Classic Thrillers Mystery

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.

A new translation of Georges Simenon's gripping tale of lost identity. A man picked up for wandering in obvious distress among the cars and buses on the Grands Boulevards. Questioned in French, he remains mute... A madman? In Maigret's office, he is searched. His suit is new, his underwear is new, his shoes are new. All identifying labels have been removed. No identification papers. No wallet. Five crisp thousand-franc bills have been slipped into one of his pockets.

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.

This collection offers three novels of adventure and suspense from Patricia Wentworth, each with its own plucky and independent young heroine. First, Jane Smith is incognito at stately Luttrell Marches, in the middle of a mystery of secret formulae, political plots, and secret passages. Then, Sally Meredith is entrusted with the red lacquer case containing the formula for her uncle’s new and deadly gas, and is soon in the clutches of sinister foreign agents.

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.

Every year for two decades, David Payne invites his five closest college friends to travel with him on a weeklong humanitarian mission. And each year, they are too busy. This year, however, when David's funeral reunites them, they decide to fulfill his mission to a far-flung Pacific island. But something unplanned and mind-boggling occurs.

Sir Charles Baskerville is dead. His body was discovered on the grounds of his Devonshire estate, face frozen in fright, not far from the footprints of a large beast. The cause of death has been determined to be a heart attack, but family legend tells another tale, and Detective Sherlock Holmes is determined to uncover the truth.

Edgar Allan Poe was a writer, poet, editor and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre, and is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and of American literature. Poe was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story and considered to be the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction.

Bruno Bicek, "Lefty," is a prizefighter and small-time hood in Chicago. Boxing is his ticket to escape hard times and gang life, but when Bruno doesn't prevent the brutal gang rape of his girlfriend, Steffi, it tears them apart, their worlds changed forever.

In this new translation of Simenon's twisted tale, a forgotten crime comes to light in the Parisian summer. The sunshine almost as thick as syrup in the quiet streets of the Left Bank...there are days like this, when ordinary life seems heightened, when the people walking down the street, the trams and cars all seem to exist in a fairy tale. A story told by a condemned man leads Maigret to a bar by the Seine.

Maigret is called to the home of professional gambler Felix Nahour, who has been found shot dead by his chambermaid. Maigret is shocked to recognise a photo of the man's wife, who becomes the main suspect. All signs point to her guilt, but Maigret suspects there might be more to this complicated affair.

This novel has been published in a previous translation as Maigret on the Defensive.

In 1962 and 1963, Thornton Wilder spent 20 months in hibernation, away from family and friends, in the town of Douglas, Arizona. While there, he launched The Eighth Day, a tale set in a mining town in Southern Illinois about two families blasted apart by the apparent murder of one father by the other. The miraculous escape of the accused killer, John Ashley, on the eve of his execution and his flight to freedom triggers a powerful story tracing the fate of his and the victim’s wife and children.

Inspector Maigret must untangle the web of lies left behind by a murdered man whose family didn't know him as well as they thought. When a man is found stabbed to death in an alley off Boulevard Saint-Martin, his identity card shows a workplace that had gone out of business three years earlier. As far as his wife knew, he still worked there, and she insists that the shoes and a tie he was wearing when he was killed 'couldn't be his'.

Apart from the ubiquitous presence of the authors who work in the short story tradition, the Second Season introduces poems and novellas. The romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge is here with his haunting and supernatural sea adventure "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", while Rudyard Kipling tests the human condition with his famous poem "If". Perhaps the most potent addition in this second part is Joseph Conrad’s timeless novella "The Heart of Darkness", exploring the darkest recesses of the human soul. B. J.

A Girl of the Limberlost, a novel by the writer and naturalist Gene Stratton-Porter, was published in 1909 as the sequel to her earlier novel Freckles. The tale unfolds in and around the Limberlost Swamp of north-eastern Indiana and in the nearby town of Onabasha. The main character, Elnora Comstock, lives with her widowed mother, Katharine Comstock, on the edge of the wetlands. The embittered Katharine blames her daughter for the death of her husband, who was swallowed by quicksand.

"With the roar of thunder and the speed of a galloping horse comes the tide to Mont St. Michel", goes the old nursery song. So when the aged patriarch of the du Rocher family falls victim to the perilous tide, even the old man's family accepts the verdict of accidental drowning. But too quickly, this "accident" is followed by a bizarre discovery in the ancient du Rocher chateau: a human skeleton, wrapped in butcher paper, beneath the old stone flooring. Professor Gideon Oliver, lecturing on forensic anthropology at nearby St. Malo, is asked to examine the bones.

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.

A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov was published in 1840. Set in the Russian Caucasus in the 1830s, the novel relates a series of adventures by the military officer Pechorin during his travels in the Caucasus. He kidnaps the daughter of a Circassian tribesman, becomes entangled with a group of smugglers, and tries to win the affection of a Muscovite princess while having on an affair with his former lover Vera.

The terrible spectacle of the beast, the fog of the moor, the discovery of a body: this classic horror story pits detective against dog. When Sir Charles Baskerville is found dead on the wild Devon moorland with the footprints of a giant hound nearby, the blame is placed on a family curse. It is left to Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson to solve the mystery of the legend of the phantom hound before Sir Charles' heir comes to an equally gruesome end.

Bruce Attleton dazzled London’s literary scene with his first two novels, but his early promise did not bear fruit. His wife, Sybilla, is a glittering actress, unforgiving of Bruce’s failure, and the couple lead separate lives in their house at Regent’s Park. When Bruce is called away on a sudden trip to Paris, he vanishes completely until his suitcase and passport are found in a sinister artist’s studio, the Belfry, in a crumbling house in Notting Hill, and Inspector Macdonald must uncover Bruce’s secrets. This intricate mystery from a classic writer is set in a superbly evoked London of the 1930s.