Partners


John Grisham - 2016
      Sebastian Rudd, rogue lawyer, defends people other lawyers won't go near. It's controversial and dangerous work, which is why Sebastian needs his bodyguard/assistant/sidekick: Partner. So if Sebastian is just about the most unpopular lawyer in town, why is Partner so loyal to him? How did they meet? And what's the real story of this man of few words who's as good with a gun as he is with the law? The surprising answers are all in PARTNERS, John Grisham's first exclusively digital short story.

Madball


Fredric Brown - 1953
    . . It was only cheap glass, a fraud, a come-on for the suckers who paid Doc Magus to gaze into its depths and tell them tomorrow would be better. And Doc--a decent man, a smart man--pitied them. Yet tonight, even Doc had to believe the Madball. There was nothing left to lead him to the money--enough money to spring him free of the raucous, sordid world of the pitchmen and the pickled punks, the cotton candy and the kewpie dolls--and the belly dancers who needed him for all-night alibis.Doc was shrewd, but not quite shrewd enough. Someone else knew about the $42,000--a specialist in death, who was only yards away. . .MADBALL is a novel of one traveling show, and of the lives of its carneys, who live to close to the edge of frenzy.

Easy Death


Daniel Boyd - 2014
    ...and two robbers hired by a local crime boss manage to heist half a million dollars from an armored car. But getting the money and getting away with it are two different things, especially with a blizzard coming down, the cops in hot pursuit, and a double-crossing gambler and a murderous park ranger threatening to turn this white Christmas blood red.

Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes


Charles PrepolecRick Kennett - 2008
    John H. Watson opens to reveal eleven all new tales of mystery and dark fantasy. Sherlock Holmes, master of deductive reasoning, confronts the irrational, the unexpected and the fantastic in the weird worlds of the Gaslight Grimoire.

Resort to Murder


Carl BrookinsPat Dennis - 2007
    Editors Carl Brookins, Ellen Hart and William Kent Krueger (known as the Minnesota Crime Wave) have solicited 13 riveting stories of murder, mystery and mayhem, in this follow-up to the best-selling short story anthology The Silence of the Loons.

No Comebacks


Frederick Forsyth - 1972
    all  culminating in shocking twists of fate.   Within these pages live a wealth of  characters you will not soon forget... people  whose lives become irrevocably trapped in a world of  no comebacks, beyond the point of no return--from  the manipulators and the manipulated to the  ultra-rich capable of buying and selling human lives, to the everyday man maneuvered by circumstances into performing deadly acts of violence.

The Double Take


Roy Huggins - 1946
    Bailey investigates the woman in an attempt to stop the extortion, and as the story unfolds, there are many twists and turns. Following The Double Take, Huggins turned his attention to creating memorable TV shows such as “Maverick,” “The Fugitive,” “City of Angels,” and “The Rockford Files.” Huggins passed away in 2002 at age 87.

The Stranger House


Reginald Hill - 2005
    Sam Flood is a young Australian post-grad en route to Cambridge. Miguel Madero is a Spanish historian in flight from a seminary. They have nothing in common and no connection, except that they both want to dig up bits of the past that some people would rather keep buried. Sam is looking for information about her grandmother who left Illthwaite courtesy of the child migrant scheme four decades earlier. The past Mig is interested in is more than four centuries old.They meet in the village pub, the Stranger House, a remnant of the old Illthwaite Priory. They can find nothing to agree on. Sam believes that anything that can’t be explained by math isn’t worth explaining; Mig sees ghosts; Sam is a fun-loving, experienced young woman; Mig is a 26-year-old virgin. But once their paths cross, they become increasingly entangled as they pursue what at first seem to be separate quests, finding out the hard way who to trust and who to fear in this ancient village.The action is fast, there are clashes physical and metaphysical, and shocks natural and supernatural, as the tension mounts to an explosive climax. But fans of Reginald Hill’s will not be surprised to find a few laughs along the way. And very loyal fans might even recognize a ghost from the very distant past. . . .From the Hardcover edition.

English Country House Murders


Thomas GodfreyWills Crofts - 1988
    Yet these staid, conservative houses play host to a wider variety of murders than do the mean streets of America's darkest cities.Contents: The adventure of the Abbey Grange / Sir Arthur Conan Doyle --A marriage tragedy / Wilkie Collins --Lord Chizelrigg's missing fortune / Robert Barr --The Fordwych Castle mystery / Emmuska, Barroness Orczy --The blue scarab / R. Austin Freeman --The doom of the Darnaways / G.K. Chesterton --The shadow on the glass / Agatha Christie --The queen's square / Dorothy L. Sayers --Death on the air / Ngaio Marsh --The same to us / Margery Allingham --The hunt ball / Freeman Wills Crofts --The incautious burglar / John Dickson Carr --The long shot / Nicholas Blake --Jeeves and the stolen Venus / P.G. Wodehouse --Death in the sun / Michael Innes --An unlocked window / Ethel Lina White --The wood-for-the-trees / Philip MacDonald --The man on the roof / Christianna Brand --The death of Amy Robsart / Cyril Hare --Fen Hall / Ruth Rendell --A very desirable residence / P.D. James --The Worcester enigma / James Miles.

Mary Russell's War And Other Stories of Suspense


Laurie R. King - 2016
    King illuminates the hidden corners of her beloved Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series in this dynamic short story collection.In nine short stories, seven of which have never previously been available in print, and one brand-new, never-before-seen Sherlock Holmes mystery available together for the first time Laurie R. King blends her long-running brand of crime fiction with historical treats and narrative sleight of hand. At the heart of the collection is a prequel novella that begins with England’s declaration of war in 1914. As told in Mary Russell’s teenage diaries, the whip-smart girl investigates familial mysteries, tracks German spies through San Francisco, and generally delights with her extraordinary mind until an unimaginable tragedy strikes.Here too is the case of a professor killed by a swarm of bees; Mrs Hudson’s investigation of a string of disappearing household items and a lifelong secret; a revealing anecdote about a character integral to The God of the Hive; the story of Mary’s beloved Uncle Jake and a monumental hand of cards; and a series of postcards in which Mary searches for her missing husband, