The Pale Horse/ The Big Four/ The Secret Adversary: Agatha Christie

Crime Collection. The Pale Horse: A Catholic Priest is brutally bludgeoned to death returning from a visit to a dying woman. In his shoe is a scrap of paper with a list of names - all of whom died recently and seemingly from natural causes and advantageously for those who gained by the deaths. There are whispers about a pale horse. A place? A person? An organisation? Mark Easterbrook hears the whispers that those prepared to pay can ensure that natural death becomes the ally of their ambitions. The search for a solution leads Easterbrook to a quiet Hampshire village where three modern witches boast openly of their occult powers... The Big Four: The Big Four are master criminals who Poirot is determine to unmask. They are no mere international crime syndicate - their goal is world domination and all their successes - each of which would be accounted a major achievement by lesser criminals - are merely steps toward supremacy. Three of the four are mysterious background figures: one is Chinese, one an American multi-millionaire and the other a brilliant woman. The fourth is an anonymous and ruthless killer of those who would challenge the Four. The Secret Adversary: Tommy and Tuppence, to earn a living in post-war London, try advertising themselves in The Times as willing to do almost anything. The mysterious Mr Whittington of the equally mysterious Esthonia Glassware Company has a strange proposition to make, but when Tuppence chooses the alias of Jane Finn, Mr Whittington is at first furious then, anxious to soothe his employee-to-be, gives the astonished Tuppence a payment of £50 in advance of services to be rendered. But the next day, Mr Whittington has vanished and the Esthonia Glassware Company has locked its offices and apparently gone out of business. It seems that the alias 'Jane Finn' is the same name of a young American who vanished under very strange circumstances five years earlier...