While hot on the heels of serial coupon-racketeer Gordon Ginner, Chief Inspector MacDonald of Scotland Yard receives word of an intriguing incident up in Lancashire – the summer cottage of local farmer Giles Hoggett has been broken into, with an assortment of seemingly random items missing which include a complete reel of salmon line, a large sack, and two iron dogs from his fireplace. What first appears as a simple break-in quickly spirals into a mystery of contested land grabs for fishing between farmers, made all the more enticing to MacDonald when a body is then found in the river.

Mr. Richard Dodsley, owner of a fine second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road, has been found murdered in the cold hours of the morning. Shot in his own office, few clues remain besides three cigarette ends, two spent matches and a few books on the shelves which have been rearranged. In an investigation spanning the second-hand bookshops of London and the Houses of Parliament - since an MP's new crime novel Death at the Desk appears to have some bearing on the case - John Ferguson's series sleuth MacNab is at hand to assist Scotland Yard in an atmospheric fair-play bibliomystery.

Horace Manning, scientist, recluse and 'closed book' even to his friends, is found dead in his study at 4a.m., following a dinner in honour of his daughter's engagement. An ivory-handled carving knife rests between his shoulder blades as the houseguests gather round to witness the awful crime. The telephone line has been sabotaged - a calculated murder has been committed. Rewinding twelve hours, the events of the afternoon and evening unfold, revealing a multitude of clues and motives from a closed cast of suspects.

When Miles Hammond is invited to a meeting of the Murder Club in London, he is met instead with just two other guests and is treated to a strange tale of an impossible crime in France years before; the murder of a man on a tower with only one staircase, under watch at the time at which the murder took place. With theories of levitating vampires abounding, the story comes home to Miles when he realises that the librarian he has just hired for his home is none other than Fay Seton, a woman at the heart of this bizarre and unsolved past murder.

Vivian Lestrange - celebrated author of the popular mystery novel The Charterhouse Case and total recluse - has apparently dropped off the face of the Earth. Reported missing by his secretary Eleanor, whom Inspector Bond suspects to be the author herself looking for publicity, it appears that crime is afoot when Lestrange's housekeeper is also found to have disappeared. Bond and Warner of Scotland Yard set to work to investigate a murder with no body and a potentially fictional victim.

Nineteen tales of murder and mystery in the first three books to feature H.C. Bailey's golden age detective Mr. Reginald 'Reggie' Fortune: surgeon and general practitioner, a man interested in everything, but not in anything in particular, and with a vast store of eclectic knowledge that makes him the ideal man to advise the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard, and shine a light upon the darkest of deeds.

After Arthur Penfold’s wife reveals she is leaving him to care for her ailing aunt, he sets upon a path of murder and deceit to avoid the social embarrassment of a second marital breakdown. But the purchase of a poetry book triggers a sequence of events that begins to unravel both Arthur and a seemingly open-and-shut murder case.

When a signalman discovers a mutilated body inside a railway tunnel near Groote Park, it seems to be a straightforward case of a man struck by a passing train. But Inspector Vandam of the Middeldorp police isn’t satisfied that Albert Smith’s death was accidental, and he sets out to prove foul play in a baffling mystery which crosses continents from deepest South Africa to the wilds of northern Scotland, where an almost identical crime appears to have been perpetrated.

England, 1925. After years shut away from the world, former detective Lord Edgington of Cranley Hall plans a grand ball to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday. But when someone starts bumping off members of his scheming family, the old man enlists his teenage grandson to help find the killer, before one of them is next.

The story opens with the apparently accidental drowning of a sixth form student in the Norfolk countryside. As a matter of routine, or so it seems, the case passes across the desk of Detective Sergeant Smith, recently returned to work after an internal investigation into another case that has led to tensions between officers at Kings Lake police headquarters. As an ex-DCI, Smith could have retired by now, and it is clear that some of his superiors wish that he would do so.

It’s December 19, 1931. Hercule Poirot and Inspector Edward Catchpool are looking forward to a much-needed, restful Christmas holiday, when they are called upon to investigate the murder of a man in a Norfolk hospital ward. Cynthia Catchpool, Edward’s mother, insists that Poirot stay with her in a crumbling mansion by the coast, so that they can all be together for the festive period while he solves the case.

Here in one recording is every Sherlock Holmes story ever written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Originally appearing in serial form, these famous stories are here presented in the order in which they were first published beginning in 1887. Included in this definitive, award-winning collection are four novels and 56 short stories, a total of 60 titles. The 56 short stories are aggregated into five named collections, just as they were originally published in book form.

Three critically acclaimed recordings are joined together in this dazzling Agatha Christie Triple Bill, read by award-winning narrators Alison Larkin and James Warwick, star of the Partners in Crime TV series on Masterpiece Theater.

