When an Italian assassin's body is found floating in a barrel in Victorian London's East End, enquiry agent Cyrus Barker and his assistant Thomas Llewelyn are called in to investigate. Soon corpses begin to appear all over London, each accompanied by a Mafia Black Hand note. As Barker and Llewelyn dig deeper, they become entangled in the vendettas of rival Italian syndicates -- and it is no longer clear who is a friend or foe.
The last thing Mrs. Pollifax expects to find in her closet is a young woman hiding. Kadi Hopkirk insists that that she’s being pursued by two men in a van. Under the cover of darkness, Mrs. P. tries to drive Kadi home to Manhattan, only to have a dark green sedan give them a run for their money and, Mrs. P. begins to suspect, their lives.
Roughhewn private enquiry agent Cyrus Barker and his assistant Thomas Llewelyn must track down London's first serial killer.
Of all the books in the Alleyn series, Scales of Justice is most powerfully reminiscent of Agatha Christie, with its setting in an almost unspeakably charming little English village, and its cast of inbred aristocrats. When one of the aristos turns up dead next to the local trout-stream – with, in fact, a trout at his side – everyone is dreadfully upset, of course, but really, just a tad irritated as well: Murder is so awfully messy. Thank gawd that nice Inspector Alleyn – not really one of us, you know, but not terribly wide of the mark – is on hand to clear things up. Though one could wish that he didn’t feel compelled to ask quite so many questions.
The discovery of a dead body in the woods on Thanksgiving Weekend brings Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his colleagues from the Surete du Quebec to a small village in the Eastern Townships. Gamache cannot understand why anyone would want to deliberately kill well-loved artist Jane Neal, especially any of the residents of Three Pines - a place so free from crime it doesn't even have its own police force.
Reissue of one of the great puzzle mystery classics of England's Golden Age of crime fiction; plot involves a group of upper-crust amateur sleuths who set out to solve a murder that has baffled Scotland Yard; catnip for fans of Agatha Christie and Margery Allingham.
After arriving at his London club at 10:30 am precisely, which he has been doing every morning for many years, Sir Eustace Pennefather, a known womanizer whose divorce from his current wife is pending, receives a complimentary box of chocolates through the post.
Mrs. Pollifax and her beloved husband, Cyrus, are off to the Far East for pleasure. No more life-threatening danger for Emily Pollifax, thank you very much—her mind’s made up. But when, on the very morning she and Cyrus are leaving for Bangkok, the CIA arrives on her doorstep (in the form of the somewhat harried Bishop) with an urgent request for help, Mrs. Pollifax finds that her resolve has dissolved.
After all, it’s a very small job. All she’s got to do is carry a small object to someone named Ruamsak, and get something from him in exchange. Simple enough, and—Bishop assures her—not in the least dangerous.
Victorian enquiry agent Cyrus Barker and his young assistant Thomas Llewelyn, first introduced in Will Thomas's critically acclaimed debut novel Some Danger Involved , are back with a new mission in To Kingdom Come .
When a bomb destroys the Special Irish Branch of Scotland Yard, all fingers point to the increasingly brazen factions of Irish dissidents seeking liberation from English rule. Volunteering their services to the British government, Barker and Llewelyn set out to infiltrate a secret cell of the Irish Republican Brotherhood known as the Invisibles. Posing as a reclusive German bomb maker and his anarchist apprentice, they are recruited for the group's ultimate to bring London to its knees and end the monarchy forever.
From the leading lady's liaison to the harassment of an aging juvenile lead-there's never a dull moment, darling, at the Vulcan Theatre. But vanity and hysterics, suspicion and superstition, brandy and jealousy, are upstaged by a death on opening night. Was it really suicide? Or a macabre encore to a long-ago murder in the same backstage room? Scotland Yard's cast of suspects for the final curtain.
In the absence of adult supervision, Flavia has taken on the mentorship of her “pestilent” younger cousin Undine. Undine too seems fascinated by mayhem. Flavia has nigglings of doubt about her motivations. Has Undine inherited her dead mother’s darkness? Or worse?
Prof. Jim Feldster will do anything for his cows and his students of dairy management. . . and anything to avoid an evening at home with his bossy, house-proud wife, Mirelle. But on his way to a meeting of the Scarlet Runners, he disappears. Where is Professor Feldster? What dark secrets could possibly be lurking behind his life of grain supplements and electric milking machines?
