Amateur Detectives Mystery

Anna Marie St. Clair was a normal Wisconsin-farm-girl-turned-mistress when she was framed for the murder of her racketeer boyfriend, one of Chicago’s sleaziest politicians. Sentenced to death, and only hours from getting fried, a lucky hitch sets Anna Marie free, but she blackmails the corrupt warden into informing the tabloids that she took her volts like a real trouper. What better payback than to haunt the lives of those who tried to steal hers? As the shapeliest ghost in the Windy City, she’s going to prove that dying well is the best revenge.

On a break from the Windy City, aspiring crime novelist Jake Justus and his wife, Helene, are acquainting themselves with Manhattan’s finest cocktail lounges when they befriend Dennis Morrison, a blind-drunk groom. The handsome former male escort thought he’d found his bounty in homely heiress Bertha Lutts, but while their wedding night may have been a bust, the morning after turned out to be the real horror. It seems Bertha has vanished from their bridal suite and in her place is an unidentified beheaded woman.

Radio star Nelle Brown is known coast-to-coast for her sweet and sultry voice. But her press agent and manager, Jake Justus, is familiar with another side of the darling of the airwaves: her crackpot marriage to a penniless tycoon, disastrous string of lovers, and propensity for flying into spectacular fits of rage. Now, it appears she’s being burned by an ex-flame who’s holding her scandalous love letters for ransom. The missives could ruin Nelle’s career, but so could the scoundrel’s murder.

Plus rien ne va chez les Burden : le meilleur ami de Cameron est mort, Sam Lee Ming ne donne plus signe de vie et les affaires de Jeb battent de l'aile. Courtney elle-même ne trouve plus de réconfort à glaner des meubles dans les rues. Entre la drogue, les difficultés financières de son mari et les affres du désir sexuel de son fils ainé, Courtney voit son petit confort bourgeois péricliter et les bases de sa vie de famille sapées les unes après les autres.

Courtney Burden, bourgeoise moderne de Brooklyn, a une vie bien rangée : un mari consultant dans les hedge funds, 2 garçons et un chat. Mais elle a aussi chez elle un canapé rempli de cocaïne. Et elle ne le sait pas. Pendant que son fils ainé se transforme en trafiquant de drogue et négocie avec les mafieux du coin la restitution de la coke, elle continue à gérer sa petite vie confortable, fait de l'aménagement d'extérieurs, continue à glaner des meubles abandonnés et organise des barbecues.

Courtney Burden a tout : un riche et beau mari, Jeb ; deux magnifiques enfants, Cameron et Sawyer ; un métier créatif et une brownstone de trois étages à Brooklyn, New York, là où tout le monde veut vivre. Mais elle a aussi un défaut : elle glane tous les meubles que les gens laissent sur les trottoirs de la ville. C'est compulsif. Et ce canapé, elle n'aurait pas dû le prendre, car depuis des trafiquants de drogue sont à sa recherche, pour retrouver la coke cachée à l'intérieur.

The first story featuring Ben, the lovable, humorous ex-sailor and down-at-heels rascal who can't help running into trouble. Ben is back home from the Merchant Navy, penniless as usual and looking for digs in fog-bound London. Taking shelter in an abandoned old house, he stumbles across a dead body - and scarpers. Running into a detective, Gilbert Fordyce, the reluctant Ben is persuaded to return to the house and investigate the mystery of the corpse - which promptly disappears!

Ben, wandering hungry through the foggy back alleys of Limehouse, is spooked by news of an old man murdered in Hammersmith - and runs! He crosses a plank, slips through an iron door, and goes to sea with the coal. But so does the man who did the murder...and a very pretty lady who did not. On the way the Atlanta loses a stowaway, a pickpocket, a murderer, a supercrook, a wealthy passenger, the third officer and a lifeboat. And that is how Ben gets to Spain....

Ben knows that whenever his thumbs are itching, something 'orrible is about to happen. Sure enough, on one foggy afternoon of itchy thumbs, the hapless Ben is implicated in criminal activity by the police - the kind of mistake it isn't easy to explain. Doing a runner, Ben hides in the basement of a deserted house, where he discovers the body of a well-dressed man, shot through the head...and much more trouble than he bargained for.