The unloading of a consignment of French wine from the steamship Bullfinch is interrupted by a gruesome discovery in a broken cask leaking sawdust and gold sovereigns. But when the shipping clerk returns with the police, the cask and its macabre contents have gone. Following the clues to Paris, Inspector Burnley of Scotland Yard enlists the help of the genial French detective M. Lefarge to check motives and alibis in their hunt for evidence of a particularly fiendish murder.

The Josephine Tey Collection includes unabridged recordings of Tey's 8 major novels in one audiobook, including all 6 of the novels in the Inspector Alan Grant series.

When a signalman discovers a mutilated body inside a railway tunnel near Groote Park, it seems to be a straightforward case of a man struck by a passing train. But Inspector Vandam of the Middeldorp police isn’t satisfied that Albert Smith’s death was accidental, and he sets out to prove foul play in a baffling mystery which crosses continents from deepest South Africa to the wilds of northern Scotland, where an almost identical crime appears to have been perpetrated.

John Griffith "Jack" London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. This collection includes "Love of Life", "A Day's Lodging", "The White Man's Way", "The Story of Keesh", "The Unexpected", "Brown Wolf", "The Sun-Dog Trail", and "Negore, the Coward".

Maisie is an innocent six year-old, torn between her divorced parents, pathetically isolated yet tragically involved.

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.

Welworth Garden City in the 1940s is a forward-thinking town where free spirits find a home - vegetarians, socialists, and an array of exotic religious groups. Chief among these are the Children of Osiris, led by the eccentric High Prophet, Eustace K. Mildmann. The cult is a seething hotbed of petty resentment, jealousy and dark secrets - which eventually lead to murder. The stage is set for one of Inspector Meredith's most bizarre and exacting cases.

Maurice Leblanc, a writer of detective fiction during the same period as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, created Arsene Lupin, a sort of French Robin Hood. An inventive genius, a master of disguise, and an accomplished actor, Lupin operates in the choice chateaux and salons. He scorns sham and with great disdain leaves his card in a baron's residence. The card reads, "Arsene Lupin, gentleman-burglar, will return when the furniture is genuine."

Aunt Mildred declared that no good could come of the Melbury family Christmas gatherings. So when Sir Osmond Melbury, the family patriarch, is discovered - by a guest dressed as Santa Klaus - with a bullet in his head on Christmas Day, the festivities are plunged into chaos. Nearly everybody stands to reap some sort of benefit from his death excepting Santa Klaus, the one person who seems to have had every opportunity to fire the shot.

Demobilised officer, finding peace incredibly tedious, would welcome diversion. Legitimate if possible; excitement essential. When Captain Hugh Drummond, DSO, MC placed that advertisement, he was looking for adventure. What he finds is an international plot headed by the greatest criminal mastermind in the world.

When Douglas B. Douglas - leading light of the London theatre - premiers his new musical extravaganza, Blue Music, he is sure the packed house will be dazzled by the performance. What he couldn't predict is the death of his star, Brandon Baker, onstage in the middle of act two. Soon another member of the cast is found dead, and it seems to be a straightforward case of murder followed by suicide.

When Harold Merefield returned home in the early hours of a winter morning from a festive little party at that popular nightclub, the Naxos, he was startled by a gruesome discovery. On his bed was a corpse. There was nothing to show the identity of the dead man or the cause of his death. At the inquest, the jury found a verdict of ‘death from natural causes’ - perhaps they were right, but yet?

Following a mysterious explosion, the offices of Excelsior Joinery Company are no more; the three directors are killed and the peace of a quiet town in Surrey lies in ruins. When the supposed cause of an ignited gas leak is dismissed and the presence of dynamite revealed, Superintendent Littlejohn of Scotland Yard is summoned to the scene. But beneath the sleepy veneer of Evingden lies a hotbed of deep-seated grievances. Confounding Littlejohn's investigation is an impressive cast of suspicious persons, each concealing their own ax to grind.

1942: a German spy comes ashore on a desolate stretch of Lincolnshire beach. But he is hunted down by a young detective, Richard Prince. The secret services have need of a man like him.... In occupied Europe, Denmark is a hotbed of problems for British intelligence. Rumours of a war-ending weapon being developed by the Germans are rife. Sent to Copenhagen, Prince is soon caught in a deadly game of cat and mouse. Dodging Gestapo agents, SS muscle and the danger of betrayal, his survival - and the war effort - hangs in the balance.

Spanning events over thirty years, Volume I of The Papers of Sherlock Holmes relates narratives of Holmes and Watson's days in Baker Street, as well as particulars of Holmes's supposed retirement. Follow along as The Master and his Boswell travel from the streets of London to the Kent countryside, to Oxford and Sussex. Written in traditional canonical style, these stories provide fresh details of Holmes's world. Join us as we climb the seventeen steps to the Baker Street sitting room, where Holmes and Watson prepare to begin their next adventure. The game is afoot!

