"One night, Avery is awoken by a fire consuming her family's compound; she runs away with her cult brother Cole, hiding in the woods and then in a school gym for weeks. After police apprehend them for shoplifting, a horrific discovery is made-their entire lives have been a lie and they were actually kidnapped as children, taken by the cult leaders they knew as Mom and Dad. Cole is quickly reunited with his family and permanently separated from nineteen-year-old...

[The] author ... returns to the mysterious coastal town of Sea Haven where six sisters of the heart are bound by the elements, and one is stalked by an inescapable past... After escaping from a cult, Lexi found refuge with her sisters on the farm that more than sustained her body-- it nurtured her soul as well. But she never forgot the terror she left behind or the always present fear that the cult would find her again, and claim her. Then her nightmare...

After he is separated from his shadow at birth, Fetter is without foundation. He's raised by a messianic figure in a cult where summoning devils and murder are part and parcel of his education. As an adult, he flees to Luriat, a city on the brink of cataclysmic change, where he discovers a new obsession with the Bright Doors. No one knows what is behind them—some believe there are whole worlds, and some believe there is nothing—and Fetter grapples...

Gillengaria seethes with unrest. In the south, hostility toward magic and its users has risen to a dangerous level, though King Baryn has ordered that such mystics are to be tolerated. It is whispered that he issued the decree because his new wife used her magic powers to ensnare him…

The King knows there are those in the noble Twelve Houses who could use this growing dissent to overthrow him. So he dispatches the mystic Senneth to assess

...

"Never one to conform, Anna always had trouble fitting in. Earnest and willful, as a young girl she quickly learned how to hide her quirks from her parents and friends. But when, at sixteen, a sudden melancholia takes hold of her life, she loses her sense of self and purpose. Then the Goldschmidts move in next door. They're active members of a religious cult, and Anna is awestruck by both their son Lars and their fervent violent prophecies for the...

Ever since Miranda Crabtree's father died when she was 14, she's managed to get by as a smuggler ferrying contraband through the Prosper River bayou for deranged preacher Billy Cotton. Now 21, Miranda learns that Cotton and his dwindling band of followers are planning to sacrifice his young daughter , Littlefish, who possesses the gift of "the sight," to the darkness of the swamp, testing Miranda's resolve to keep her head down and mind her own business....

"A valuable resource for students and general audiences, this book provides a unique global perspective on the history, beliefs, and practices of emergent faith communities, new religious traditions and movements worldwide, from the 19th century to the present"--

After haunting events occur at a cult compound, two intelligence agents meet in Arizona to exchange information about what happened, while contact is lost with one of NASA's interplanetary probes and something beyond Pluto's orbit makes contact.

"An hour from the closest West Virginia mining town, fifteen-year-old Wren Bird lives in a cloistered mountain cabin with her parents. They have no car, no mailbox, and no visitors--except for her mother's lifelong best friend. Every Sunday, Wren's father delivers winding sermons in an abandoned gas station, where he takes up serpents and praises the Lord for his blighted white eye, proof of his divinity and key to the hold he has over the community,...