Murder Mystery

The faculty of Willow Creek High School are having a get-together after the spring concert with refreshments provided, courtesy of Daisy's Tea Garden. Oolong tea and chocolate biscuits are just what the staff needs to help them unwind from Althea Higgins's demanding curriculum. Her lessons on such controversial subjects as school uniforms and under qualified substitute teachers are earning her an F from her colleagues. But a failing grade was preferable to Althea falling victim to foul play.

August 1901: A fundraiser for a new Rhode Island Audubon Society brings Emma to Vinland, the Viking-themed seaside home of her relative, Florence Vanderbilt Twombly, where the guest of honor is Edith Roosevelt, wife of Vice President Theodore Roosevelt. Emma's observation of harmless philanthropy is proven wrong the following morning when one of Mrs. Twombly's houseguests from the luncheon becomes mysteriously and dangerously ill. Accompanying police detective Jesse Whyte, Emma discovers a box of petit fours supposedly sent by Mrs. Roosevelt.

Cherringham - a quiet town in the Cotswolds. Nothing ever happens there, or so it seems - until one morning a woman's body is found in the river. A terrible accident, according to the police. But is this true? Sarah believes there must be more to it. In Jack, a former NYPD homicide detective, she finds a partner who is willing to start investigating with her. They soon find out that things are not as clear as the police want them to be ... This first - of many cases brings Sarah and Jack together in an unlikely partnership.

In the title work in this collection of novellas, Poirot and Inspector Japp collaborate on the investigation of a suspicious suicide. The supernatural is said to play in the disappearance of top secret military plans in The Incredible Theft—an incredible claim, indeed, as Poirot will prove. The bullet that kills Gervase Chevenix-Gore shatters a mirror in Dead Man's Mirror—just the clue Poirot needs to solve the crime.

A secret worth dying for is a secret worth killing...When a violent storm uncovers the remains of an unknown young woman, long buried among the sand dunes, DI Tom Janssen must piece together fragmentary evidence to determine how she came to be there. In the years she lay undiscovered, several young women have disappeared, and as the team works through the possibilities, they come to an uncomfortable conclusion...Is a serial killer stalking coastal Norfolk? Each missing person had a story. Each of them had enemies. Some were more dangerous than others...

On the day an infamous thief, and callous murderer, is due to be released, DCI Tanner is given the task of overseeing the operation. But when the prisoner is kidnapped at gunpoint, only to be found tortured to death the very next day, Tanner finds himself asking why, especially when two men arrive from the National Museum, demanding to know where the priceless painting was, the same one the dead man had taken some thirty years before.

The year 1934. Kitty Underhay steps out of the battered Rolls Royce and onto the graveled driveway of Thurscomb Castle in deepest Yorkshire. She’s honored to be a bridesmaid at her cousin Lucy’s wedding to the reluctant Lord Rupert Woodcomb, but as family and friends gather for welcome drinks, Kitty dodges intrusive questions about her own marital status by taking a stroll about the castle grounds. As she passes through the manicured gardens, a fatal shot rings out....

November 1933. Amateur sleuth-cum-dutiful granddaughter Kitty Underhay stifles a sigh of boredom as she attends the annual Hoteliers' Association Dinner and Dance on behalf of her grandmother, the proprietress of the Dolphin Hotel. She hopes the company of ex-army captain Matthew Bryant will enliven the otherwise dull evening. That is, until bullish and overbearing local councilor Harold Everton drops dead into his bowl of consommé.

When eighteen-year-old aspiring scientist Elinor Dashwood discovers her beloved father slumped over the desk of his office study, she knows his death means dire straits for the Dashwood women. To make matters worse, an outdated will entails his estate—including Norland & Company, the private investigation firm where her younger sister Marianne worked as her father’s partner and protégé—to their half-brother and his haughty wife, who waste no time in forcing the Dashwoods out of their home and into a cramped apartment on London’s Barton Street.

Winter 1934. Kitty Underhay is enjoying a night off from wedding planning as she attends a charity ball at the home of Lady Eliza Foxley. She’s excited to see her father, roguish Edgar Underhay, who is also a guest in the house. But the evening of cocktails and waltzing turns into a dance macabre when Edgar finds their lively, fun-loving hostess dead, strangled by her own silk stocking.

