Private Detective Mystery

The Adventure of the Priory School, one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is one of 13 stories in the cycle collected as The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle ranked The Adventure of the Priory School tenth in his list of his twelve favorite Holmes stories. Holmes receives a visit from Dr. Thorneycroft Huxtable, the founder and principal of a preparatory school called Priory School in Northern England. He beseeches Holmes to come back to Mackleton with him to look into the disappearance of one of his pupils, the ten-year-old Lord Saltire.

The Adventure of the Norwood Builder, one of the 56 short Sherlock Holmes stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is the second tale from The Return of Sherlock Holmes. The story was first published in The Strand Magazine in 1903 with original illustrations by Sidney Paget. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are visited by "the unhappy John Hector McFarlane", a young lawyer from Blackheath who has been accused of murdering one of his clients, a builder called Jonas Oldacre. McFarlane explains to Holmes that Oldacre had come to his office only a day earlier and asked him to draw up his will in legal language.

The Adventure of Black Peter is a Sherlock Holmes story by Arthur Conan Doyle. This tale is in the collection The Return of Sherlock Holmes, but was published originally in 1904 in the Strand Magazine and Collier's. Forest Row in the Weald is the scene of a harpoon murder, and a young police inspector, Stanley Hopkins, asks Holmes, whom he admires, for help. Holmes has already determined that it would take a great deal of strength and skill to run a man through with a harpoon and embed it in the wall behind him.

The Adventure of the Dancing Men, a Sherlock Holmes story written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is one of 13 stories in the cycle published as The Return of Sherlock Holmes in 1905. Doyle ranked The Adventure of the Dancing Men third in his list of his twelve favorite Holmes stories. This is one of only two Sherlock Holmes short stories where Holmes' client dies after seeking his help. The other is "The Five Orange Pips", part of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The original title was "The Dancing Men," when it was published as a short story in The Strand Magazine in December 1903.

The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist, one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is one of 13 stories in the cycle collected as The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes is contacted by Miss Violet Smith of Farnham, Surrey about an unusual turn in hers and her mother's lives. Violet's father has recently died and left his wife and daughter rather poor. There was an ad in the news asking about their whereabouts. Answering it, they met Mr. Carruthers and Mr. Woodley, the former a pleasant enough man, but the latter a bully.

San Francisco, 1952. Detective Evander “Andy” Mills has started a new life for himself as a private detective—but his business hasn’t exactly taken off. It turns out that word spreads fast when you have a bad reputation, and no one in the queer community trusts him enough to ask an ex-cop for help. When James, an old flame from the war who had mysteriously disappeared, arrives in his offices above the Ruby, Andy wants to kick him out. But the job seems to be a simple case of blackmail, and Andy’s debts are piling up. He agrees to investigate, despite everything it stirs up.

Meet Conrad. You’ve never met a cat like him before. Neither has Lulu Lewis when he walks into her life one summer’s day. Mourning the recent death of her husband, the former police detective had expected a gentle retirement, quietly enjoying life on her new canal boat, The Lark, and visiting her mother-in-law Emily in a nearby care home. But when Emily dies suddenly in suspicious circumstances, Lulu senses foul play and resolves to find out what really happened. And a remarkable cat named Conrad will be with her every step of the way.

Minnie Polson is dead. Burned to a crisp in a fire so big and bad it had to be deliberate. The only thing worse is that Hap and Leonard could have prevented it. Maybe. Minnie had a feeling she was being targeted, shaken down by some shadowy force. However, when she’d solicited Hap & Leonard, all it took was one off color joke to turn her sour and she’d called them off the investigation. Wracked with a guilty conscience, the two PIs—along with Hap’s fleet-footed wife, Brett—tuck in to the case.

In late Victorian England, private enquiry agents Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn find themselves in the middle of the deadly chaos when powerful forces align to take over London's criminal underworld.

