Crime Detective

Three perplexing puzzles - and three inimitable Wimsey solutions - told with wit, humor, and suspense. Narrator Ian Carmichael, the quintessential Lord Peter, provides great entertainment with his talented performance of these three stories. In "Striding Folly", a frightening dream provides a haunting premonition. A house numbered 13 is in a street of even numbers, and a dead man was never alive in "The Haunted Policeman." And "Talboys" sees Lord Peter's own children accused of theft.

A classic from the queen of mystery: Agatha Christie.

When Hercule Poirot, a well-known inspector and an eccentric, but very likable, Belgian refugee from the Great War, discovers that Emily Inglethorp, his wealthy benefactress who helped him through his new life, has been found dead, poisoned with strychnine, he sets out to solve the crime. But there is a problem. The main suspects are close relatives who can't or don't want to cooperate.

Just after midnight, the famous Orient Express is stopped in its tracks by a snowdrift. By morning, the millionaire Samuel Edward Ratchett lies dead in his compartment, stabbed a dozen times, his door locked from the inside. One of his fellow passengers must be the murderer.

Newly promoted to Detective Inspector, William Warwick is tasked with a dangerous new line of work, to go undercover and expose crime of another kind: corruption at the heart of the Metropolitan Police Force. Along with detectives Rebecca Pankhurst and Nicky Bailey, his team is focused on following Detective Jerry Summers, a young officer whose lifestyle exceeds his income. But the investigation risks being compromised when Nicky falls for Summers.

When nine-year-old best friends Charlie and Amy disappear, two families are plunged into a living nightmare. A text message confirms the unthinkable; that the girls are the victims of a terrifying kidnapping. And when a second text message pits the two families against each other for the life of their children, the clock starts ticking for D.I. Kim Stone and the squad.

Newly appointed police inspector Domenic Jejeune doesn't mind ruffling a few feathers. His success has elevated him into a poster boy for the police. The problem is Jejeune doesn't really want to be a detective at all; he much prefers watching birds. Recently reassigned to the small Norfolk town of Saltmarsh, Jejeune's two worlds collide with the grisly murder of a prominent ecological activist.

The best of the golden age crime writers, praised by all the top modern writers in the field including P. D. James and Ruth Rendell, Dorothy L. Sayers created the immortal Lord Peter Wimsey. The twelfth book featuring Lord Peter (the third novel to feature Harriet Vane) is set in an Oxford women's college. Harriet Vane has never dared to return to her old Oxford college. Now, despite her scandalous life, she has been summoned back.

When London’s finest jazz musicians, the Dizzy Heights, are booked to play the glitzy Midsummer Ball at a country house in Oxfordshire, they expect a weekend filled with flappers and toffs having a roaring good time. But the festivities at Bilverton House take a turn for the worse when the group are stranded by a summer storm. And when a member of the Bilverton family turns up dead in a locked room in an apparent suicide, Skins, Dunn and Ellie realize this is going to be a much tougher gig than they thought.

Charlene Grant believes she is going to die. For the past few years, her childhood friends have been murdered one by one. Same day. Same time. Now she’s the last of her friends alive, and she’s counting down the final four days of her life until January 21st. Charlene doesn’t plan on going down without a fight. She has taken up boxing, shooting, and running. She also wants Boston’s top homicide detective, D. D. Warren, to handle the investigation. But as D. D. delves deeper into the case, she starts to question the woman’s story.

When the bodies of a local family are discovered on a quiet street in the small town of Dumfries, Virginia, Detective Amanda Steele takes charge of the case. Brett and Angela Parker were shot three times each, leaving no hope of survival, and their tidy suburban home has been ransacked. But there is no sign of their beloved six-year-old, Zoe.

A torso in a suitcase looks like an impossible case, but Sean Duffy isn’t easily deterred, especially when his floundering love life leaves him in need of a distraction. So with detective constables McCrabban and McBride, he goes to work identifying the victim. The torso turns out to be all that’s left of an American tourist who once served in the U.S. military. What was he doing in Northern Ireland in the midst of the 1982 Troubles?

From the moment he sees the young woman's body in her hotel bathtub, homicide detective Jack Murphy knows he's looking at a truly demented but brilliantly designed puzzle. She's been drained of blood. Missing her left hand - and the killer left a special message just for him. Hours later, he sees her severed hand arranged on a second victim's body. The newspaper has the gruesome details. The FBI has a theory.

Just after midnight, the famous Orient Express is stopped in its tracks by a snowdrift. By morning, the millionaire Samuel Edward Ratchett lies dead in his compartment, stabbed a dozen times, his door locked from the inside. One of his fellow passengers must be the murderer. Isolated by the storm, detective Hercule Poirot must find the killer among a dozen of the dead man's enemies, before the murderer decides to strike again....

Cheverell Manor is a lovely old house in deepest Dorset, now a private clinic belonging to the famous plastic surgeon George Chandler-Powell. When investigative journalist Rhoda Gradwyn arrived there one late autumn afternoon, scheduled to have a disfiguring and long-standing facial scar removed, she had every expectation of a successful operation and a pleasant week recuperating. Two days later she was dead, the victim of murder.

John Bachelor is the saddest kind of spy: not a joe in the field, not even a desk jockey, but a milkman - a part-time pension administrator whose main job is to check in on aging retired spies. Late in his career and having lost his wife, his house, and his savings after a series of unlucky choices, John's been living in a dead man's London apartment, hoping the bureaucracy isn't going to catch up with him and leave him homeless. But keeping a secret among spies is a fool's errand, and now John has made himself eminently blackmailable.

Among the towering red cliffs of Petra, like some monstrous swollen Buddha, sits the corpse of Mrs.Boynton. A tiny puncture mark on her wrist is the only sign of the fatal injection that killed her. With only 24 hours available to solve the mystery, Hercule Poirot recalled a chance remark he'd overheard back in Jerusalem: "You see, don't you, that she's got to be killed?" Mrs. Boynton was, indeed, the most detestable woman he'd ever met....

The tranquility of a luxury cruise along the Nile was shattered by the discovery that Linnet Ridgeway had been shot through the head. She was young, stylish, and beautiful. A girl who had everything...until she lost her life. Hercule Poirot recalled an earlier outburst by a fellow passenger: “I’d like to put my dear little pistol against her head and just press the trigger.” Yet under the searing heat of the Egyptian sun, nothing is ever quite what it seems.

As the snow falls in Newcastle, Detective Joe Ashworth and his daughter, Jessie, travel home on the busy Metro. When the train stops unexpectedly due to bad weather, Jessie notices that one woman doesn’t leave, and when trying to wake her they find that the passenger has been fatally stabbed. With no witnesses DI Vera Stanhope looks into the victim’s past and discovers she lived for years on Harbour Street, in a run-down Northumberland fishing town.

Unexpectedly put in charge of the investigation when her lieutenant is found dead, Emilia Cruz uncovers the lieutenant's sordid sexual past as well as his involvement in a kidnapping and counterfeit money scheme. Reputations are threatened by her discoveries, and truth is for sale. Emilia becomes a pawn in an ugly game of checkmate and corruption played by Acapulco's ambitious mayor and the powerful police union.