Mari is a cat surviving by her claws on the fringes of the Judean desert. Yeshua is a man with healing hands, seeking solitude in the wastes beyond Qumran. Their paths cross when Yeshua rescues her from wild dogs and carries her to safety in his arms. An extraordinary friendship grows up between them, and when he leaves the desert she rides with him, his closest companion, hidden in a sling beneath his robe. Mari tells Yeshua's story from a cat's eye view-hours spent curled against his heart, comforted by the rise and fall of his breast, sometimes singed by the fires of his healing as he...

A Cat Out of Egypt "On a cold winter's night when the heavens almost seemed to reach down and touch the Earth, a child was born in a stable . . . and many miles away, as her last kitten struggled into the world, the Great Cat Who Is Bast saw the star and wondered." C.L. Francisco's new novel, A Cat Out of Egypt, is a magical tale of Jesus' "lost" years in Egypt. The feline narrator, Miw, is an Egyptian cat from the great temple at Bubastis, born under the Christ Child's star. After corrupt priests plot her death, Miw escapes with Tikos, priestess of Bast, to a Jewish village, where Miw's...

Cat Born to the Purple, 4th volume in the Yeshua's Cats' series, picks up the story from Yeshua's Cat of a young woman who had been stoned. Yeshua healed her after sensing her presence, battered and barely alive, in the burning hills near Sepphoris, and named her Eliana, "God has answered my prayer." He settled her in Cana with his friend Eli to keep her safe from her husband and mother-in-law, who had accused her falsely and incited the mob to stone her. Now she is beginning to put her life back together-except for the memory of her stoning, which she has walled away in...

Bad religion can be deadly. So Miranda Lamden, small-town religion professor, discovers in This Madness of the Heart. The dark hollers of Eastern Kentucky offer fertile soil for shady evangelist Jasper Jarboe, new president of Grace and Glory Bible College, as he beguiles the small mining town of Canaan Wells with his snake-oil charm. When Miranda isn't teaching at Obadiah Durham College, she's investigating paranormal phenomena-or enjoying a turbulent romantic relationship with backwoods artist Jack Crispen. JJ's inquisition-style gospel has alienated her long since, but when he announces...