When Detective Inspector Bridget Hart returns to her old Oxford college for a reunion dinner, she's hoping for a fun weekend catching up with old friends. But the reunion takes a macabre turn when body parts are served up at the college feast, and one of her friends is found murdered. With Bridget's arch rival Inspector Baxter leading the murder inquiry, and herself a potential suspect, Bridget is forbidden from taking part in the investigation. But that doesn't stop her from carrying out her own private inquiries. Bridget soon realizes that the murderer is someone known to her.

London, 1815. Amateur sleuth Atlas Catesby is about to discover the dark side of the bright lights. His long-awaited night at the opera with Lady Lilliana ends abruptly when a notorious courtesan is shot to death in Covent Garden. The infamous victim was the mistress of the powerful Marquess of Vessey. Atlas believes that the marquess - his former brother in law - is responsible for the long-ago death of Atlas' sister, Phoebe. Atlas seizes the opportunity to potentially avenge his sister's death.

Anne George’s novels offer a delightful mix of gentle comedy and compelling mystery. Murder Runs in the Family finds two feisty 60-something sisters doing a little amateur sleuthing into the death of a visiting genealogist. Mary Alice has spared no expense for her daughter’s wedding. Two days after the glittering affair, Mary Alice and Patricia Anne are spending a fascinating lunch listening to the groom’s cousin explain the ’dog-eat-dog" world of professional genealogy.

The delectable Phryne Fisher has been invited to the Last Best party of 1928. When three of the guests are kidnapped, Phryne finds she must puzzle her way through the scavenger hunt clues to retrieve the hostages. This is another sparkling mystery from Australia's Queen of Crime, Kerry Greenwood.

Take one of the crowning musical geniuses of mid-nineteenth century Europe; surround him with enemies, some of whom are fiercely jealous of his talent, others in love with his beautiful wife (a musical genius in her own right); add several scoundrels including a seller of stolen jewels and a kleptomaniac music critic who ends up murdered under highly mysterious circumstances and there you have the world of Robert and Clara Schumann in the Germany of the 1850s, as told by the narrator, Dsseldorfs top detective, Inspector Hermann Preiss.

Sometimes it takes a cat to catch a killer. There’s something special about Max. He may look like your regular ginger flabby tabby, but unlike most tabbies he can communicate with his human, reporter for the Hampton Cove Gazette Odelia Poole. Max takes a keen interest in the goings-on in their small town, by snooping around with his best friends Dooley, a not-too-bright ragamuffin, and Harriet, a gorgeous white Persian.

Eccentric twin brothers Cedric and Ambrose retire from MI6 to make honey and tackle crosswords at Tanglefoot Farm in England's Surrey Hills. The unsolved brutal murder of their long-lost friend drags them back into the secret life they left behind. Can Cedric and Ambrose, along with Charlie, their dead friend's daughter, and the seventy-five-year-old mystery woman who lives in a campervan, unravel the clues and crack the cold case before the killer strikes again?

Sussex, 1957: When Flora and Jack hear that Percy Milburn–a newcomer to the area who has ruffled more than a few feathers with his grand plans for modernizing Abbeymead–is missing, they’re determined to find him. But after scouring the village, Flora is shocked to discover the body of the poor man in the cellar of a crumbling farmhouse.

Chief Inspector Acton and Detective Sergeant Kathleen Doyle know firsthand how the administration of justice can often follow a labyrinthine path. As they pursue a self-appointed judge, jury, and executioner, Acton's own questionable methods may prove his undoing.

When the partial remains of a young woman are unearthed during a violent storm, it falls to DI Tom Janssen and his team to discover her identity and what brought her there. A man is released from prison having been the apparent victim of a miscarriage of justice and returns home to rural Norfolk. Questions are being asked, not only of the police and their flawed investigation, but also of the man himself. A loner, strange and disinterested, is he truly innocent? Convicted without a body, if he didn't commit the murder he was sent to jail for, then where is she?