Historical Detective Mystery

With the country in the grip of economic malaise, and worried about her business, Maisie Dobbs is relieved to accept an apparently straightforward assignment from an old friend to investigate certain matters concerning a potential land purchase. Her inquiries take her to a picturesque village in Kent during the hop-picking season, but beneath its pastoral surface she finds evidence that something is amiss. Mysterious fires erupt in the village with alarming regularity, and a series of petty crimes suggests a darker criminal element at work.

When business magnate Robert Jeffreys announces his investment in airships, he hosts a promotional flight for a group of reporters. Working undercover in the crew is retired spy Augusta Peel. She’d rather be working on her book repair business, but Inspector Fisher of Scotland Yard has persuaded her to help with a surveillance operation. The press trip on the airship takes a turn when a body is found in a cabin. Can Augusta identify the murderer? It’s tricky to find a motive among the sophisticated passengers—some of them are sophisticated liars, too.

In the summer of 1994, a workman at the historic mansion of railroad baron James J. Hill in St. Paul, Minnesota, stumbles on a long-hidden wall safe. When experts arrive to open the safe and examine its contents, they make an astonishing discovery. There, inside, is a handwritten manuscript bearing the signature of John H. Watson, MD. The manuscript contains the story of how Sherlock Holmes and Watson traveled to Minnesota to track a murderous arsonist - known only as the Red Demon - who is threatening both Hill and his Great Northern Railway.

It is 1923. Mary Russell Holmes and her husband, the retired Sherlock Holmes, are enjoying the summer together on their Sussex estate when they are visited by an old friend, Miss Dorothy Ruskin, an archeologist just returned from Palestine. She leaves in their protection an ancient manuscript which seems to hint at the possibility that Mary Magdalene was an apostle—an artifact certain to stir up a storm of biblical proportions in the Christian establishment.

It's 1194, and Sir Faucon de Ramis, the shire's newly appointed keeper of the pleas, must do his duty and make an official declaration of the cause of a miller's death. Saddled with a clerk who names Faucon his "penance", the shire's first crowner must thread the tangled relationships between the sheriff, the village of Priors Holston, and the priory that once ruled it. As a simple task takes a turn to the political, what seems obvious isn't, and what appears safe turns out to be more dangerous than he could imagine.

Irene Adler is no ordinary young lady. She's at the top of the ranks in the All Souls cohort, a competitive preparatory class reserved for Oxford's brightest minds. But her peers and professors don't know she's a lady at all. To them, she is Isaac Holland. Keeping up her disguise gets trickier when All Souls students start dying, one by one. Determined to find out who's responsible for the deaths, Irene—as Isaac—teams up with fellow classmate and roommate Sherlock Holmes to track down clues

Long before Western writers had even conceived the idea of writing detective stories, the Chinese had developed a long tradition of literary works that chronicled the cases of important district magistrates. One of the most celebrated of these was Judge Dee, who lived in the seventh century.

A reluctant ex-spy with demons of her own, Elinor finds herself facing down one of the most dangerous organized crime gangs in London, ultimately exposing corruption from Scotland Yard to the highest levels of government. The private, quiet “Miss White" as Elinor is known, lives in a village in rural Kent, England, and to her fellow villagers seems something of an enigma. Well she might, as Elinor occupies a "grace and favor" property, a rare privilege offered to faithful servants of the Crown for services to the nation.

July 8, 1921. Ireland. A British Officer is shot dead on a remote hillside south of Dublin. November 22, 2015. United Kingdom. Former police detective Jayne Sinclair, now working as a genealogical investigator, receives a phone call from an adopted American billionaire asking her to discover the identity of his real father. How are the two events linked? Jayne Sinclair has only three clues to help her: a photocopied birth certificate, a stolen book, and an old photograph.

A killer is on the loose in the Arizona Territory. One by one, Tonto Basin ranchers are being murdered for their livestock -and the Cattle Raisers Association has hired two range detectives to catch the culprit. From the looks of them, Stovepipe Stewart and Wilbur Coleman are just another pair of high plains drifters. But with their razor-sharp detective skills and rare talent for trouble, they’re the last remaining hope for one young cowboy who’s been arrested for the murders.

