This volume explores the conflicting representations of ancient Rome—one of the most important European cities in the medieval imagination—in late Middle English poetry.Once the capital of a great pagan empire whose ruined monuments still inspired awe in the Middle Ages, Rome, the seat of the pope, became a site of Christian pilgrimage owing to the fame of its early martyrs, whose relics sanctified the city and whose help was sought by pilgrims to their shrines. C. David Benson ana...

Originally published in 1990. This study is of one of the world’s great narrative poems and one of the few long poems in English about physical love. Although this work is often overshadowed by the Canterbury Tales, the author argues that it has its own profound multiplicity. Its mixture of genres, styles, characters and other competing elements creates a powerful literary experience for each reader. This book explores the diversity and contradictions produced by the poem without ...

Havana Homicide is the latest in the Carina Quintana Murder Mysteries series by Kirkus Award winning author David M Benson. Something as prosaic as a police chiefs convention brings Carina to Havana but she's got way stronger Cuban connections than that. Her grandparents emigrated from Cuba just before Castro's revolution, bringing Carina's Cuban-born father to the the United States. And her family history, particularly that of her tough guy grandfather, who ran a casino in Havana for the ...

The unsolved murder of a reclusive Brooklyn woman whose badly beaten body was discovered in a windswept corner of Prospect Park…. A killer whose unique affliction calls up a blinding, crimson rage impossible to control….Enter a Manhattan surgeon named Damon Fox, who walked away from medicine in his prime for the very different life of private detecting in South Florida, leaving a hospital's worth of baffled former colleagues in his wake. One of them is the dead woman's sister, who ...

The ninth installment in the Carina Quintana Murder Mysteries series, Three Strikes and You're Dead pits the tough and beautiful Fort Lauderdale police chief against the worst sort of serial killer imaginable. A profiler's nightmare, this cleverly disguised, merciless merchant of death travels the country picking his victims at random and inflicting mortal damage of the most heinous sort. And to Carina's dismay, the killer changes up his MO as often as most people change their lunch orders...

Carina Quintana's latest case takes her back to New York City, where someone is leaving bodies, gruesomely stabbed in the heart, on church altars. Now wealthy and celebrated through her true crime books and settled in with the alluring Alice, the former chief of Miami Beach PD is in need of new challenges. She accepts a position with the uber-private investigations firm to which her ex-NYPD partner, Pete Simpson, escaped, and is immediately thrust into what may turn out to be the biggest--...

The Six Wives of Jenny the 8th centers on rich and beautiful Jennifer York's journey of self discovery, Hollywood success and the six women who infiltrate and infuse her heart. It is a tale of love, lust, jealousy, condemnation and retribution that is both a modern update of King Henry the 8th's marital sagas and a timeless portrait of one woman's personal struggles to navigate her world. The six women's varying stays in Jenny's life are marked by unforeseen twists and turns, and move, ove...

An immense asteroid struck the Earth one fine spring day without the amount of advance warning the experts had planned for and expected. If it had, countless millions of lives could have been saved. Or maybe not. Was the asteroid a planet killer? On this the experts disagreed. The only clear thing was that the Earth faced a cataclysm of a degree unknown since the dinosaurs shared a similar fate. But those behemoths and strange winged creatures were entirely unprepared to deal with the afte...

Body of Work, the 11th entry in the Carina Quintana Murder Mysteries series by author David M Benson, opens with the gruesome murder of a wealthy art collector at his waterfront mansion in Miami Beach. Carina, recently out of a brief retirement, had joined the Florida Department of Law Enforcement--the state's FBI--and now headed up the region's Investigations and Forensic Science unit. The nature of the killing prompted Miami Beach PD to request that she join the investigation. Her first ...

Death on the Vine, the 10th book in the Carina Quintana Murder Mysteries series, opens as five college-age men from well-to-do suburban Atlanta families attend a demonstration in Fort Lauderdale in June 2020. But as night falls, the formerly peaceful push for equal rights morphs into a riot and, during the melee, one of the young men produces a gun and shoots a plain clothed police officer, who dies in the street. Carina Quintana, Chief of the Fort Lauderdale Police Department, witnesses t...

Over the course of her career, Elizabeth Robertson has pursued innovative scholarship that investigates the overlapping domains of medieval philosophy, literature, and gender studies. This collection of essays, dedicated to her work, examines gender as a construct of language, a mode of embodiment, and a critical framework for thinking about the past. Its eleven contributors approach the figure of the gendered body in medieval English writing along several axes: poetic, philosophical, mate...

KIRKUS REVIEW--Benson's tightly plotted crime thriller is sure to please fans of police procedurals--a Kirkus Star novel.Wealthy middle-aged Manhattanites—the baby boomers of the title—have been gruesomely murdered, and Det.Carina Quintana senses a connection. But how can she prove it? The killer, if he exists, varies his methods and targetsand leaves no tangible evidence. Age and wealth are all that the victims have in common. Recently transferred fromMiami aft...