Classic Thrillers

With his longtime girlfriend, Ellie, detective Peter Pascoe is off to Thornton Lacey for an exciting weekend reunion with a few of his college friends. However, upon arrival, he finds no cause for celebration. Instead, there's been a triple homicide, and one of his friends-the chief suspect-is missing.

What made Sherlock Holmes a household name and cultural icon? This very first collection of stories featuring the astute sleuth and his loyal assistant, Dr. Watson. In these twelve ingenious mysteries, Holmes is embroiled in betrayal, abduction, thievery, deception, and murder. Relying on logic, driven by instinct, and employing his uncanny powers of observation, Holmes cracks the cases that elude Scotland Yard. This Baker Street dozen by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is all the evidence listeners will need to understand why Sherlock Holmes is an enduring legend in detective fiction.

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.

Raven is a ruthless assassin, a hired killer, whose cold-blooded murder of the minister for war will have violent repercussions across Europe. As the nation prepares for battle, Raven goes on the run, hunted by the police and in search of the man who paid him in stolen banknotes, eventually unearthing the terrible truth behind his deadly assignment.

They were meant to be safe on Fleet Ward: psychiatric patients monitored, treated, cared for. But now one of their number is found murdered, and the accusations begin to fly. Was it one of his fellow patients? A member of staff? Or did someone come in from the outside? DC Alice Armitage is methodical, tireless, and she's quickly on the trail of the killer. The only problem is, Alice is a patient too.

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.

For The Penguin Book of Murder Mysteries, writer and anthologist Michael Sims did not summon the usual suspects. He sought the unfamiliar, the unjustly forgotten, and little-known gems by writers from outside the genre. This historical tour of one of our most popular literary categories includes stories never before reprinted, features rebellious early “lady detectives," and spotlights former stars of the crime field—Austrian novelist Auguste Groner and prolific American Geraldine Bonner among them.

It has been 10 years since Juliette de Marny's father asked her to swear revenge upon Deroulede for the death of her brother in a duel. At last, she finds herself in Deroulede's house, with an easy opportunity to betray him to the citizens of France for conspiring against the people. But Juliette realizes, too late, that she is in love with Deroulede.

Jack Kerouac tells the story of Jack Duluoz, a French-Canadian boy growing up in Kerouac’s own birthplace, the dingy factory town of Lowell, Massachusetts. There, Doctor Sax, with his flowing cape, slouched hat, and insinuating leer, is chief among the many ghosts and demons that populate Jack’s fantasy world. Deftly mingling memory and dream, Kerouac captures the accents and textures of his boyhood in Lowell in this novel of a cryptic, apocalyptic hipster phantom.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson investigate the legend of a supernatural hound, a beast that may be stalking a young heir on the fog-shrouded moorland that makes up his estate. The best of the Holmes novels!

Sarah Crowe left Atlanta, and the remnants of a tumultuous relationship, to live alone in an old house in rural Rhode Island. Within its walls she discovers an unfinished manuscript written by the house's former tenant - a parapsychologist obsessed with the ancient oak growing on a desolate corner of the property. And as the gnarled tree takes root in her imagination, Sarah risks her health and her sanity to unearth a revelation planted centuries ago.

Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 - 30 years after its original publication - Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder. One of the 20th century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator.

Toren Daniels vanished eight months back, and his wife and kids have moved on - with more than a little relief. Toren was a good man but carried a raging temper that often exploded without warning. So when he shows up on their doorstep out of the blue, they're shocked to see him alive. But more shocked to see he's changed. Radically. His anger is gone. He's oddly patient. Kind. Fun. Toren has no clue where he's been but knows he's been utterly transformed. He focuses on three things: Finding out where he's been. Finding out how it happened. And winning back his family.

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.

Known for his looks and charm, a young man obsessed with wealth and status will stop at nothing to get what he wants. He sets his sights on a beautiful and innocent college student named Dorothy, intent on marrying her for her family’s money. But when Dorothy becomes pregnant, his careful plans start to unravel, and he begins to take cold, calculating, and drastic measures to protect his future.

Miles de Cogan thought that he was set to live out a simple life with a cantankerous old lady for his landlord, but this is all turned on its head with a phone call. Inheriting a prosperous estate called County Wicklow and the title to go along with it, Miles learns of the death of his cousin, a baronet.

Psychologist Loche Newirth becomes hunted when he sees a painting that opens a window onto the afterlife. An ancient order of men seeking to control the art pursue him across the world, through centuries, into madness, and beyond. The first part of Michael B. Koep's the Newirth Mythology The Invasion of Heaven is mystery, adventure, myth, betrayal, murder, and madness. Loche Newirth wonders if it was his fall: The 50-foot drop from the rocky cliff to the icy water below. Is this why he has been hallucinating?

On the midnight shift at a hospital in rural Maine, Dr. Luke Findley is expecting another quiet evening of frostbite and the occasional domestic dispute. But the minute Lanore McIlvrae—Lanny—walks into his ER, she changes his life forever. A mysterious woman with a past and plenty of dark secrets, Lanny is unlike anyone Luke has ever met. He is inexplicably drawn to her...despite the fact that she is a murder suspect with a police escort.

In 1985, Kat McCann was six years old when renowned Austrian detective Alik Lisser solved her mother’s murder. And unfortunately proved Kat’s father as the culprit. Ten years later Kat is still obsessed with the heroic criminologist. She’s also addicted to the bestselling novels inspired by Alik’s ingenious deductions—penned by the grande dame of whodunits, who’s a bit of a mystery herself. Kat has devoured them all. Even the one based on her father’s crime.

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.