Penny feels guilty after taking a beautiful blue marble that she sees in Mrs. Goodwin's grass, but gets a pleasant surprise when she goes to return it the next day.

Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt...

Fifty years after Hannah Arendt examined the dynamics of conformity in her seminal account of the Eichmann trial, "Beautiful Souls" explores the flipside of the banality of evil, mapping out what impels ordinary people to defy the sway of authority and convention.

A discussion of how adherence to the qualities of character, courage, and conscience can help people prevent personal and interpersonal problems and dilemmas, with examples from the author's radio talk show that illustrate how to repay and restore human spirit, relationships, and life.

Draws on social behavior and twin studies to explore how moral systems arise from the physical self in combination with environmental demands, evaluating whether people have a predisposition to adopt specific ethics.

"A woman tries to rebuild her life after her husband's conviction for huge financial fraud"-- After her husband Alan's decades of financial fraud are exposed, Suzanne's wealthy, comfortable life shatters. Alan goes to prison. Suzanne files for divorce, decamps to a barely middle-class Massachusetts beach town, and begins to create a new life and identity. Ignoring a steady stream of calls from Norfolk State Prison, she tries to cleanse herself of...

Obsessed with violating the laws of nature and of life and death, scientist Victor Frankenstein constructs a creature from the limbs of the dead. Once jolted into life, the creature proves to be even more human than his creator. He is knowledgeable, wise and also possessed with a conscience. Unable to inspire love, he chooses to inspire fear and vows to avenge the man who created and then abandoned him.

When a deep-seated memory suddenly surfaces, Elizabeth Burns becomes obsessed with the long-ago disappearance of her childhood friend April Cassidy. Driven to investigate, Elizabeth discovers a thirty-five-year-old newspaper article revealing the details that had been hidden from her as a child-shocking revelations about April's mother, Adele. Elizabeth, now herself a mother, seeks out anyone who might help piece together the final months, days,...