Detective Short Stories Mysteries

There's no such thing as magic. That's what Leger keeps telling himself. But following a girls' night out, Leger finds that he is gifted a voodoo doll of Peter. He can't help himself from whispering his thoughts to the effigy before Bob gets a hold of the doll and mistakes it for a chew toy. Within hours, Peter is found beaten to within an inch of his life. Leger takes on the case, determined to find those responsible for the assault on Peter. With the help of his daughter, Sparkle and her best friend, a frog named Simpson, he starts piecing together clues. When a dead black cat turns up on...

Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, with the help of his friend newspaper reporter Hutchison Hatch, solves a variety of mysteries using cold, hard logic. No matter how twisted the trail of clues or how clever the perpetrator, Professor Van Dusen, aptly dubbed “The Thinking Machine”, reminds us that “two and two make four, not some times, but all the time”.

This second collection of pastiches of the immortal Sherlock Holmes offers 11 adventures of Solar Pons, who has been called by Vincent Starrett "a clever impersonator, with a twinkle in his eye, which tells us that he knows he is not Sherlock Holmes, and knows that we know it, but that he hopes we will like him anyway for what he symbolizes." Once again in the London of years ago "the game is afoot."

Lisa Paxton loves her job as a Private Investigator. Spying on cheating spouses is easy work that pays well. But when classmates from high school twelve years ago are now targeted by a madman who kills them in violent ways, Lisa's job description got a whole lot more dangerous. Add in a handsome ex-fling who suddenly wants to join his investigative business with Lisa's and you have a fun, spicy, dangerous short story. EENIE MEENIE MINY MO. Who's next? Rating: PG13 A thrilling romantic suspense just the right length when you don't have a lot of time to read. By a best-selling, award-winning ...

Just as World War I is drawing to an end, the prime minister is kidnapped. It is down to Hercule Poirot to locate him before a crucial conference, to avert an international crisis.

This is a story from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes collection. In this collection are four more individual cases for Mr. Sherlock Holmes, narrated by his faithful friend and admirer Dr. Watson. They dive into the opium dens of London in "The Man with the Twisted Lip," recall the curious history of "The Musgrave Ritual," come face to face with the grisly evidence contained in "The Cardboard Box," and go on a wild-goose chase in "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle." The powers of Sherlock Holmes prevail.

Anna Katharine Green (1846 - 1935) was one of the crime novelists and paved the way for later female writers of detective novels, like Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh.

The Floating Admiral was the first of the Detection Club's collaborative novels, in which 12 of its members wrote a single novel. Eighty-five years later, 14 members of the club have once again collaborated to produce The Sinking Admiral. The Admiral is a pub in the Suffolk seaside village of Crabwell, the Admiral Byng. The Admiral is also the nickname of its landlord, Geoffrey Horatio Fitzsimmons, as well as the name of the landlord's dinghy.

Lance Cooke doesn’t want much. He’s lived his whole life quietly in the town of Belvidere, New Jersey. He just wants to be remembered as a good man. And that’s not too hard when you’re a small town police chief. Cooke’s time is mostly spent worrying about traffic violations and town festivals, and whether he will finally kiss Lucy, the beautiful coffee shop queen. But trouble is terrorizing Belvidere, in the form of the Walker brothers, the town’s resident bullies. Why does Cooke seem to protect them? As the Walkers grow bolder, the town’s peaceful facade is shattered. Cooke ...

When seven million dollars in ancient gold coins vanish from a burned-out antique shop in Barcelona, legendary detective Sidney Fleet finds himself racing against time aboard the exclusive cruise ship Meridian Challenger. As Spanish authorities close in, demanding the ship's return to port, Fleet and his assistant Drew Peterson must unravel a web of deception involving a mysterious entomologist, his research assistant, and an elaborate ant farm that may hold more than just insects. Known for solving complex crimes from the comfort of his ocean-view suite, the brilliant but eccentric Fleet ...

