Time: the 1930s, Take one stately English home - complete with secret passage and impeccable butler. Fill with assorted characters gathered for a weekend house party. Among them, an eccentric, gun-crazy earl; his brother, a government minister engaged in top secret talks with a foreign envoy; a Texas millionaire and his wife (the owner of a fabulous diamond necklace); a young lady down on her luck; and the uninvited guest - a beautiful European adventuress, complete with shady past and unconvincing present. Add: the threat of a visit from 'The Wraith', notorious society jewel thief; a violent thunderstorm; a fight in a darkened room; a scream in the night - and a body in the lake. Finally, season with one highly unconventional detective. A superb puzzle of the Agatha Christie genre.
-
-
The Affair: Lee Child
$7.00Jack Reacher No XVI. March 1997... A woman has her throat cut behind a bar in Carter Crossing, Mississippi. Just down the road is a big army base. Is the murderer a local guy - or is he a soldier? Jack Reacher, still a major in the military police, is sent in undercover. The county sheriff is a former US Marine - and a stunningly beautiful woman. Her investigation is going nowhere. Is the Pentagon stonewalling her? Or doesn't she really want to find the killer? -
The Alienist: Caleb Carr
$5.00New York City, 1896. Hypocrisy in high places, police corruption is rife and a brutal killer is terrorising young male prostitutes. Police Commissioner Roosevelt would prefer that the mentally ill and the 'alienists' who treat them to be out of sight and out of mind. But as the body count rises, Roosevelt turns to an eminent alienist in an early attempt at psychological profiling in an effort to get the killer. -
The discovery of a corpse, its fingers neatly severed, is enough to draw Superintendent Richard Jury and his lugubrious Sergeant Wiggins to the village of Littlebourne. There, it's motley crew of inhabitants - among them a maiden lady ornithologist, a penny-pinching peer and a ten-year old girl who swaps snippets of gossip for lemonade and crisps - try to throw some light on the matter. But Jury has to follow the trail to London's East End and the far less salubrious Cripps family before he can link the murder with an attack on poor Katy O'Brien, currently in a coma after a vicious assault in the Underground. At The Anodyne Necklace pub, a game of Wizards and Warlords provides a further clue and at last, Jury and his dilettante side-kick Melrose Plant solve the riddle and unmask the unlikely villain. -
On a snowy December night in 1363, Brother Wulfstan ventures from the warmth of St. Mary's Abbey into the town. Worried by the decline in his patient, an unnamed pilgrim, he asks Nicholas Wilton, the Master Apothecary, for a herbal remedy. But the pilgrim dies in agony later that night. It is only when the same medicine proves fatal to another man - the ward of John Thoresby, Lord Chancellor of England - that suspicions are raised and Owen Archer, formerly Captain of Archers, is dispatched to York to discover the truth. As his cover he will work as the apprentice of Nicholas Wilton. However, Wilton is very ill and so it is from Wilton's beautiful, high-spirited and fascinating wife Lucie that Owen will learn the trade. As he unravels the complicated mystery, Owen is drawn into York life. But when there is another mysterious death, Owen must count Lucie among the suspects.
-
On exhibit at the marble-pillared Wade Museum of Oriental Art is an enormous black-hooded carriage; and when an inspector opens one of its doors to investigate some strange goings-on, out falls a corpse. But it is not just an ordinary corpse - this one has an elaborately decorated Persian dagger protruding from its chest, fake whiskers on its chin, and a cookbook clutched in its hand. These bizarre components have Dr. Gideon Fell temporarily baffled, but not overwhelmed, as he unravels the clues to reveal the solution to a chillingly horrendous crime. -
Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy is an internationally renowned Aboriginal artist from the remote Mission Hole community in the Northern Territory. Her works command high prices - until a new painting is unveiled. It is discovered slashed with the words hastily scrawled across it: the artist is a thief. Is the artist a thief? Is she to blame or is she the victim of someone else's fraud? And here is where this detective novel diverges, into a world where everyone except the 'detective' knows the rules. Jean-Loup Wild, a Melbourne financial consultant sent by ATSIC to Mission Hole, is caught between the art world with its wealth, fashions, heroes and sophisticated private language and the Aboriginal community with its poverty, social problems, kinship ties and unchanging traditional law. If Jean-Loup can find the artist he can begin to find the secret of what's been happening at Mission Hole. He can also begin to understand how the layers of that mystery lie deep in the bedrock of Australian society. -
Athens - Ancient Greece...When the body of a young man is discovered on the slopes of Mount Lycabettus, it's believed a pack of wolves are responsible. But Tramachus, an aspiring student at Plato's academy, shows no signs of having fought for his life. Diogroras, Tramachus' tutor, is determined to find the dark secret behind this death. He turns to Heracles, known as the 'Decipherer of Enigmas' to help discover what really happened. But as their investigations continue, it emerges that Telemachus' death is not the only mystery. A second story is emerging in the footnotes of The Athenian Murders. The modern-day translator can see a message hidden in the images of the original narrative - and the more he translates, the more the clues pull together to reveal an astonishing truth... -
D.C. Cameron of Yorkshire County is on his way through heavy snow, with a visiting D.I., to arrest one Charles Goodwin for his part in a bank robbery. Cameron is certain they'll find him in a remote abandoned croft, a tiny dwelling shared by several farmers for shepherds' shelter in bad weather. Goodwin is there and Goodwin's reaction is more bloody and ferocious, worse than Cameron had feared. There's a living hatred between Goodwin and Cameron, and this is the story of two ruthless and resourceful men trapped in an isolated croft - and trapped in mutual hatred.
