Private Detective

FViolet Hunter consults Holmes after being offered a governess job subject to a number of unusual conditions, including cutting her hair short. The wage is extremely high, £120, and she decides to accept the job, though Holmes tells her to contact him if she needs to. After a number of strange occurrences, including the discovery of a sealed-off wing of the house, she does so. Holmes discovers that someone had been kept prisoner in the wing, but when Holmes, Watson and Hunter enter, it is empty.

An engineer, Victor Hatherley, attends Dr Watson's surgery after his thumb is chopped off, and recounts his tale to Watson and Holmes. Hatherley had been hired for 50 guineas to repair a machine he was told compressed Fuller's earth into bricks. Hatherley was told to keep the job confidential, and was transported to the job in a carriage with frosted glass, to keep the location secret. He was shown the press, but on closer inspection discovered a "crust of metallic deposit" on the press, and he suspected it was not being used for compressing earth.

Lord Robert St. Simon's new American bride, Hatty Doran, has disappeared almost immediately after the wedding. The servants had prevented an old love interest of his from forcing her way into the wedding breakfast, Hatty had been seen in whispered conversation with her maid, and Inspector Lestrade arrives with the news that Hatty's wedding dress and ring have been found floating in the Serpentine. Holmes quickly solves the mystery, locating Hatty at a hotel with a mysterious, "common-looking" man who had picked up her dropped bouquet after the ceremony.

Helen Stoner worries her stepfather may be trying to kill her after he contrives to move her to the bedroom where her sister had died two years earlier, shortly before her wedding. Stoner is herself now engaged, and Holmes learns that her stepfather's annuity (from the estate of his wife — Stoner's mother) would be greatly reduced if either sister married. During a late-night investigation of the bedroom, Holmes and Watson discover a dummy bell-pull near a ventilator. As they lie in wait a whistle sounds, then a snake appears through the ventilator.

A banker asks Holmes to investigate after a "Beryl Coronet" entrusted to him is damaged at his home. Awakened by noise, he had found his son, Arthur, holding the damaged coronet. Arthur refuses to speak, neither admitting guilt nor explaining himself. Footprints in the snow outside the house tell Holmes that the banker's niece had conspired with a blackguard to steal the coronet; Arthur had discovered the crime in progress and the coronet had been damaged during his struggle to prevent it being stolen. He had refused to tell his father the truth of the crime because of his love for his cousin.

A Blue Carbuncle is stolen from a hotel suite, and a former felon is soon arrested. However, an acquaintance of Holmes discovers the carbuncle in the throat of a Christmas goose. Holmes traces the owner of the goose, but soon determines that he was not the thief by offering him a replacement goose. The detective continues his search, first to an inn and then a dealer in Covent Garden. The dealer refuses to provide Holmes with information about the source of the goose, but Holmes observes another man trying to find the same information, and confronts him.

When a bright young heiress with a flair for romance and one too many enemies is found brutally murdered, Nero Wolfe and his sidekick, Archie, find themselves embroiled in a case that is not as black and white as it first appears.

In June of 1893, the future Nicholas II travels to London for a royal wedding, bringing with him his private security force and his ballerina mistress, Mathilde Kchessinska. Rumored to be the target of a professional assassin known only as La Sylphide, and the subject of conspiracies against his life by his own family who covet his future throne, Nicholas is protected by not only private security, but the professional forces of both England and Russia.

At 11 years old, Morgan Sheppard solved the murder of a teacher when everyone else believed it to be a suicide. The publicity surrounding the case laid the foundation for his reputation as a modern-day Sherlock Holmes. He parlayed that fame into a gig as TV’s “resident detective,” solving the more typical tawdry daytime talk show mysteries. Until, that is, Sheppard wakes up handcuffed to a bed in a hotel room. Around him, five strangers are slowly waking up, as well. Soon they discover a corpse in the bathtub and Sheppard is challenged to put his deductive skills to the test.

