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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.

During the 1970s the Republic of Korea (South Korea) was a strange mixture of modern industry and medieval traditions, of Christianity and Shamanism, of a democratic façade masking a brutal totalitarian dictatorship. The dictator's wife was assassinated by his enemies, and the role of First Lady fell to the dictator's daughter. No one was free of suspicion; no one escaped punishment for disobedience. There were several American families living in the R.O.K. during that time, descendants of the first missionaries and businessmen to break through the Silk Curtain and settle in what had been until the late nineteenth century The Hermit Kingdom. These people were treated with respect but were under constant surveillance to make sure they did not threaten the regime. Their names, like the names of the Koreans integral to this story, are altered for their protection. Thomas Wood, a Peace Corps volunteer who specialized in hydraulic engineering, who now works for a prominent American company, took careful notes on the things he heard and saw while he worked in the R.O.K, from 1974-1977. This novel, featuring barely disguised characters participating in thinly veiled events, captures the essence of those days. Boyce Mann's journey back to the land of his birth, what he finds there, what happens to him there, represent a fiction that Thomas Wood calls "historical fantasy." His story may not have happened, but it did happen. You will find this novel as intriguing and fascinating as you did "The Year of Living Dangerously," and you will find that it touches you more deeply than that story because Boyce Mann is an American, not an Australian, and he faces his dangers not in a country like Indonesia, not well known to Americans, but in a country that has been military partners with the United States for over sixty years. Read this story carefully, read it with relish, read it for enlightenment about Koreans and about ourselves. Once you begin to read, you will not stop; and once you have finished it you will much more aware of the ambiguities of the international pageant.

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.

White Dogs is the story of a young woman and the six men who know her in six different ways. It is the story of how the way men see women affects both men and women. Master story teller James Baker has created an astounding commentary on the human condition, discovering universal truths in a few grains of sand along the side of a rural road. Mary Charlotte Lafferty's life is molded by these six men: her father, whose suicide leaves her to grow up with a brother; her brother whose innocence involves the two in the world's oldest taboo; the boy preacher who falls in love with her and loses his innocence as he learns the truth and strips her of her own innocence; the Mexican who helps her escape her prison and by worshiping her destroys himself; the man who uses his wealth to make claims on her that result in the deaths of two men; and the boy who starts out to kill her and what she means to him and ends up loving her as none of the others did or could do. This book could just be a sleeping masterpiece.

"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 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. John in exile on Patmos before his vision. Everyone, sometimes in his life, experiences a dark Saturday of despair like the Saturday between the crucifixion and the resurrection of Christ. 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. In Faith for a Dark Saturday, Dr. Baker imaginatively tells the stories of persons in the Bible who experienced severe testing of their faith and reached the darkest hour of despair.

"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.

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 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.