Historical Detective Mystery

A revolution in the Middle East has a direct and deadly impact upon the summer term at Meadowbank, a picture-perfect girls' school in the English countryside. Prince Ali Yusuf, Hereditary Sheikh of Ramat, whose great liberalizing experiment is coming to chaos, knows that he must prepare for the day of his exile. He asks his pilot and school friend, Bob Rawlinson, to care for a packet of jewels. Rawlinson does so, hiding them among the possessions of his niece Jennifer Sutcliffe, who is bound for Meadowbank.

Hank Fallon knows what it's like to rot behind bars. To wallow in the filth of a rat-infested cell. To smell the pent-up rage of cutthroat killers and thieves. Fallon earned his freedom the hard way. He saved the lives of four guards, got released early, and became a detective. Then he went undercover, infiltrated a prison gang plotting to bust out - and barely made it out alive. Now they're sending him back. Behind the iron. Straight to hell...

When listeners last heard Maisie Dobbs, it was 1938, and the world was on the brink of war. Maisie herself was on a dangerous mission inside Nazi Germany, where she encountered an old enemy and the Führer himself. In In This Grave Hour, a year has passed, and Maisie is back home in England - yet neither she nor her nation is safe. Britain has just declared war on Germany and is mobilizing for the devastating battle ahead.

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....

November, 1940. Tom Tyler, Detective Inspector of the small Shropshire town of Whitchurch, is a troubled man. The preceding summer had been a dark one for Britain, and even darker for Tom's own family and personal life. So he jumps at the opportunity to help out in the nearby city of Birmingham, where an explosion in a munitions factory has killed or badly injured several of the young women who have taken on dangerous work in support of the war effort.

Jane discovers holiday cheer is fleeting. One of the Yuletide gathering dies in a tragic accident whose circumstances Jane immediately views with suspicion. If the accident was in fact murder, the killer is one of Jane's fellow snowbound guests. With clues scattered amid cleverly crafted charades, dark secrets coming to light during parlor games, and old friendships returning to haunt the Christmas parties, whom can Jane trust to help her discover the truth and stop the killer from striking again?

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.

Charlotte’s success on the RMS Provence has afforded her a certain measure of time and assurance. Taking advantage of that, she has been busy, plotting to prise the man her sister loves from Moriarty’s iron grip. Disruption, however, comes from an unexpected quarter. Lord Bancroft Ashburton, disgraced and imprisoned as a result of Charlotte’s prior investigations, nevertheless manages to press Charlotte into service: Underwood, his most loyal henchman, is missing and Lord Bancroft wants Charlotte to find Underwood, dead or alive.

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 Catherine Saxon, an American correspondent reporting on the war in Europe, is found murdered in her London digs, news of her death is concealed by British authorities. Serving as a linchpin between Scotland Yard and the Secret Service, Robert MacFarlane pays a visit to Maisie Dobbs, seeking her help. He is accompanied by an agent from the US Department of Justice - Mark Scott, the American who helped Maisie get out of Hitler’s Munich in 1938. MacFarlane asks Maisie to work with Scott to uncover the truth about Saxon’s death.

"The Ravenscrofts didn't seem that kind of person. They seemed well balanced and placid..." And yet, twelve years earlier, the husband had shot the wife, and then himself - or perhaps it was the other way around, since sets of both of their fingerprints were on the gun, and the gun had fallen between them. The case haunts Ariadne Oliver, who had been a friend of the couple. The famous mystery novelist desires this real-life mystery solved, and calls upon Hercule Poirot to help her do so.

The year is 1976. Veteran New Haven homicide detective Frank Suchy has finally learned to cope with the demons in his life and the daily pressure of "the job" - being exposed to every manner of death that could possibly befall someone - all the while celebrating his third year of sobriety. But when his best friend's child is brutally murdered in broad daylight outside a downtown shopping mall, his world begins to deteriorate, bringing back the nightmares that he thought were locked away long ago.

It gives us considerable pleasure to be able to offer to the public the “inside” record of those of former District Attorney Markham’s criminal cases in which Mr. Philo Vance figured so effectively. The true inwardness of these famous cases has never before been revealed by S. S. Van Dine, Mr. Vance’s lawyer and almost constant companion, being the only person who possessed a complete record of the facts and has only recently been permitted to make them public.

In the cold Toronto winter of 1895, the naked body of a servant girl is found frozen in a deserted laneway. The young victim was pregnant when she died. Detective William Murdoch soon discovers that many of those connected with the girl's life have secrets to hide. Was her death on attempt to cover up a scandal in one of the city's influential families?

The incomparable Booker Prize winner’s next great crime novel - the story of a family whose secrets resurface when a parish priest is found murdered in their ancestral home. Detective Inspector St. John Strafford has been summoned to County Wexford to investigate a murder. A parish priest has been found dead in Ballyglass House, the family seat of the aristocratic, secretive Osborne family.

Owner of the Crewel World needlework shop and part-time sleuth Betsy Devonshire heads for the Minnesota north woods to renovate an old cabin. But beneath the awful linoleum is something even uglier--the skeleton of a Nazi. Betsy's investigation yields the site of a former German POW camp, a mysterious crocheted rug, and an intricately designed pattern of clues to a decades-old crime.

The sleek high-rises of Park Avenue make Frank Clemons uneasy. The former Atlanta homicide detective came to New York after a sickening murder case soured him on the South, but despite the glitz and excitement of his new surroundings and the beauty of the woman he shares them with, the city makes his skin crawl. Now a private eye, he is only at ease in the city's darker corners, among the whores, gamblers, and pimps who call Eighth Avenue home. That affinity for the socially isolated is what draws him to the case of Hannah Karlsberg, an elderly seamstress who deserved a better death than she got.

Spring 1940. With Britons facing what has become known as "the Bore War" - nothing much seems to have happened yet - Maisie Dobbs is asked to investigate the disappearance of a local lad, a young apprentice craftsman working on a "hush-hush" government contract. As Maisie's inquiry reveals a possible link to the London underworld, another mother is worried about a missing son - but this time the boy in question is one beloved by Maisie.

In the summer of 1932, Maisie Dobbs' career takes an exciting new turn when she accepts an undercover assignment directed by Scotland Yard's Special Branch and the Secret Service. Posing as a junior lecturer, she is sent to a private college in Cambridge to monitor any activities "not in the interests of His Majesty's government". She soon finds herself investigating a web of activities being conducted by the emerging Nazi Party.

Stoke Newington, 1863: Little Margaret Lovejoy is found brutally murdered in the outhouse at her family’s estate. A few days later, a man is cut down in a similar manner on the doorstep of courtesan and professional detective Heloise Chancey’s prestigious address. At the same time, Heloise’s maid, Amah Li Leen, must confront events from her past that appear to have erupted into the present day. Once again Heloise is caught up in a maelstrom of murder and deceit that threatens to reach into the very heart of her existence.