Classic Detective

A return trip down the Mississippi River to Uncle Silas's farm is just the beginning of a yarn that includes twins, a diamond heist, a confidence man, a murder, and enough twists and turns to satisfy an avid mystery fan.

All is not well on the film set of director Bill Wade’s new blockbuster, Dark Harvest, currently being shot in Kent. At first Jack Colby, car detective, can’t believe his luck when he is called in to investigate the disappearance of Bill Wade’s rare 1935 Auburn speedster, but he soon realises that this is no straightforward theft - there is much more at stake.… Despite his instant attraction to the charismatic lead of Dark Harvest, Louise Shaw, Jack senses that cast and crew are at odds with each other - and especially with the director’s wife, Angie. Jack’s warning light begins to flash about his assignment - and rightly so.

A treasure chest of the most popular classic crime stories from the 19th century. •The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allan Poe •A Terribly Strange Bed by Wilkie Collins •Murder under the Microscope by William Russell •The Three Strangers by Thomas Hardy •The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe •The Mystery of Marie Roget by Edgar Allan Poe •Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe by Nathaniel Hawthorne

During the last part of the nineteenth century, the detective story took off as a popular genre as literary magazines vied with each other to draw in readers with gripping page-turners by the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, Guy Boothby and Wilkie Collins. This collection brings together some of the great detectives of the Victorian era, from the master sleuth himself, Sherlock Holmes, to the mild mannered Father Brown, to the feisty J. G. Reeder.

A fabulous yellow diamond becomes the dangerous inheritance of Rachel Verinder. Outside her Yorkshire country house watch the Hindu priests who have waited for many years to reclaim their ancient talisman, looted from the holy city of Somnauth. When the Moonstone disappears, the case looks simple, but in mid-Victorian England no one is what they seem, and nothing can be taken for granted.

"The Moonstone" by Wilkie Collins is one of the forefathers of detective fiction, cementing the foundations of the genre. At the centre of it lays the theft of a diamond, dating in origin from a religious Indian shrine, which prompts detective Sergeant Cuff to take up the case. It is an absolute page-turner of a story and goes through the accounts of the different characters, winding and meandering from fact to fiction and vice versa.

Pip is a poor orphaned boy who lives together with his sister and her husband. Pip is not educated but has great dreams of the future. He is determined to get out of the low class and seek progress in the higher class. One day a lawyer appears. Pip has suddenly received a large fortune from a secret benefactor and he has to get to London to start his education. Pip’s life changes in a second. But he is ready to embark on his next journey.

Hungary during the Ottoman wars: Turks attack Buda and set up a siege of Eger. Gergely Bornemissza is a poor half-orphan who is about to become a national hero. "Eclipse of the Crescent Moon" follows Gergelys life from the age of eight until his early thirties. His life is a vivid combination of poverty, love, battles and dangers. He is on the front line when the Turks capture Buda and later when they approach Eger. His country is in danger and so is his family. The battle is one of life or death.

Fourteen mysteries to test your inner sleuth! This collection includes "The Stolen White Elephant" by Mark Twain, narrated by Mauro Hantman; "The Fenchurch Street Mystery" by Baroness Orczy, narrated by Davina Porter; "Problem of the Superfluous Finger" by Jacques Futrelle, narrated by Stephen R. Thorne; "The Blue Sequin" by R. Austin Freeman, narrated by Simon Vance; "An Intangible Clue" by Anna Katharine Green, narrated by Angela Brazil; and "The Oblong Box" by Edgar Allan Poe, narrated by Mauro Hantman, among others.

David Copperfield was a little boy who grew up in an unfortunate family. His father died six months before David’s birth. Later his mother remarried to a cruel man who beat him up. David however fought back and bit him. This resulted in David getting sent to a boarding school which he did not finish because of his mother’s death. All in all, David’s life has been a string of misfortunes. His development from infancy to maturity happened unnecessarily fast.

