Playing With Fire

FIRE--It consumes futures and pasts in a terrified heartbeat, devouring damning secrets while leaving even greater mysteries in the ashes.

The night sky is ablaze as flames engulf two barges moored side by side on an otherwise empty canal. On board are the blackened remains of...Read more

Accidental Murder

In this novel, top Australian cop Carol Ashton tracks the most elusive killer of her career. When people with no obvious connection to each other are dying in what appear to be legitimate accidents, nothing seems amiss, until Carol Ashton receives a call from a private investigator.Read more

Final Curtain

Troy Alleyn, Inspector Roderick Alleyn's beautiful young wife, is engaged to paint a portrait of Sir Henry Ancred, famed Shakespearean actor and family patriarch, but she senses all is not well in the dreary castle of Ancreton. When old Hnery is found dead after a suspicious dinner and an...Read more

A Restless Evil

It sends a shiver down Detective Superintendent Alan Markby's spine when he hears that a rambler has stumbled on human bones in Stovey Woods in the heart of the Cotswolds.

Twenty-two years ago, as a fresh-faced young inspector, he had a rare failure in the hunt for a brutal...Read more

Pictures Of Perfection

High in the Mid-Yorkshire dales stand the pretty village of Enscombe, proud survivor of all that history has thrown at it. But now market forces mass at the gates and the old way of life seems to be changing fast. The Law can do little to stop the ever-growing crimes against tradition, but...Read more

Murder on a Midsummer Night

The year is 1929, and Melbourne is in the grip of an exhausting heatwave. But for elegant and irrepressible private investigator Phryne Fisher, the temperature is the least of her worries. She finds herself simultaneously investigating the apparent suicide of a man on St Kilda beach, and...Read more

On Beulah Height

Into thin air...

Three little girls, one by one, had vanished from the farming village of Dendale. And Superintendent Andy Dalziel, a young detective in those days, never found their bodies--or the person who snatched them. Then the valley where Dendale stood was flooded to...Read more

Aftermath

One phone call from a concerned neighbor has inadvertently led police to Terence Payne, the elusive serial killer known only as "Chameleon." Now the fiend is in custody, perhaps dying, and a long nightmare appears to be over at last. But is it? In Acting Detective Superintendent Alan Banks'...Read more

Beneath These Stones

Twelve-year-old Tammy Franklin has learned too much about death, too quickly. Two years ago she lost her mother to a long, lingering illness and now the body of the woman her father married in an attempt to replace his wife has been found on a railway embankment close to the Franklin farm....Read more

Colour Scheme

Often regarded as her most interesting book and set on New Zealand's North Island, Ngaio Marsh herself considered this to be her best-written novel. It was a horrible death -- Maurice Questing was lured into a pool of boiling mud and left there to die. Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn, far...Read more

An Author Bites the Dust

An Author Bites the Dust takes super-sleuth Napoleon Bonaparte to the house party of Mervyn Black, famous author and critic, where the host is found murdered among his literary friends.Read more

An Excellent Mystery

In 1141, two monks have arrived in Shrewsbury from Winchester, where their abbey was destroyed. Now Brother Humilis, who is very ill, and Brother Fidelis, who is mute, must seek refuge at Shrewsbury. And from the moment he meets them, Brother Cadfael senses something deeper than their...Read more

An Imperfect Spy

While guest-teaching a semester at Schuyler Law School, Kate Fansler gets to know an extraordinary secretary named Harriet, who patterns her life after John le Carré's character George Smiley. Harriet reveals that Schuyler has some serious skeletons swinging in its perfectly appointed...Read more

Call the Dead Again

When Meredith Mitchell picks up a hitchhiker on a lonely road outside Bamford one evening she is left feeling distinctly uneasy. What business can this confident, yet secretive, young woman have at Tudor Lodge, the beautiful old home of Brussels-based lawyer Andrew Penhallow, where she asks...Read more

Death and the Dancing Footman

The party's over when murder makes an entrance...

