Classic Thrillers

M.R. James (1862-1936) was provost of King's College, Cambridge, and Eton College. He was a highly regarded scholar and academic in his time but today is remembered for his ghost stories, which are considered among the finest in the genre. The seven stories in this Volume One are: "A School Story", "Rats", "A Warning to the Curious", "Two Doctors", "The Haunted Doll's House", "Casting the Runes", "There Was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard".

These are 20 new crime mysteries together in one large collection, taken from a string of short stories set in the late 19th century. No fictional characters are more renowned for their powers of thought and observation than Sherlock Holmes and his faithful companion, Dr. John Watson.

Chief Inspector Macdonald has been invited to a treasure hunt party at the house of the Graham Coombe, the celebrated publisher of Murder by Mesmerism. The clues of the hunt have been devised by Coombe's thriller-writer friends, disguised on the night under literary pseudonyms. The fun comes to an abrupt end, however, when 'Samuel Pepys' is found murdered in the telephone room in bizarre circumstances.

Our story begins in 1785 when a young seafarer, Captain Thornhill, disappears while visiting the shop of a barber in London, a certain Sweeney Todd whose shop in Fleet Street is situated by St. Dunstan's church, just round the corner from the famous and popular meat pie shop run by Mrs. Lovett. Thornhill was carrying a string of pearls as a gift for Johanna Oakley, the sweetheart of his friend Mark Ingestrie who is missing, presumed lost at sea.

The fantastic Londonbased "consulting detective", famous for his astute logical reasoning, his ability to take almost any disguise, and his use of forensic science skills to solve difficult cases. This nine hour audiobook contains twelve of his most exciting adventures!

With the sole idea that, through a pleasant, or at least fascinatingly strange story, some will be brought to the threshold of realization wherein the partially explored activities and functions of the mind contain many profound mysteries and principles of considerable import, and that those so illumined may be tempted to seek for more light in the chamber of the unknown, this book is offered to those constantly asking for the unusual in fiction and the mystical in romance.

That shoeless foot looked incongruous lying on the pavement next to another foot encased in a shoe made of black kid leather. It was naked, private.... It was Maigret who retrieved the other shoe, which lay by the kerb six or seven metres away. A series of strange phone calls leads Inspector Maigret through the Paris streets towards a man out of his depth amid a network of merciless criminals.

As a dense yellow fog swirls through the streets of London, a deep melancholy has descended on Sherlock Holmes, who sits in a cocaine-induced haze at 221B Baker Street. His mood is only lifted by a visit from a beautiful but distressed young woman---Mary Morstan, whose father vanished ten years before. Four years later she began to receive an exquisite gift every year: a large, lustrous pearl.

Exiled from Paris, Maigret discovers some disturbing secrets in a sleepy coastal town in this new translation. A short, sprightly man appeared in the doorway, looked left and right, and went back into the passage. A moment later, the improbable happened. The little man reappeared, bent over, clinging to a long mass that he now started dragging through the mud. It must have been heavy. After four metres, he stopped to catch his breath. The front door of the house had been left open.

Fred Underhill is a young cop on the rise in Los Angeles in the early 1950s - a town blinded to its own grime by Hollywood glitter; a society nourished by newspaper lies that wants its heroes all-American and squeaky clean. A chance to lead on a possible serial killing is all it takes to fuel Underhill's reckless ambition - and it propels him into a dangerous alliance with certain mad and unstable elements of the law enforcement hierarchy. When the case implodes with disastrous consequences, it is Fred Underhill who takes the fall. His life is in ruins, his promising future suddenly a dream of the past.

Each of Sean's wives takes a moment to share a tale of their past while sitting around having a drink. Contains the Valens Legacy novellas Peg and Cali and Estrella and Other Stories.

Where to turn when all roads lead to ruin? Last night I barely escaped 1776 New York City - now I have to go back. My teammates are trapped in a time catch. Worse, the demon master Malphas is building a gateway there, one that could trigger a full-blown apocalypse. But returning will require new allies: A crabby goblin, a fae princess and former lover, and the demon-vampire Arnaud. Yeah, that guy. And we’re no longer facing one time catch, but several. But as hellfire lashes up and day dims to eternal night, I’m facing an even greater test...

Only I have no idea who Sefu is, much less how to find him or her. And my magic’s not talking. But with demons on the hunt, and fiendish whispers of Sefu being some sort of ultimate weapon, failure could spell apocalypse. One of those demons happens to be an enemy I cast into the Pits, a former vampire lord whose twisted mind drips vengeance. Worse, he knows about my relationship with Detective Vega and her son. Meaning I have much more than Sefu to protect.

In the year since the Whisperer’s attack, I’ve been busting my hump to become my best wizard, like my father. Now I’m ready for a test. When a dark mage starts planting infernal bags around New York City, I get my wish. Like time bombs, the bags detonate without warning, spawning demonic beings that rip the souls of innocents from their bodies. And the attacks are accelerating.

Tippy the triceratops was once a little girl's imaginary friend, a dinosaur detective who could help her make sense of the world. But when her father died, Tippy fell into the Stillreal, the underbelly of the Imagination, where discarded ideas go when they're too real to disappear. Now, he passes time doing detective work for other unwanted ideas - until Tippy runs into The Man in the Coat, a nightmare monster who can do the impossible: kill an idea permanently. Now Tippy must overcome his own trauma and solve the case, before there's nothing left but imaginary corpses.

Le professeur Challenger, zoologiste célèbre et colérique, est revenu d'une expédition en Amérique du Sud avec une étrange histoire...

Originally published in 1922 and translated by Takashi Kojima, this classic short story was the inspiration for Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon, about the murder of a samurai. Told from the perspective of multiple witnesses.

One winter night, seven men and a woman are parachuted onto a mountainside in wartime Germany. Their objective: an apparently inaccessible castle, headquarters of the Gestapo. Their mission: to rescue a crashed American general before the Nazi interrogators can force him to reveal secret D-Day plans.

Perhaps more than any other book The Thirty-Nine Steps has set the pattern for the story of the chase for a wanted man. And, of the many writers who have attempted this kind of thing since Buchan, only a very few, like Graham Greene, have managed to sustain the tension in the same way. The story's extended chase scene inspired Alfred Hitchcock's movie of the same name.

Homicide detective Kara Gillian has a special talent: she can sense the "arcane" in our world, and there's quite a bit of it, even in Beaulac, Louisiana. She's also a summoner of demons, and works on a task force that deals with supernatural crimes. Her partners are attractive and smart FBI agents, but they're not summoners, and they're not telling Kara why they are on this special force with her.