Edgar Allan Poe is the undisputed "Father" of the Detective story and his Detective C. Auguste Dupin set the stage for eccentric, logic-wielding sleuths like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. This is the first audio collection of Poe's detective stories, plus one non-Dupin detective tale, "Thou Art the Man". Celebrity narrator Bronson Pinchot delivers amazing performances of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt", "The Purloined Letter", and "Thou Art the Man".

Sarah has been receiving threatening anonymous letters seemingly from a former lover. Just one day after revealing this information to her co-worker Nancy, Sarah is shot and found in her bedroom by one of her past flames, Donald. Desperate to clear any evidence of Donald's presence at the scene for her own infatuations, Nancy finds herself as the key suspect when she is discovered in the apartment. As the real killer uses the situation to their advantage, Bennett crafts a tense and nuanced story through flashbacks to Sarah's life and loves.

The discovery of Sir Robert Boniface's body on the floor of his limousine was made quite accidentally on a sultry Friday evening towards the end of June. The industrial and financial tycoon, and former stalwart of the British Cabinet, was shot in the head and left in the quiet Vale of Health. Nearby, a rejected portrait of Sir Robert is found riddled with bullets in the studio of the now missing artist Matt Caldwell.

It was a lonely English courtyard where attorneys received traditional apprenticeship … one of the ancient Inns of Court. The bludgeoned body of a well-dressed elderly man was found there at midnight, an apparent murder victim. Investigative newspaper reporter Frank Spargo was one of the first to arrive at the crime scene and he was puzzled about why such a prosperous looking man had been wandering there at that time of night. The only item found on the body was a small paper with a young barrister’s address.

Alvin Benson is found slumped over an easy chair in a room locked from the inside with a bullet in his head, and Wall Street and the high society of Manhattan are set ablaze with the news of the playboy stockbroker’s death. But when NYPD’s top detectives and ballistics experts can’t solve the mystery, it falls to Philo Vance, an art connoisseur and amateur sleuth, to find the killer. Vance’s intellectual and artistic background helps him uncover a series of odd clues, starting with a missing toupee and false teeth, and soon he is delving deep into the case.

Most of them were rich, most of them were beautiful, and now one of them was dead in an unexpected and particularly nasty way. Oh, and a perfectly maintained, priceless 1928 Duesenberg Phaeton, the royalty of collectible, classic automobiles, had disappeared. Where do you hide a totally recognizable Dusie? Insurance man Hobart Lindsey is back on the case...along with his sometime sparring partner and lover, homicide investigator Marvia Plum, Lindsey's troubled mother, and a cast of unforgettable characters.

Jazz Ramsey is just getting used to the idea that her on-again-off-again beau, Nick, might actually be a permanent fixture, when she gets an alarming call in the middle of the night from his mother, Kim: There's a dead man in her backyard. Kim has a long history of drinking and a vivid imagination, so when Jazz's human remains detection dog, Wally, finds no evidence of a body, Jazz thinks she can breathe easy. But when the body of a middle-aged man is discovered in a nearby park, and a photo of Nick and his mom is found in his pocket, Jazz has to admit that something isn't adding up.

Crescent Place was once a peaceful country green surrounded by five tasteful suburban houses and populated by polite, responsible citizens. But as the city enveloped it, the residents built a gate to keep the world out. With each passing year, the subdivision grew stranger and stranger - until it began to look like a time capsule of the 1890s.

In an elaborate house known as the Cloisters, Maud Wainwright rules supreme. The queen of society in the small town of Beverly, she has a table long enough to seat 100, and she keeps an iron grip on the guest list. Her right-hand woman is Pat Abbott, a local girl who is beautiful, innocent, and kind. Pat has no idea how cutthroat high society can be, but she's about to get a deadly first lesson.

Elizabeth Bell runs a quiet household, with no family and no more than the usual number of servants. She passes her time thinking about crime and working on her biography of a relative. When a young cousin comes to stay, life in the house becomes uncharacteristically lively. First, cousin Judy burns a hole in Miss Bell's desk. Next, they spy a burglar on the staircase - a shadowy figure who vanishes without a trace. And finally, Sarah, the nurse, takes the dogs for a walk and never returns.