With the notion of bringing together the most bitter of enemies for his own amusement, a bored, mischievous millionaire throws a house party. As a brutal snowstorm strands the unhappy guests, the party receives a most unwelcome...Read more

Nemesis

In utter disbelief, Jane Marple read the letter addressed to her from the recently deceased Mr Rafiel - an acquaintance she had met briefly on her travels. He had left instructions for her to investigate a crime after his death. The only problem was, he had failed to tell her who was...Read more

A Sea of Troubles

The murder of two clam fishermen off the island of Pellestrina, south of the Lido on the Venetian lagoon, draws Commissario Brunetti into the close-knit community of the island, bound together by a code of loyalty and a suspicion of outsiders worthy of the Mafia. When the boss' secretary...Read more

Under World

Years ago, young Tracey Pedley disappeared in the woods around Burrthorpe. The close-knit mining village had its own ideas about what happened, but the police pinned it on a known child-killer who subsequently committed suicide.

Now Burrthorpe comes to police attention again. A...Read more

Dead Souls

At Bertram's Hotel

Miss Jane Marple has checked into Bertram's Hotel in London for a much-needed vacation. The last thing she expects is that this elegant establishment, known for its service and old-world charm, could be embroiled in scandal. But after a series of strange events—including the disappearance...Read more

The Caller

One mild summer evening Lily and her husband are enjoying a meal while their baby daughter sleeps peacefully in her pram beneath a maple tree. But when Lily steps outside she is paralysed with terror. The child is bathed in blood.

Inspector Sejer is called to the hospital to meet...Read more

A Word After Dying

Inspector Alan Markby and his long-time friend Meredith Mitchell have taken a cottage in the country for a much needed holiday. But so sooner are they relaxing with a neighbor over a glass of blackberry wine, when Markby is being badgered for an "off the record" opinion about a somewhat...Read more

Surfeit Of Lampreys

Ngaio Marsh's most popular novel begins when a young New Zealander's first contact with the English gentry is the body of Lord Wutherford -- with a meat skewer through the eye...The Lampreys had plenty of charm -- but no cash. They all knew they were peculiar -- and rather gloried in it....Read more

A Sleeping Life

The middle-aged woman lying on the footpath is biggish and unattractive. Yet even in death her eyes hold a defiant look. Everyone in this Kingsmarkham neighborhood knew her name was Rhoda Comfrey and that she was down from London visiting her invalid father. But when Inspector Wexford looks...Read more

A Touch of Mortality

When Sally Caswell persuaded her scientist husband Liam to move from London to the quiet of rural Oxfordshire it was in the hope of a more peaceful existence. But so far the move has led to nothing but discord. Liam's sabbatical book project is not going well so, frustrated and isolated, he...Read more

Kill Shot

Some people just work better alone. Wyatt’s one of them. He’s been getting by on nice quiet little burglaries—one-man jobs—when he gets wind of something bigger.

A corporate crook, notorious Ponzi schemer, set to face court and certain jail time. He’s about to skip bail the old...Read more

Beware of the Trains

Gervase Fen, Oxford professor and amateur detective, tackles sixteen baffling cases, including the disappearance of a conductor from his trainRead more

A Caribbean Mystery

There is no rest or relaxation for Miss Marple. Agatha Christie's most appealing sleuth returns in this classic baffler of a vacation-turned-deadly.

Nephew Raymond West has given his favourite aunt a vacation at a beautiful resort in the Caribbean. While there she encounters an...Read more

Dead By Morning

Over the last year, Superintendent Draco has turned the little police station at Sturrenden upside down. A hard-driving, fiery Welshman, he has breathed new life into a stagnant police force, and Det. Inspector Luke Thanet has been forced to admit that even if he’s difficult to work with,...Read more

Death at the Bar

At the Plume of Feathers in south Devon one midsummer evening, eight people are gathered together in the tap-room. They are in the habit of playing darts, but on this occasion an experiment takes the place of the usual game – a fatal experiment which calls for investigation.

A...Read more

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