Charles has been gone for months, and Mimi's not feeling like being a private detective anymore. She's had it with the liars and the cheats. Speaking of liars and cheats, when she takes on a missing person case for a new client, she's thrown into a web of lies and deceit that ends in murder. Come along as, once again, Mimi Capurro butts heads with her homicide detective boyfriend, Nick Christianson, when their cases cross paths. What surprises do her client and employees have in store?

A ship captain is found dead, stabbed through with a harpoon. Police Inspector Stanley Hopkins, who is being mentored by Sherlock Holmes, brings the case to Holmes and Dr. Watson. An abusive man, the captain had many enemies, widening the suspect list. The investigation finds Holmes and company on a stakeout, on a case that involves a chance meetings on the high seas and stolen securities.

In this new installment of Ken Bruen's beloved Jack Taylor series, the whiskey-swigging Irish detective investigates a series of violent attacks on the local convent's nuns.

Tori Van Camp wakes one morning on a luxurious ocean liner where she's offered whatever a person might desire: food, clothes, recreation, and the companionship of congenial people. But Tori has no memory of booking a cruise. What she does have is a vivid recollection of being shot point blank in the chest.

In Liverpool, a woman inexplicably leaps to her death. The following morning, two bodies are found on nearby Crosby Beach: a woman tied to a statue, and a man buried up to his neck and left to drown. When a nine-month-old murder case is reopened, DI Sheridan Holler is shocked to uncover family connections between the victim, Daniel Parks, and the three unexplained deaths. With Daniel’s body still missing and the number-one suspect cleared of the crime, Holler’s cold case suddenly becomes a major murder investigation.

Two-year-old Abigail is fast asleep in the back of the car, clutching her little red lion. Tony, her father, steps out onto the pavement. The man he’s meeting punches him in the face, knocking him to the ground. Before it all goes black, Tony sees his car speed away—with his little girl inside. When he finally gets home after the worst day of his life, the house is empty. His wife is gone too. The place is ransacked and the kitchen is streaked with blood.

In 1851, private detective Laetitia Rodd is enjoying a well-earned holiday when she gets an urgent request for her services. Mrs. Rodd’s neighbor Jacob Welland is a reclusive rich gentleman dying of consumption, and he wants Mrs. Rodd to find his brother, who has been missing for 15 years. Joshua Welland was a scholar at Oxford, brilliant, eccentric, and desperately poor when he disappeared from the university. Friends claim to have seen him since, in gypsy camps and wandering around the countryside.

It is London in the early 1960s and Teddy Bean is making a name for himself as a private detective. However, his personal problems are taking over, with his brother, John, only slowly recovering from a heart attack and his wife, Pearl, dying in a car accident. Added to this, he takes on a difficult case involving a woman presumably drowned at sea by her husband. Teddy needs help while his brother is incapacitated and finds it in his friend, ex-Detective Inspector Tony Halliday. With the added support of their secretary Muriel, the Bean Detective Agency is open for business once more!

Three cases - two missing persons and one apparent suicide - are pushing PI Jessie Cole and crime reporter Ben Morrison closer to the edge.

St Pauls, Bristol, 1980. Joseph Tremaine Ellington, now 57 years old, has long abandoned his former career as an enquiry agent for the safety of teaching. But his old life draws him back. One of the very few lights from Ellington’s dark and violent past has flickered out. His fiancée, Ruth Castle, is dead - leaving him again heartbroken and alone to bring up his 15-year-old niece, Chloe. Ellington’s days are long and lonely, his nights tormented by old ghosts.

When a renowned theater director senses something amiss during his latest production, he calls Nero Wolfe. Though the corpulent genius wouldn’t normally accept a job this vague, a mutual friend dangles the prospect of a very rare orchid in exchange for his services, and Wolfe can’t resist. With a mind to suss out useful backstage gossip, Wolfe turns to his faithful assistant, Archie Goodwin, to impersonate a journalist in order to speak to the cast. Though Goodwin’s conversations prove unfruitful, on his last day at the theater, the director is murdered in his sound-proof booth.