-
The Bear Pit: Jon Cleary
$8.00Scobie Malone XVII. Scobie Malone's job as a homicide cop is to try to keep murder at bay. His job as a father is to keep his family safe. Now, as the eyes of the world are turning toward his city, both of Malone's careers are in serious jeopardy. An important politician is murdered in high-profile public as his nation rushes toward center stage in the international arena. The assassination is clean and professional - and senseless on the surface. Malone knows, however, that violent death is sometimes politics' strangest and darkest bedfellow. And before thousands of visitors descend on his city, the dedicated detective will have to put himself in the line of fire to flush out a killer. But he won't be alone in someone's rifle sight. An ambitious young reporter will be joining Scobie Malone in harm's way: his daughter. -
A banquet of thrills, chills, questions and arrests from the classic crime authors. In this volume: The Purloined Letter, Edgar Allan Poe; The Angler's Story of the Lady of Glenwith Grange, Wilkie Collins; The New Catacomb, Arthur Conan Doyle; The Hammer of God, G.K. Chesterton; The Interruption, W.W. Jacobs; The Gioconda Smile, Aldous Huxley; The Almost Perfect Crime, Henry Holt; The Letter, W. Somerset Maugham; The Farewell Murder, Dashiell Hammett; They Never Get Caught, Margery Allingham; The Siamese Cat, George Goodchild; The Avenging Chance, Anthony Berkeley; The Necklace of Pearls and The Man Who Knew How, Dorothy L. Sayers; The Poetical Policeman, Edgar Wallace; S.O.S. and Wireless, Agatha Christie; The Mallet, James Hilton; Dusk to Dawn, Cornell Woolrich; The Murder, John Steinbeck; Eyewitness, Robert Arthur; Puzzle for Poppy, Patrick Quentin; The Homesick Buick, John D. MacDonald; The Enemy, Charlotte Armstrong; The Conspirators, Michael Gilbert; Double Image, Roy Vickers; Lamb to The Slaughter and The Way Up to Heaven, Roald Dahl; The Necessity of His Condition, Avram Davidson; The Unsuspected, Jay Wilson; You Can't Be A Little Girl All Your Life, Stanley Ellin; A Day of Encounters, Anthony Gilbert; Foxer, Brian Cleeve; Special Release, Eric Parr; Love Affair, Julian Symons; Scatter His Ashes, Elizabeth Ferrars; Jericho and the Two Ways to Die, Hugh Pentecost; The Niece from Scotland, Christianna Brand; Carrot For A Chestnut, Dick Francis; This One's A Beauty, Patricia McGerr; The Perfect Servant, Helen Neilsen; Judgement, Mary Kelly; Fixation, Miles Tripp; A Quite Conventional Death, John Garford; The Victim, P.D. James; Suicide or Murder? Jane Aiken Hodge; Accommodation Vacant, Celia Fremlin; Scandal at Sandkop, James McClure; The Man From The White Mountains, Ted Willis. -
A Caribbean Mystery: Dozing in the West Indian sun, an old soldier talks of safaris and scandals. After hinting that he has knowledge of a murder and showing a photograph, he is found dead - providing a most exotic case for Miss Marple. Sleeping Murder: Soon after Gwenda moves into her new home, odd things start to happen. Despite her best efforts to modernise the house, she only succeeds in dredging up its past. And she feels an irrational sense of terror every time she climbs the stairs. Gwenda turns to Miss Marple to exorcise her ghosts. Have they dredged up a “perfect” crime committed many years before? 4.50 From Paddington: For an instant the two trains ran together, going in the same direction side by side. In that moment, Elspeth, riding in the one train, witnessed a murder in the other. Helplessly, she stared out her carriage window as a man remorselessly tightened his grip around a woman’s throat. The body crumpled....then the other train drew away. But who, apart from Miss Marple, would take her story seriously? After all, there were no suspects, no other witnesses... and no corpse! At Bertram's Hotel: An old-fashioned London Hotel is not quite as reputable as it seems… When Miss Marple comes to London for a holiday, she finds what she’s looking for at Bertram’s Hotel: traditional decor, impeccable service... and an unmistakable atmosphere of danger behind the highly polished veneer. Yet not even Miss Marple can foresee the violent chain of events set in motion when an eccentric guest makes his way to the airport on the wrong day… -
Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove her car off a bridge. More than fifty years on, Iris Chase is remembering Laura's mysterious death. So begins an extraordinary and compelling story of two sisters and their secrets. Set against a panoramic backdrop of 2oth century history, here is an epic tale of memory, intrigue and betrayal. -
Book I of Blood Detective. When the naked, mutilated body of a man is found in a Notting Hill graveyard and the police investigation led by Detective Chief Inspector Grant Foster and his colleague Detective Superintendent Heather Jenkins yields few results, a closer look at the corpse reveals that what looked at first glance like superficial knife wounds on the victim's chest is actually a string of carved letters and numbers, an index number referring to a file in city archives containing birth and death certificates and marriage licenses. Family historian Nigel Barnes is put on the case. As one after another victim is found in various locations all over London, each with a different mutilation but the same index number carved into their skin, Barnes and the police work frantically to figure out how the corresponding files are connected. With no clues to be found in the present, Barnes must now search the archives of the past to solve the mystery behind a string of 100-year-old murders. Only then will it be possible to stop the present series of gruesome killings, but will they be able to do so before the killer ensnares his next victim? Barnes, Foster, and Jenkins enter a race against time - and before the end of the investigation, one of them will get much too close for comfort. -
Lew Archer is hired to find a stolen, valuable painting by Richard Chantry, who disappeared mysteriously in 1950 from his home. Archer deftly negotiates the web of dealers and collectors until he is drawn into family complications, masked brutalities and old secrets stretching back fifty years, when money talked - or bought silence... -
Black Mountain is a sleepy little place where the local police deal with one homicide a year, if they're unlucky, and where people are still getting used to the idea of locking their doors at night. Hardly the place for a serial killer to be stalking, but that seems to be the case when 11 year-old Emily Steiner's corpse is found, with a bullet wound to the head and several small sections of skin removed from her frail, abused body. The crime bears disturbing similarities to the recent murder of young Eddie Heath in Virginia and Dr. Kay Scarpetta is called in to bring her forensic skills to the case. Fighting the natural assumption that Emiluy's murderer is also the man who killed Eddie, Scarpetta's instinct for the unusual is sharply awakened when another body is found...
-
It’s seven in the morning...and the Bantrys wake to find the body of a young woman in their library. 'Do you mean to tell me,' demanded Colonel Bantry, 'that there is a body in my library - my library?' She is wearing evening dress and heavy make-up, which is now smeared across her cheeks. But who is she? How did she get there? And what is the connection with another dead girl, whose charred remains are later discovered in an abandoned quarry? The respectable Bantrys invite Miss Marple to solve the mystery… before tongues start to wag. Cover art by Tom Adams. -
New Year's Eve, 2021. The one night of the year when the guards are less vigilant, and the perfect time for murder. Welcome to 21st century Edinburgh! Rogue detective Quintilian Dalrymple, a former bureaucrat who left his high-ranking job to work for the parks service and solve mysteries on the side, sets about catching a serial killer with a peculiar signature. The killer bites out the victim's throat, cuts out the tongue, removes the genitals, and leaves in the cavity a cassette of the electric blues of Clapton, Hendrix and others. In the allegedly crime-free Edinburgh city-state, blues music is contraband. So are casual sex, monogamy, fattening foods, all drugs, and more-than-weekly showers. So why does the killer leave cryptic messages via electric blues?
