Short Thrillers

A professional pickpocket and accomplished thief ignores his wife's warnings and embarks on an adventure that will change his life - perhaps for the better. A technological marvel of a sports car kills a pedestrian, but no one was at the wheel. A local lunatic admits to murder, but is he crazy - or crazy smart? The life of a researcher with ties to a British spy agency is thrown into chaos when his research goes missing. Injury Time delivers captivating tales of intrigue wrapped in Catherine Aird's tightly woven logic, sealed with the bow of enigma.

Rumpole is on the job again, bringing along his taste for claret, his penchant for poetry, and his reputation for a good story. These seven irresistible stories run the gamut from simple thievery to murder and espionage.

Deadwood meets Cthulhu in this wild and profane Western romp featuring zombies, werewolves, evil spirits, and one pissed-off gunslinging preacher. The Wild West has never seen the likes of the Reverend Jebidiah Mercer, a hard man wielding a burning Bible in the battle between God and the devil, in an endless struggle he's not sure he cares who wins. With its five stories laced with fast-paced action, nonstop humor, and spine-tingling horror, Deadman's Road is your ride to hell....

This original short story takes us back in time to show us how it all began. On a whirlwind, action-packed thriller ride through Italy, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, it shows us the beginning of CIA operative Agent Zero's career - and brings us up to the fateful moment when his memory came to be lost.

In a quaint, antiquarian bookshop in the Midlands of England, a woman is captivated by a rare gilt-edged devotional nestled within an exquisite and equally tempting box. Her desire to pilfer it overcomes her scruples, and her guilt and terror at doing something so audacious, so unlike her. With a simple sleight of hand, it's hers.

In this short story written exclusively for Blackstone Audio, originally published in the collection Tales from the Fire Zone, New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Maberry brings us a tale of drugs, Haitian mysticism, and revenge.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales are rightly ranked among the seminal works of mystery and detective fiction. Included in this collection are all four full-length Holmes novels and more than forty short masterpieces - from the inaugural adventure A Study in Scarlet to timeless favorites like “The Speckled Band” and more. At the center of each stands the iconic figure of Holmes - brilliant, eccentric, and capable of amazing feats of deductive reasoning.

Graham is a detective inspector with London’s Metropolitan police force. He’s a career police officer, an educated, reserved, thoughtful, some might say, complex man. He has suffered tragedy in his life that serves to exaggerate his more introspective characteristics and, like many of us, has to look his demons in the eye from time to time and make tough choices. This box set contains the first four mysteries in this bestselling series.

Walking home from a dance on a foggy autumn night in rural New York, Marly Shaw sees a flash of approaching headlights. A pickup truck stops, and two men get out. One of them is her stepfather. She runs. They follow. Minutes later, gunshots ring out. Two men are dead, and one terrified girl is running-for the rest of her life.

A short ghost story from the best-selling author of Abbot's Keep. A photographer reluctantly agrees to take images of an abandoned manor house on the Dorset clifftops only to find the building is not completely empty.

The Cambodian Curse: When an ancient and supposedly cursed Cambodian sculpture disappears from an impenetrable museum, and the carving's owner is killed by an invisible assailant while a witness is a few feet away, historian Jaya Jones and her old nemesis Henry North team up to solve the baffling crime. Additional stories include: "The Hindi Houdini", "The Haunted Room", "The Library Ghost of Tanglewood Inn", "The Curse of Cloud Castle", "Tempest in a Teapot", "A Dark and Stormy Light", "The Shadow of the River", plus the bonus novella Fool's Gold.

There's a body in a trunk; a dead girl's reflection is caught in a mirror; and one corpse is back from the grave, while another is envisioned in the recurring nightmare of a terrified eccentric. What's behind such ghastly misdeeds? Try money, revenge, passion, and pleasure. With multiple motives, multiple victims, and multiple suspects, it's going to take a multitude of talent to solve these clever crimes. In this inviting collection, Agatha Christie enlists the services of her finest - Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, and Parker Pyne.

Dashiell Hammett is best known as both pioneer and master of American hard-boiled detective fiction, but these dozen and a half stories both affirm that reputation and present him in a different light. Along with the full-length treatments On the Make and The Kiss-Off, this collection includes never before and rarely published stories that explore failed romance, courage in the face of uncertainty, hypocrisy, and crass opportunism.

Joyce Carol Oates, a queenpin of the noir genre, has brought her keen and discerning eye to the curation of an outstanding anthology of brand-new top-shelf short stories (and poems by Margaret Atwood!). While bad men are not always the victims in these tales, they get their due often enough to satisfy listeners who are sick of the gendered status quo, or who just want to have a little bit of fun at the expense of a crumbling patriarchal society. This stylistically diverse collection will make you squirm in your seat, stay up at night, laugh out loud, and inevitably wish for more.

With gimlet-eyed cool and razor-sharp wit, these spare, stylish stories from a master of modern-crime fiction assemble a world of gangsters and con men, of do-gooders breaking bad and those caught in the crossfire. The uncle of an FBI agent spends his life as sheriff in different cities, living too close to the violent acts of men; a cocktail waitress moves through several desert towns trying to escape the unexplainable loss of an adopted daughter; a drug dealer with a penchant for karaoke meets a talkative lawyer and a silent clown in a Palm Springs bar.

In the wild crags of the Dark Peak moorland, a ruthless conflict has been raging for years. The discovery of an illegal haul from the bedroom of a terraced house is a clue to what might be at stake - perhaps the entire future of one of the most prized landscapes in the Peak District National Park. For young Derbyshire police detective DC Ben Cooper, an assignment to the Rural Crime Squad means stepping into the middle of the conflict, without being quite sure whose side he's on.

For the past twenty years, Lee Child has been one of the bestselling authors in the world, thanks to the popularity of his iconic and instantly recognizable hero Jack Reacher. But even at the height of Reacher's fame, Child's short story writing was not confined to the series; throughout the course of his career, he published tales about a range of characters on both sides of the law, including assassins, a body guard, CIA and FBI agents, gangsters, and more.

It’s the perfect time to curl up in front of a crackling fire with these wintry whodunits from the legendary Agatha Christie. But beware of deadly snowdrifts and dangerous gifts, poisoned meals and mysterious guests. This chilling compendium of short stories - some featuring beloved detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple - is an essential omnibus for Christie fans.

This Audiobook contains the following works: "The Builder" [Frank L. Packard], "The Man Who Didn't Count" [Frank L. Packard], "Red Petals" [Frederick Merrick White], "The Other Man's Story" [Frederick Merrick White], "The Shebeeners" [Frederick Merrick White], "The Waterwitch" [Frederick Merrick White], "The Brand of the Wild" [G.B Lancaster], "A Fair Smuggler" [George Newnes], "A Castaway of the South" [Gilbert Parker], "As Deep As the Sea" [Gilbert Parker], "The Gift of the Simple King" [Gilbert Parker], "The Treasure of Sacramento" [Nick Guy Boothby].

This collection of 25 Hercule Poirot adventures is compiled from short stories written by Agatha Christie for The Sketch magazine in 1923 from March to December. In these stories, including "The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim", "The Veiled Lady", and "The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb", the eccentric private detective slowly and surely solves mysteries involving jealousy, revenge, and greed. These stories were well-received at the time and cemented Christie's reputation as the worthy successor to Arthur Conan Doyle.