Ben the tramp's uncanny knack of running into trouble is unsurpassed in the final crime thriller written for him by J. Jefferson Farjeon. On a grey afternoon he was destined never to forget, Ben sat down on a park seat and proceeded to think, not of cabbages and kings but of numbers, lucky and unlucky. But it wasn't Ben's lucky day, or that of the nondescript-looking stranger sitting at the other end of the bench - murdered before his very eyes!

Amateur sleuth Mordecai Tremaine is back in another classic mystery from the author of Murder for Christmas. When Mordecai Tremaine emerges from the train station, murder is the last thing on his mind. But then again, he has never been able to resist anything in the nature of a mystery - and a mystery is precisely what awaits him in the village of Dalmering.

With his usual knack of getting into trouble, Ben the tramp finds himself hunted by the law and the lawless in this breathless adventure. Returning home to his Cockney roots after a trip to Spain, Ben meets a mysterious stranger on a cross-Channel steamer and is promised a job. On arrival at Southampton, they take a taxi. Ben gets out to post a letter but on returning to the cab finds the stranger has been murdered!

Amateur sleuth Mordecai Tremaine is back in another classic mystery from the author of Murder for Christmas. Adrian Carthallow, enfant terrible of the art world, is no stranger to controversy. But this time it's not his paintings that have provoked a blaze of publicity - it's the fact that his career has been suddenly terminated by a bullet to the head. Not only that, but his wife has confessed to firing the fatal shot.

From the Collins Crime Club archive, the first original novel to feature Ben the Cockney tramp, the unorthodox detective character created by J. Jefferson Farjeon, author of Mystery in White. Strange things are happening in the untenanted houses of Jowle Street. There are unaccountable creakings and weird knockings on the door of no.29, where a homeless ex-sailor has taken up residence.

As DI Dominic Bell and his team investigate the series of murders in hidden locations across London, they fail to find the connection between the victims. The only person who can help is Clementine Starke, an academic researching adult thrill seekers. However, Clementine is haunted by dark and violent obsessions, including her former relationship with DI Dominic Bell. As the body count rises, Clementine Starke and DI Dominic Bell form an uneasy alliance to hunt the killer.

It is possibly the most repugnant piece of fiction in all of England. So why is Plumtree Press, one of the country's most respectable publishing houses, about to add the hotly controversial new novel to its list? Publisher Alex Plumtree isn't talking. Hardly anyone knows he has taken on the project as a favor to the Prime Minister. Forget the bad press and hateful reviews. Alex swiftly finds himself on the wrong side of a lawsuit, bugged, betrayed, roughed up, and implicated in murder. Suddenly Alex doesn't know who to trust.

New York, January 1896: Arthur Conan Doyle, the renowned creator of Sherlock Holmes, arrives at the Britannic Hotel with his wife, Louisa, ready to begin his first American tour. While he prepares his lectures, Louisa becomes mesmerised by this brash, vibrant, dangerous city, especially when a woman's brutally butchered corpse is found in a Bowery alley and Louisa is convinced from the artist's sketch in the paper that she'd seen the victim at the hotel.

Kizzy Cutler finds it so delicious to be back in her hometown of Shadow Bend, Missouri, that she seems to have forgotten why she fled 20 years ago. For now, she's excited to kick off her new line of cupcakes with a competition, which Dev has agreed to host in her shop. But before the first yummy cupcake is even baked, Kizzy's assistant, Fallon, dies from a mysterious ailment.

Professor Emily Cavanaugh has left Windy Corner behind and is back at Bede College on her sabbatical, determined to finish writing her book on Dostoevsky. She is soon reunited with one of her promising students, Daniel Razumov, as well as familiar faces on the teaching staff - her friend, Marguerite Grenier; her half-brother, Oscar Lansing; the abrasive division chair, Richard McClintock; and the predatory Taylor Curzon, known for her relentless pursuit of young male students - and Taylor now has Daniel firmly in her sights.

Tired of being homeless and down on his luck, the incorrigible Ben has taken a job as a stoker on a cruise ship. But his luck doesn't last long when they are all shipwrecked in the Pacific. Seen through Ben's eyes, the uncharted island is a hive of cannibals, mumbo jumbo, and gals who are more nearly naked than any he has ever seen. And every time he tries to bluff his way out of a situation, he just bluffs himself further in, somehow convincing the natives that he has godlike powers....