Classic Thrillers Mystery

London, June 1965. Karl Braun arrives as a lodger in Pimlico: hatless, with a bow-tie, greying hair, slight in build. His new neighbours are intrigued by this cultured German gentleman who works as a piano tuner; many are fellow émigrés, who assume that he, like them, came to England to flee Hitler. That summer, Braun courts a woman, attends classical concerts, dances the twist. But as the newspapers fill with reports of the hunt for Nazi war criminals, his nightmares become increasingly worse.

The rebellious son of a long line of pureblood cartographers and diviners, Valen has spent most of his life trying to escape what society - and his family - have ordained for him. His own mother has predicted that he will meet his doom in water, blood, and ice. Her divination seems fulfilled when a comrade abandons Valen in a rainy wilderness half-dead, addicted to an enchantment that converts pain to pleasure, and possessing only a stolen book of maps.

The Trial by Franz Kafka, narrated by award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti, begins like a nightmare - only K is awake, and he is being arrested and indicted on charges he never learns. He is caught up in a legal system that will destroy his life. This is a text that often is used in English classes because it is so deep. Kafka attacks the norms of society, religion, and the legal system.

La porte de la chambre fermée à clef " de l'intérieur ", les volets de l'unique fenêtre fermés, eux aussi, " de l'intérieur ", pas de cheminée... Qui a tenté de tuer Mlle Stangerson et, surtout, par où l'assassin a-t-il pu quitter la chambre jaune ? C'est le jeune reporter Rouletabille, limier surdoué et raisonnant par " le bon bout de la raison, ce bon bout que l'on reconnait à ce que rien ne peut le faire craquer ", qui va trouver la solution de cet affolant problème, au terme d'une enquête fertile en aventures et en rebondissements.

PerfectQuestion is back! He's running and gunning his way across an incredible civilization-building game set on Mars. But this time he's employed as an online ringer for a corrupt dictatorship and trying to avoid getting "disappeared" in a reckless world of intrigue, epic parties, sports cars, and women who are as dangerous as they are beautiful. Five million in gold says he can do it and put the next Sultan on the throne by leading a rag-tag clan of gaming jihadis to victory, but revolution and revolt are afoot.

Best-selling novelist Agatha Christie will take you on a gripping mystery story set after the Great War where you’ll learn from the struggles of Tommy Beresford and Prudence "Tuppence" Cowley, two childhood friends who, desperate and out of work, decided to open their own business. They started with an ad that read: "Two young adventurers for hire. Willing to do anything, go anywhere. Pay must be good. No unreasonable offer refused."

Beneath the sea cliffs of the south coast, suicides are a sad but common fact. Yet even the hardened coastguard knows something is wrong when a beautiful young film actress is found lying dead on the beach one morning. However, it soon becomes clear that darker motives were afoot, and potential suspects in the death of Christine Clay stack up at a rapid pace. As the case grows murkier, the man who spent the last week of Clay’s life living with her in a remote cottage goes on the run, and Inspector Alan Grant must race to uncover the truth.

A new translation, by David Bellos, of this chilling novel, set on the Belgian border. "She wasn't an ordinary supplicant. She didn't lower her eyes. There was nothing humble about her bearing. She spoke frankly, looking straight ahead, as if to claim what was rightfully hers. 'If you don't agree to look at our case, my parents and I will be lost, and it will be the most hateful legal error..." Maigret is asked to the windswept, rainy border town of Givet by a young woman desperate to clear her family of murder.

The streets of Bay City, California, in the early 1950s are as mean as they get. Marlowe is as restless and lonely as ever, and the private eye business is a little slow. Then a new client is shown in: blond, beautiful, and expensively dressed, she wants Marlowe to find her former lover. Almost immediately, Marlowe discovers that the man's disappearance is merely the first in a series of bewildering events. Soon he is tangling with one of Bay City's richest and most ruthless families—and developing a singular appreciation for how far they will go to protect their fortune.