The first audiobook which appeared in Georges Simenon's famous Maigret series, in a gripping new translation by David Bellos.Inevitably Maigret was a hostile presence in the Majestic. He constituted a kind of foreign body that the hotel's atmosphere could not assimilate. Not that he looked like a cartoon policeman. He didn't have a moustache and he didn't wear heavy boots. His clothes were well cut and made of fairly light worsted. He shaved every day and looked after his hands. But his frame was proletarian. He was a big, bony man.

It's a rainy, uneventful evening in the Oddfellows' Arms until a man bursts into the pub, clearly unstable, and ranting about a body in Fennings' Mill. The police investigate and stumble upon a body-the face smeared with theatrical make-up and a false mustache pasted neatly over the lip. Once the national news descends, Inspector Faddiman calls in Inspector Littlejohn to help him uncover the dark, hidden secrets in this quiet, provincial town. Soon it becomes clear that a lot of people can't, and won't tell the truth.

New York Times bestselling author Alan Furst is widely recognized as master of the historical spy novel. Furst’s works are vivid evocations of long-forgotten heroes and feature plots that unfold to the inexorable cadence of history. Night Soldiers is a simultaneously thrilling and illuminating tale of espionage set in 1934.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres and the New York Times best-selling Last Hundred Years Trilogy, a captivating, brilliantly imaginative story of three extraordinary animals - and a young boy - whose lives intersect in Paris.

As one of the first female reporters on 1880s Fleet Street, Penny Green has her work cut out. Whether it's investigating the mysterious death of a friend or reporting on a serial killer in the slums, Penny must rely on her wits and determination to discover the truth. Fortunately she can rely on the help of Inspector James Blakely of Scotland Yard, but will their relationship remain professional?

When salvage expert and historian Paisley Sutton crawls into an abandoned store with a house attached, she certainly isn’t expecting to find a body on site. But soon, her discovery sends Paisley on an expedition through history that links this murder to the one that led the previous owners to abandon the building in the first place. And someone doesn’t want her to salvage this story from the wreckage.

Investigate weird goings on for a living? What kind of nutbag would do that? Well, the kind with bills to pay, actually. In the quiet seclusion of the Appalachia mountains, something evil stirs. Home to generations of witches, the entire region knows the lore, and everyone knows someone with at least a suggestion of the supernatural in their family. So when Edgar Corey, one time FBI field agent and all-round recluse, is called upon to help the sheriff with what sounds like a supernatural case, he automatically turns him down. Or wished he had because all too soon he’s up to his neck in a ...

Lady Katherine would rather chase clues than suitors. Her reputation as a matchmaker could give her the cover she needs to follow in her detective father's footsteps. If she catches the Pink Ribbon Killer before he strikes again, she'll win her dowry and her independence in the process. One look through the exclusive Northbrooke estate house party doubles her suspect list. With the help of her trusty maid and her precocious pug, Katherine risks it all to unmask the killer. But is winning her freedom worth putting another debutante in mortal danger?

Susan didn’t plan on being an amateur sleuth and, after two successful investigations, she’s looking forward to a quiet Christmas. So, when local businesswoman Meera is in desperate need of help, Susan agrees rather reluctantly. The task should be easy enough. The infamous press mogul Duncan Fern is coming back to the Isle of Wight, the scene of his family’s childhood holidays, to celebrate Christmas with his grown-up children and their partners, his new glamorous wife Kirsten who is forever dripping with diamonds, and the spikey editor of his paper the Morning Flame, Antoine.

A mail-order bride schemes to make her new husband fall deeply and desperately in love with her in this sweetly suspenseful historical romance! Jameson Ford’s dream is to turn the remote mountain community of El Vaquero into the biggest cattle town in Texas. When he submits an application for a mail-order bride, he’s not looking for love. To him, acquiring a wife is simply one of his duties for pioneering a town. An impoverished debutante and former life of the party, Penelope Copeland carves out a new life as a working-class girl in post-war Atlanta — that is, until a gang of ...

When award-winning actor, producer, and international icon Gabriel Byrne was a young boy, his grandmother brought him to the cinema for the first time. There, Byrne fell in love with the transporting power of the big screen. Growing up in 1950s and 60s Dublin within a family of eight, Byrne's formative childhood years were both carefree and challenging, spent between home, the church, school, and the streets of his ever-changing city.

Despite his highly successful marketing career, Craig Williams' personal life is falling apart. The puppy he's surrendering to the local shelter is one sign of how messed up things have gotten due to a recent divorce plus the loss of a child. He thinks he'd best focus on his two surviving kids. When Craig shows up to Megan Anderson's no-kill animal shelter, the confrontation that ensues sets them on a path neither could have predicted.

The unloading of a consignment of French wine from the steamship Bullfinch is interrupted by a gruesome discovery in a broken cask leaking sawdust and gold sovereigns. But when the shipping clerk returns with the police, the cask and its macabre contents have gone. Following the clues to Paris, Inspector Burnley of Scotland Yard enlists the help of the genial French detective M. Lefarge to check motives and alibis in their hunt for evidence of a particularly fiendish murder.