Classic Mystery

This audiobook includes unabridged recordings of Agatha Christie's first 5 Hercule Poirot novels, and the first collection of short stories featuring the famous detective, all read by the award-winning David Rintoul.

Riddle of the Sands is set during the long suspicious years leading up to the First World War and is a classic of spy fiction.

James Bond is not an easily intimidated man, but it’s hard not to feel unnerved in the presence of Mr. Big. A ruthless Harlem gangster who uses superstition and fear to control his vast criminal empire, he’s also one of SMERSH’s top American operatives. Mr. Big has been smuggling British pirate treasure to New York from a remote Jamaican island and funneling the proceeds to Moscow.

Chief Inspector Macdonald has been invited to a treasure hunt party at the house of the Graham Coombe, the celebrated publisher of Murder by Mesmerism. The clues of the hunt have been devised by Coombe's thriller-writer friends, disguised on the night under literary pseudonyms. The fun comes to an abrupt end, however, when 'Samuel Pepys' is found murdered in the telephone room in bizarre circumstances.

Join Sherlock Holmes - and his faithful companion and chronicler, Dr. Watson - on their first case. The adventure begins when Holmes and Watson are asked by Scotland Yard to step around to a house off Brixton Road. In the vacant house, the police have discovered a body: one Enoch J. Drebber of Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A. There are quantities of blood all over the room, and on one wall, the single word, Rache is scrawled in blood red letters. Inspector Lestrade wants Holmes's opinion: "If this man was murdered," he asks, "how was it done?" "Poison," Holmes said curtly. "Come, Watson. The game is afoot."

Osama bin Laden is dead. Saddam Hussein is buried. Baghdad lies in ruins. Now the eyes of the world are on Jerusalem as Jon Bennett - a Wall Street strategist turned senior White House advisor - his beautiful CIA partner Erin McCoy, and the U.S. Secretary of State arrive in the Middle East to meet with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

On a quest to find her sister's killer, Mac is a major player in a deadly game, but with one great advantage: she knows how to find the Sinsar Dubh, an ancient book of magic so dark it corrupts anyone who touches it. What Mac soon discovers is worse than she had imagined. Surrounded by treachery, her enemies indistinguishable from her allies, she can be certain of only one thing: as All Hallows' Eve approaches, her time is running out.

En una soleada mañana en la ciudad de Los Ángeles el dueño de una librería y aspirante a escritor Adien English le abre la puerta a un asesinato. Su viejo amigo de la secundaria (y empleado) ha sido encontrado apuñaleado en un callejón después de tener una estruendosa pelea pública con Adrien la noche anterior. Naturalmente la policía quiere hacerle algunas preguntas a Adrien; pero no están muy impresionados con sus respuestas, y cuando unas horas después alguien entra y deshace la tienda de Adrien, la ley asume que Adrien esta tratando de quitarse las sospechas del crimen de ...

As he searches for a mysteriously vanished girlfriend, Haruki Murakami's protagonist plunges into a wind tunnel of sexual violence and metaphysical dread in which he collides with call girls, plays chaperone to a lovely teenaged psychic, and receives cryptic instructions from a shabby but oracular Sheep Man. Dance Dance Dance is a tense, poignant, and often hilarious ride through the cultural Cuisinart that is contemporary Japan, a place where everything that is not up for sale is up for grabs.

The virtuous and loving Emily, the young protagonist, finds herself in the care of her aunt following the death of her father. Her aunt promptly marries the villain Montoni, a cruel and calculating man whose scheming leads him to lock both women in the dark and winding castle of Udolpho. Will they survive to tell of its terrors?

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.

Ben Dejooli is a Navajo cop who can't escape his past. Six years ago his little sister Ana vanished without a trace. His best friend saw what happened, but he refuses to speak of what he knows, and so was banished from the Navajo tribe. That was the day the crows started following Ben. Caroline Adams is a nurse with a special talent: She sees things others can’t see. She knows that Ben is more than he seems, and that the crows are trying to tell him something.

Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is a realistic yet romantic nautical adventure about a young stowaway on the high seas. One day in 1827, Arthur Gordon Pym escapes his dreary life in New Bedford and hides on the Grampus, where he befriends the captain's son, Augustus. The two boys witness and participate in a dazzling series of adventures, including shipwreck, famine, rescue, and voyages all over the world.

Cash-strapped drifter Anthony Cade agrees to two jobs at the behest of an old friend. He is to deliver an unpublished memoir to a publisher and return a cache of letters to a woman. The simple errands soon plunge Cade into dangerous international intrigue that draws together Scotland Yard, the French Sûreté, and the heir to the Herzoslovakian throne. But it’s at the historic estate of Chimneys in the English countryside that the dark secrets of a treacherous conspiracy erupt in murder.

Confessions of a Thug is an English novel written by Philip Meadows Taylor in 1839 based on the Thuggee cult in British India.This book is a tale of crime and retribution. Set in 1832 in India, the story lays bare the practices of the Thugs, or deceivers as they were called, who lived in boats and used to murder those passengers whom they were able to entice into their company in their voyages up and down the rivers.

Galina is a young woman caught, like her contemporaries, in the seeming lawlessness of the new Russia. In the midst of this chaos, her sister Maria turns into a jackdaw and flies away - prompting Galina to join Yakov, a policeman investigating a rash of recent disappearances. Their search will take them to the underground realm of hidden truths and archetypes, to find themselves caught between reality and myth, past and present, honor and betrayal... the secret history of Moscow.

Lanning “Lanny” Budd spends his first 13 years in Europe, living at the center of his mother’s glamourous circle of friends on the French Riviera. In 1913, he enters a prestigious Swiss boarding school and befriends Rick, an English boy, and Kurt, a German. The three schoolmates are privileged, happy, and precocious - but their world is about to come to an abrupt and violent end. When the gathering storm clouds of war finally burst, raining chaos and death over the continent, Lanny must put the innocence of youth behind him.

Briseis has a gift: she can grow plants from tiny seeds to rich blooms with a single touch. When Briseis’ aunt dies and wills her a dilapidated estate in rural New York, Bri and her parents decide to leave Brooklyn behind for the summer. Hopefully there, surrounded by plants and flowers, Bri will finally learn to control her gift. But their new home is sinister in ways they could never have imagined - it comes with a specific set of instructions, an old-school apothecary and a walled garden filled with the deadliest botanicals in the world.

Wilkie Collins' follow-up to The Woman in White and No Name is an innovative take on mistaken identity, the nature of evil, and the dark underbelly of Victorian England. The story concerns two distant cousins, both named Allan Armadale, and the impact of a family tragedy, which makes one of them a target of the murderous Lydia Gwilt, a vicious and malevolent charmer determined to get her hands on the Armadale fortune. Will the real Allan Armadale be revealed, and will he survive the plot against his life?

October “Toby” Daye is finally doing all right. She’s settling into her new role as the Countess of Goldengreen; she’s actually dating again; she’s even agreed to take on Quentin as her official squire. Life is looking up all around - and that inevitably means it’s time for things to take a turn for the worse. Someone has kidnapped the sons of Duchess Dianda Lorden, regent of the Undersea Duchy of Saltmist. To prevent a war between land and sea, Toby must not only find the missing boys, but also prove that the Queen of the Mists was not behind their abduction.