These six cases are among the last undertaken by Sherlock Holmes before he retired to the Sussex downs. However, the problems facing the sleuth are as diverse and challenging as ever. What with seeking the whereabouts of the stolen Mazarin Diamond, discovering the importance of being called Garrideb, encountering a mysterious murder on Thor Bridge, searching for eternal youth and the threat of a vampire in Sussex, there is no sign of Holmes' deductive powers slowing down.

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe published in Graham's Magazine in 1841. It has been claimed as the first detective story; Poe referred to it as one of his "tales of ratiocination".

Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island is an epic adventure story that takes place during the American Civil War era. As a sequel to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the novel beings with a group of characters who must band together to survive after they escape imprisonment during the war by stealing a giant air balloon. As fate would have it, they get lost in a storm and crash land on an unknown island somewhere around New Zealand.

It should have been a case like any other: a missing princess, a king willing to pay in gold for her return. But before he realizes it, private investigator Eddie LaCrosse, a slightly shopworn sword jockey with a talent for discretion and detection, is swept up in a web of mystery and deceit involving a brutally murdered royal heir, a queen accused of an unspeakable crime, and the tragic past he thought he'd left behind.

In “Two Hundred Thousand Francs Reward!”, it has been a fortnight since the baroness Repstein disappeared from Paris, taking with her a fortune in jewels stolen from her husband. French detectives have chased her all over Europe, following the trail of gemstones like so many precious breadcrumbs, but she has eluded their efforts. When Arsène Lupin finds her, she will not escape so easily. Also featuring “The Wedding-Ring”, “The Sign of the Shadow”, “The Infernal Trap”, “The Red Silk Scarf”, “Shadowed by Death”, “Lupin’s Marriage”, and more.

With his partner away on a honeymoon, Yorkshire detective Andrew Dalziel tries to beat the blues by taking a vacation of his own. But after getting caught in a torrential rain and running into a funeral procession, he winds up accompanying a crowd of upper-class mourners to a crumbling country house. Dalziel isn't known for his elegant manners, but he has bigger problems than not fitting in: The owner of the home has died under unusual circumstances, and soon more bodies are turning up.

In these eight intriguing tales, Holmes and Watson solve cases that range from the suspicious to the downright strange. They encounter mysteries as diverse as vanishing staff, secret plans and eccentric lodgers as Holmes is struck down by a rare tropical disease and, later, lured away from retirement to help his country on the eve of war.

Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, Sir Edward Leithen is told that he has but one year left to live. He relinquishes his law practice and resigns from public office in order to make peace with himself and to reconcile himself with his maker. However, he also wants to die standing, not to creep into the 'bleak bag's end of life'. This will involve one last physical challenge.

Milos Vesely, aka Cowboy, kills Nazis. After the events of SecondWorld, a failed attempt by modern Nazi forces to carry out a worldwide genocide and claim the planet for the Aryan nation, he now hunts down the enemy. Most of them are running for cover. But others, as Cowboy discovers beneath the sands of Tanis, Egypt, are searching for a way to strike again.

Martha Macnamara knows that her daughter, Elizabeth, is in trouble; she just doesn't know what kind. Mysterious phone calls from San Francisco at odd hours of the night are the only contact she has had with Elizabeth for years. Now, Elizabeth has sent her a plane ticket and reserved a room for her at San Francisco's most luxurious hotel. Yet she has not tried to contact Martha since she arrived, leaving her lonely, confused, and a little bit worried. Into the story steps Mayland Long, a distinguished-looking and wealthy Chinese man who lives at the hotel and is drawn to Martha's good nature and ability to pinpoint the truth of a matter.

It starts in a laboratory. A man-made strain of flesh-eating virus. Created by a power-hungry cartel. Capable of turning victims into brain-dead carnivores. Smuggled aboard a cruise ship that's about to set sail . . .One by one, the passengers are exposed. A U.S. senator. A young couple. An undercover agent. A beautiful assassin. Some will be infected. Others will survive. But no one will be spared if the outbreak isn't contained and the dead outnumber the living.