Welcome to Icicle Lodge. Watch your back. Not everyone survives their visit. A wealthy gentleman, his one-armed butler, eight guests, and a cat are trapped in a ski lodge buried beneath an avalanche. One of them will be brutally murdered behind a locked door in the middle of the night. On the suspect list are a socialist and his girlfriend, the worst actor in LA, the French ambassador's daughter, and of course the butler. But at the top of the list is a brain surgeon. Think you know who did it? You don't. You don't even know who died. Even June Kato can't help solve this impossible to ...

A return to power. A town living in fear. A detective who wants to reach the end. When a child is taken, Harper and Liam are on a race to find out why? Why would the Seven Deadly Sins Killer take an innocent child? Why make it look as if another child is the culprit? As the killer's mind begins to spiral downward, something happens that reassures him that he is still in power. Join Harper and Liam as they fight through the seven sins, shoving their relationship aside. A madman and his assassin needed to be brought to justice before the final sin. The one where he would demand retribution ...

A professional pickpocket and accomplished thief ignores his wife's warnings and embarks on an adventure that will change his life - perhaps for the better. A technological marvel of a sports car kills a pedestrian, but no one was at the wheel. A local lunatic admits to murder, but is he crazy - or crazy smart? The life of a researcher with ties to a British spy agency is thrown into chaos when his research goes missing. Injury Time delivers captivating tales of intrigue wrapped in Catherine Aird's tightly woven logic, sealed with the bow of enigma.

The Problem of Cell 13 is a short story by Jacques Futrelle. It was first published in 1905 and later collected in The Thinking Machine (1907), which was featured in crime writer H. R. F. Keating's list of the 100 best crime and mystery books ever published. Like Futrelle's other short stories, The Problem of Cell 13 features Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen as the main character, although most of the story is seen through the perspective of a prison warden.

Summertime - as the temperature rises, so does the potential for evil. From Cornwall to the French Riviera, whether against a background of Delphic temples or English country houses, Agatha Christie’s most famous characters solve even the most devilish of conundrums as the summer sun beats down. Pull up a deckchair and enjoy plot twists and red herrings galore from the best-selling fiction writer of all time.

Upon opening a time capsule from 1968, the author finds a letter written by a condemned insurance agent from Texas only minutes before his arrest on capital murder charges. The letter relates this agent's downfall at the hands of a crooked police detective and a twisted woman. Though he was undoubtedly innocent of the crime, history long ago recorded his apprehension, trial and execution. By the time you read his letter, fifty years will have passed, and nothing can be done to save its author. His tale is a cautionary one, however, and so well worth reading. Beware of dames, dives, and death.

Tales for a Winter's Night brings together eight Arthur Conan Doyle mystery classics that originally appeared in the Strand magazine between July 1898 and January 1899. When first gathered into one volume in 1908, the book was entitled Round the Fire Stories, since the author recommended that they be read ideally "round the fire" upon a winter's night.

Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings are on holiday at the opulent Grand Metropolitan Hotel in Brighton, where they meet the wife of a wealthy stockbroker. As they discuss the jewels worn by Mrs. Opalsen, the great detective relates his experiences in cases which have concerned some of the best-known jewels in the world. Excited by his anecdotes, the wealthy matron eagerly offers to show him a very expensive pearl necklace, but when she goes to retrieve it, she discovers that it has been stolen....

Ogden Ford, a spoiled child of stupidly wealthy divorced parents, is "the Little Nugget"—the El Dorado of the American kidnapping industry. When Peter Burns, the gentleman of leisure, agrees to spirit the boy away from an English preparatory school to reunite him with his doting mother, he finds himself up against professional competition from across the Atlantic. And when penitent ex-playboy Jimmy "Piccadilly Jim" Crocker covertly returns to his native United States, the Nugget is once more involved as Jimmy finds himself enmeshed in plots and schemes of espionage and kidnapping.

An anthology featuring famous sleuths: Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter", Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Crooked Man" and G.K. Chesterlon's "The Man in the Passage".