Private detective Nigel Strangeways attends a dinner with an elite group of detective fiction writers, known as The Assassins’ Club. A room full of crime enthusiasts seems like an amusing setting for a murder...until one happens at the dinner table. With no shortage of suspects capable of thinking up a murder plot, Strangeways must quickly deduce who in the room could be responsible for the crime.

Lady Wainwright presides over the Gothic gloom at Belting, in mourning for her two sons lost in the Second World War. Long afterwards a stranger arrives at Belting, claiming to be the missing David Wainwright, who was not killed after all but held captive for years in a Russian prison camp. With Lady Wainwright's health fading, her inheritance is at stake, and the family is torn apart by doubts over its mysterious long-lost son. Belting is shadowed by suspicion and intrigue, and then the first body is found.

A short story from British Library Crime Classic The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories. Inspired by the unsolved Peasenhall murder case of 1902, 'Blind Man’s Hood' shows Carter Dickson’s penchant for true crime. When Rodney Hunter and his wife, Muriel, arrive late to a Christmas party in rural Kent, they are unsettled to find the isolated stately home open and empty of guests. While they await the party’s return, they are welcomed in by a mysterious hostess who regales them with the dark legend of Jane Waycross.

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.

Inspired by a newspaper competition, a group of people discuss enigmatic remarks they have overheard but do not know the meaning of. The phrase ‘Grey’s ghost was black’ sparks much intrigue and speculation, as series detective John Appleby recounts the mysterious tale of an author, his ghost writer and his ghost writer’s ghost.

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.

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.

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.

Taking a break from his holiday visiting his nephew, Jim, Athelstan Digby agrees to look after the old bookshop of Keldstone so that his hosts, the Lavenders, can attend their cousin's funeral. On the first day of his tenure, three suspicious characters enquire after a copy of The Life and Times of Mr Badman by John Bunyan.

Albert Campion, an eccentric but intelligent and resourceful man, becomes involved in a mysterious crime in Black Dudley, an isolated country estate owned by the wealthy and secretive Dudley family. A grand gathering is taking place at the house, but not all will leave.

A short story from British Library Crime Classic The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories. A brutal murder and a shocking deathbed confession - the love triangle of Karen Garborg, Thord Jensen and Olaf Kinck proves deadly on the Norwegian ski slopes.

Cryptic inscriptions in an antique Bible appear to record three gruesome deaths that took place in a quiet English village in 1779. Nearly 200 years later, a fourth person is found dead under similarly violent circumstances. As the investigation unfolds, suspicions are roused by the parallels with other events in the village’s history, and the book becomes key to unravelling a more than one mystery.

Jane Marple is an elderly lady from St Mary Mead who possesses an uncanny knack for solving even the most perplexing puzzles. Now, for the first time in 45 years, Agatha Christie’s beloved character returns to the page for a globe-trotting tour of crime and detection. Join Marple as she travels through her sleepy English village and around the world. In St Mary Mead, a Christmas dinner is interrupted by unexpected guests; the Broadway stage in New York City is set for a dangerous improvisation.

The village of Badger's Drift is the essence of tranquillity. But when resident and well-loved spinster Miss Simpson takes a stroll in the nearby woods, she stumbles across something she was never meant to see, and there's only one way to keep her quiet. Miss Simpson's death is not suspicious, say the villagers. But Miss Lucy Bellringer refuses to rest: her friend has been murdered. She is sure of it.

Hercule Poirot's quiet supper in a London coffeehouse is interrupted when a young woman confides to him that she is about to be murdered. She is terrified - but begs Poirot not to find and punish her killer. Once she is dead, she insists, justice will have been done. Later that night, Poirot learns that three guests at a fashionable London Hotel have been murdered, and a cufflink has been placed in each one’s mouth. Could there be a connection with the frightened woman?