Classic Fiction Mysteries

An impossible grand theft in a posh Brighton hotel. The locked-room murder of an Italian nobleman. The suspicious suicide of a man worth more dead than alive. What are the motives behind these puzzling crimes? In Agatha Christie’s first collection of short stories, eleven mysteries in all, detective Hercule Poirot makes his investigations. Leave it to the unflappable Belgian sleuth and his partner, Captain Arthur Hastings, to put the pieces together.

At first, high school freshmen Rex McClendon and Leif Nelson believe what they’ve been told - that local students’ strange demises at Whitewood, a local reformatory, were all tragic accidents. But when the shoot for their low-budget horror masterpiece, PolterDog, goes horribly awry - and their best friend, Alicia Boykins, is sent to Whitewood - Rex and Leif are forced to question everything they know about their unassuming hometown and its cherished school for delinquents.

He wasn't born with the name Maniac Magee. He came into this world named Jeffrey Lionel Magee, but when his parents died and his life changed, so did his name. And Maniac Magee became a legend. Even today kids talk about how fast he could run; about how he hit an inside-the-park "frog" homer; about how no knot, no matter how snarled, would stay that way once he began to untie it. But the thing Maniac Magee is best known for is what he did for the kids from the East Side and those from the West Side.

When a gay Los Angeles magician named Parsifal dies suddenly, he leaves behind his heartbroken assistant, Sabine, and a secret past that leads her to Nebraska and a father she never knew he had.

Felix Castor is a freelance exorcist, and London is his stomping ground. It may seem like a good ghostbuster can charge what he likes and enjoy a hell of a lifestyle, but there's a risk: sooner or later he's going to take on a spirit that's too strong for him. When Castor accepts a seemingly simple ghost-hunting case at a museum in the shadowy heart of London, what should have been a perfectly straightforward exorcism is rapidly turning into the Who Can Kill Castor First Show, with demons and ghosts all keen to claim the big prize.

Mrs. Blencarrow is a lovely middle-aged widow with five adoring children and a comfortable income with which to raise them. She holds a position of admiration and respect in her strictly Victorian village society. But the good lady who seems beyond reproach has a secret, and not all her neighbors wish her well. When one of them stumbles upon incriminating information, Mrs. Blencarrow stands to lose everything she holds dear ... Originally published in 1890 by Margaret Oliphant, a keen and prolific chronicler of the strict laws and customs of her time.

Three years have passed since Sherlock Holmes and his nemesis Moriarty vanished into the abyss of the Reichenbach Falls. In that time the criminals of London have been able to sleep safe in their beds. But the capital has never been in greater need of its protector.

Investigating a crime seemingly unconnected to the Royal Family, Holmes & Watson uncover a conspiracy to kidnap Queen Victoria and destabilise the British Empire. With a ticking clock to her next public engagement, Holmes and Watson must discover who is behind the plot and locate her majesty, while Mycroft tries to keep the monarch’s disappearance a secret from the British people. At first, Holmes believes Moriarty is responsible for the abduction, but when the Napoleon of Crime is proved innocent, Holmes must work with his arch-nemesis to rescue the Queen.

August 1911. Emily Hardcastle and her inimitable lady’s maid Florence Armstrong are enjoying a fine summer until Harry, Lady H’s brother, turns up out of the blue with a mystery for them to solve. A routine parachute test at a local aeroplane factory has gone horribly wrong - with pilot Dickie Dupree plummeting to his death. Harry is certain there is more to this ‘tragic accident’ than meets the eye, having discovered that someone at the airfield is leaking top secret intelligence to foreign rivals.

Jon Bennett is a top Wall Street strategist turned senior White House advisor. But nothing has prepared him for the terror that he will face. Saddam Hussein dispatches his top hit men to assassinate the President of the United States. Iraqi terrorists spread carnage throughout London, Paris, and Riyadh...and the Butcher of Baghdad has a nuclear ace in his hand that he has not yet played.

When he falls ill on his way home from school, 15-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover--then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.

Keisha Lewis lived a quiet life with her wife, Alice, until the day Alice disappeared. After months of searching, presuming she was dead, Keisha held a funeral, mourned, and gradually tried to get on with her life. But that was before Keisha started to see her wife, again and again, in the background of news reports from all over America. Alice isn't dead, and she is showing up at every major tragedy and accident in the country. Following a line of clues, Keisha takes a job as a long-haul truck driver and begins searching for Alice.

The atomic submarine Dolphin has impossible orders: to sail beneath the ice floes of the Arctic Ocean to locate and rescue the men of weather station Zebra, gutted by fire and drifting with the ice pack somewhere north of the Arctic Circle. But the orders do not say what the Dolphin will find if she succeeds - that the fire at Ice Station Zebra was sabotage and that one of the survivors is a killer....

Emily Inglethorp has been poisoned. And it seems everyone at Styles Court, from the hired help to family members, had a motive - and the means. But with Detective Hercule Poirot out of retirement and on the case, no one's getting away with murder. The Mysterious Affair at Styles was not only Agatha Christie's debut; it also introduced her illustrious detective character to the world.

This story is based on the actual murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers, a crime that paralyzed New York because of the unprecedented violence that the murderer turned on her. Mary Cecilia Rogers was born in Connecticut in 1820 and disappeared on October 4, 1838, in unclear circumstances. Some days later the newspapers announced that she had been found and had fled to marry a naval officer. The case was closed, but three years later, on July 25, 1841, Mary Cecilia Rogers disappeared again. Her lifeless body was found floating in the Hudson River

In the debut of an exciting new series from Heather Killough-Walden, the archangel Uriel thinks he has found his one true archess in Eleanor Granger-but can he protect her from the danger that threatens her?

Juanita di Perli was a young woman when she decided to live the rest of her life on a table-top. She called it God's will, but for the order of nuns that sprang up around her, Juanita's devotion was a curse. For decades they did the bidding of the holy grouch, and the entire island of San Juan el Pirata sighed with relief when she died. Twenty years later, the islanders fight for Juanita's canonization - not because they liked her, but because a local saint would be a tourist boon. The only thing keeping the island poor is the Archduke, who refuses to ask Rome to consider Juanita for sainthood.

Science fiction adventure and space opera at its best. An addictive, fast-action, edge-of-your-seat journey. . . the Empire wants them dead and doesn't care about collateral damage. “Greetings. I’m former Sergeant Hutheen Bozon. You may have read about our exploits. I’m a female, feline Hoganthan warrior. I’m an elite sniper and the weapons officer on our warship corvette, HSS Valkyrie. The Empire has made a huge mistake - they’ve ruled we are to be executed on-sight. If they really want to try that, they need to send more of their pretty ships for us to carve up and destroy. We ...

Tautly narrated and excruciatingly suspenseful, Double Indemnity gives us an X-ray view of guilt, of duplicity, and of the kind of obsessive, loveless love that devastates everything it touches. First published in 1936, this novel reaffirmed James M. Cain as a virtuoso of the roman noir.

Jim Thompson's classic The Grifters is one of the best novels ever written about the art of the con, an ingeniously crafted story of deception and betrayal that was the basis for the critically acclaimed film by Stephen Frears and Martin Scorcese. To his friends, to his coworkers, and even to his mistress Moira, Roy Dillon is an honest hardworking salesman. He lives in a cheap hotel just within his pay bracket. He goes to work every day. He has hundreds of friends and associates who could attest to his good character.