con el descubrimiento en 1945 de los codices de Nag Hammadi, quiza los ultimos en su clase, tanto Gnosis como La Magdalena han vuelto a nosotros trayendo sabiduria y esperanza en estos dificiles y confusos tiempos. Magdalena, la mujer que camina con Jesus consiste no solamente en una laboriosa investigacion que refleja el retrato de una gran mujer con una inteligencia que fue mas alla de su epoca. Es el retrato de la busqueda del Gnosis, la experiencia directa de Dios en el individuo.

This radical retelling of the greatest story ever told brings Mary Magdalene to life--not as a prostitute or demon-possessed but as an educated woman who was truly the "apostle to the apostles."