Like most women, Elizabeth Miles assumes many roles; unlike most, hers have made her a woman on the run. Living on the edge of society, Elizabeth uses her guile to relieve so-called respectable men of their ill-gotten gains. But brutal and greedy entrepreneur Oscar Thornton is out for blood. He's lost a great deal of money and is not going to forgive a woman for outwitting him. With his thugs hot on her trail, Elizabeth seizes the moment to blend in with a group of women who have an agenda of their own.

Roger Ackroyd knew too much. He knew that the woman he loved had poisoned her brutal first husband. He suspected, also, that someone had been blackmailing her. Then, tragically, came the news that she had taken her own life with a drug overdose. But the evening post brought Roger one last fatal scrap of information. Unfortunately, before he could finish reading the letter, he was stabbed to death.

At a Hallowe'en party, Joyce - a hostile thirteen-year-old - boasts that she once witnessed a murder. When no one believes her, she storms off home. But within hours her body is found, still in the house, drowned in an apple-bobbing tub. That night, Hercule Poirot is called in to find the "evil presence". But first he must establish whether he is looking for a murderer or a double murderer.

World War II has finally come home to Britain, but it takes more than nightly air raids to rattle intrepid spy and expert code breaker Maggie Hope. After serving as a secret agent to protect Princess Elizabeth at Windsor Castle, Maggie is now an elite member of the Special Operations Executive–a black ops organization designed to aid the British effort abroad–and her first assignment sends her straight into Nazi-controlled Berlin, the very heart of the German war machine. Relying on her quick wit and keen instincts, Maggie infiltrates the highest level of Berlin society, gathering information to pass on to London headquarters. But the secrets she unveils will expose a darker, more dangerous side of the war–and of her own past.

It is 1921 and Mary Russell—Sherlock Holmes's brilliant apprentice, now an Oxford graduate with a degree in theology—is on the verge of acquiring a sizable inheritance. Independent at last, with a passion for divinity and detective work, her most baffling mystery may now involve Holmes and the burgeoning of a deeper affection between herself and the retired detective.

Spring, 1909, and Lady Hardcastle, amateur sleuth and all-round eccentric, is enjoying a well-deserved rest. But a week after a trip to the cattle market, Spencer Caradine, a local farmer, turns up dead in the pub, face-down in his beef and mushroom pie. Once again, it is up to Lady Hardcastle and her maid, Florence, to solve the case. Armed with wit and whimsy, not to mention Florence’s mean right hook, the pair set out to discover what really happened and why. Was it poison or just ill luck?

The Great War is still raging when Francesca Hatton’s adored grandfather dies on his estate in England’s isolated Exe Valley. She is his sole heir, for her five cousins are dead now on the battlefields of France. Among his effects, Francesca is stunned to find a letter cursing the Hattons. And at the funeral, a stranger publicly accuses Hatton of murder. Who was her grandfather? The kind man who raised her - or a secretive killer? For in the back garden where she and her cousins once played, there is a white stone they always called the Murder Stone

Though forty miles away, Duston Heights is not safe from the flu that’s raging through Boston. When Johnny Dixon’s grandmother falls ill, he’s sent to live with his neighbor to avoid infection. So many locals are getting sick that school is canceled for a week, and the reclusive Dr. Abram Ashburn comes out of retirement to make house calls. After seeing a scary vision of his bedridden grandmother outside of a window, Johnny starts to feel on edge. Then he and his best friend find what looks to be a weird map of a cemetery in Dr. Ashburn’s house.

Ten people gather together for an elegant London dinner party. By the end of the party, only nine are alive. Sometime after dinner, General Thaddeus Carlyon is brutally murdered in the hallway. Who had the strength - and motive - to murder the distinguished military hero? Nurse Latterly and Inspector Monk find the answers in a nightmarish legacy of evil.

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....