Prior Knowledge is a period mystery with 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...

"The darkest hour is just before dawn." The age-old adage has been borne out through the experiences of countless lives as 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...

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...

"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...

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....

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...