Although real murder is never a laughing matter, Charlotte MacLeod makes the fictional kind more fun than anyone else. Her latest outing with Professor Peter Shandy, New England's famous horticulturist and homegrown hercule Poirot, takes us to the Maine coast, a world of stormy seas and verdant gardens where dark and bright are strangely mixed... and where secrets abound. Peter Shandy has journeyed northward alone to escape his wife Helen's all-female house party and to go in search of some mysterious lupines - glorious great spikes of bloom that are reportedly growing where conditions should make their existence impossible. He takes a room at a quaint old inn in Pickwance, Maine, and is awaiting a serving of Indian pudding in the dining room when the town's most disliked citizen, Jasper Flodge, keels over, face first, into his chicken pot pie. Foul play is soon suspected - especially since everyone in Pickwance feels that while Jasper never finished his main course, he got his just desserts. Shandy, however, is more intrigued by another enigma. He has located the lupines at an ancient farm owned by Frances Hodgson Rondel, a woman of great age and fixed opinions. Her plants are inexplicably lush, her hens are in glowing health, and she herself is as spry as a woman of forty. Could it be something in the soil - or in the bubbling spring that Miss Rondel guards from prying eyes? And whose voice did Shandy hear shouting threats as he came up the nearly impassable drive? Just as an unidentified element is making Miss Rondel's lupines bloom with incredible splendor, an unknown someone is turning love and hate, greed and lies, into fertile ground - for murder.
The placid village of Lymstock seems the perfect place for Jerry Burton to recuperate from his accident under the care of his sister, Joanna. But soon a series of vicious poison-pen letters destroys the village's quiet charm, eventually causing one recipient to commit suicide. The vicar, the doctor, the servants—all are on the verge of accusing one another when help arrives from an unexpected quarter. The vicar's houseguest happens to be none other than Jane Marple.
Amateur sleuths Professor Peter Shandy and his wife Helen of Balaclava Agricultural College are back, faced with a very disagreeable--and very murdered--bird watcher during a traditional owl count.
Red-hot jazz meets cold-blooded murder.
Once again, Mrs. Pollifax, the cheerful little woman with the flyaway white hair and a penchant for old hats is plunged headfirst into another hair-raising CIA mission. Posing as a tourist in China, Emily Pollifax meets the sinister challenges of the Orient to safeguard a treasure for the CIA...and all but loses her life in the bargain.
The weather vanes of the famous craftsman Praxiteles Lumpkin are one of the great cultural treasures of rural Massachusetts. Helen Shandy, librarian at Balaclava Agricultural College, is roaming the countryside, camera in hand, capturing images of these lovely copper sculptures, trying to give them the attention they deserve. But each time she takes a picture, the featured vane vanishes. Could there be a gang of breezy-minded burglars on her tail?
Belgian detective Hercule Poirot is summoned to France after receiving a distressing letter with a urgent cry for help. Upon his arrival in Merlinville-sur-Mer, the investigator finds the man who penned the letter, the South American millionaire Monsieur Renauld, stabbed to death and his body flung into a freshly dug open grave on the golf course adjoining the property. Meanwhile the millionaire's wife is found bound and gagged in her room. Apparently, it seems that Renauld and his wife were victims of a failed break-in, resulting in Renauld's kidnapping and death.There's no lack of his wife, whose dagger served as the weapon; his embittered son, who would have killed for independence; and his mistress, who refused to be ignored - and each felt deserving of the dead man's fortune. The police think they've found the culprit. But Poirot has his doubts. Why is the dead man wearing an overcoat that is too big for him? And who was the impassioned love-letter in the pocket for? Before Poirot can answer these questions, the case is turned upside down by the discovery of a second, identically murdered corpse...
On Groundhog Day, Professor Peter Shandy digs into the past, bizarre circumstances around a century-old corpse. Peter is helped mostly by Ottermole and Cronk, with appearances from Grace and Phil Porble.
The elderly white men of a small, southern community are all being brutally murdered, and an old black grandmother must sort through the tangle of her childhood memories to find the key to unlock the mystery and stop the killer.