1937. War with Germany is dawning, and a civil war already raging in Spain. Split across political lines, the six Mitford sisters are more divided than ever. Meanwhile their former maid Louisa Cannon is now a private detective, working with her policeman husband Guy Sullivan.

On the day he retires, Inspector Ashwin Chopra inherits two unexpected mysteries. The first is the case of a drowned boy, whose suspicious death no one seems to want solved. And the second is a baby elephant. As his search for clues takes him across the teeming city of Mumbai, from its grand high rises to its sprawling slums and deep into its murky underworld, Chopra begins to suspect that there may be a great deal more to both his last case and his new ward than he thought.

Narrated by acclaimed British actor Edward Petherbridge. On the eve of war, Sherlock Holmes is asked by the Prime Minister of England to recover a new British superweapon that has fallen into the wrong hands. But Lucy James, an actress and Holmes's recently discovered grown daughter, has inherited the family sleuthing skills and strong-willed nature. Despite her father's objections, she insists on helping him, although several horrific murders have been linked to the weapon's disappearance.

Narrated by acclaimed British actor Edward Petherbridge, The Last Moriarty is set in London, 1895. On a cold November morning, a young American actress visits 221B Baker Street, desperate for Sherlock Holmes to protect her from the threats of a mysterious, menacing man who has recently appeared in her life. Holmes agrees to help, even though he has just promised the Prime Minister to solve the murder of John D. Rockefeller's security agent before the incident can derail an upcoming British-American summit.

Hercule Poirot comes out of retirement to solve one of the most vexing cases of his career. The quiet village of King’s Abbot is still reeling from the death of the widow Ferrars from an overdoes of Veronal, when not twenty-four hours later it is learned that the man she planned to marry, Roger Ackroyd, has been brutally murdered. Prior to his death, Ackroyd had been reading an article in the Evening Post to discover who had been blackmailing his wife over poisoning her first husband. But before he could learn who the blackmailer was, he was stabbed through the neck in his own study.

Rosemary Simpson presents Book 8 in the Gilded Age Mystery series.

December 1889. Fresh from debunking a 'ghostly' hound in Dartmoor, Sherlock Holmes has returned to London, only to find himself the target of a deadly vendetta. A beautiful client arrives with a tale of ghosts, kidnapping and dynamite on a whisky estate in Scotland, but brother Mycroft trumps all with an urgent assignment in the South of France. On the fabled Riviera, Holmes and Watson encounter treachery, explosions, rival French detective Jean Vidocq...and a terrible discovery.

Detective Joe "Preach" Everson, a prison chaplain turned police officer, is coming home. After a decade tracking down killers in Atlanta, and with a reputation as one of the finest homicide detectives in the city, his career derailed when he suffered a mental breakdown during the investigation of a serial killer who was targeting children. No sooner does Preach arrive at home in Creekville, North Carolina - a bohemian community near Chapel Hill - than a local bookstore owner is brutally killed, the first murder in a decade.

The year 1942 is a bad time to stage Madame Butterfly. Although Puccini's masterpiece is a perennial favorite of the San Francisco opera crowd, its sympathetic depiction of a Japanese girl causes tension in the dark months following Pearl Harbor. Newspaper editorialists rage against the production, opera buffs picket the theater, and a note appears nailed to the house door, threatening violence against the cast and crew. When the first workman dies, the maestro calls Toby Peters, a Los Angeles detective who works discreetly for Hollywood's rich and famous.

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.

Jabez Wilson, a pawnbroker, consults Holmes about a job, gained only because of his red hair, which took him away from his shop for long periods each day; the job for to simply copy the Encyclopædia Britannica. After eight weeks, he was suddenly informed that the job ended. After some investigation at Wilson's shop, Holmes contacts a police inspector and the manager of a nearby bank. With Watson, they hide in the bank vault and catch two thieves who had dug a tunnel from the shop while Wilson was at the decoy copying job.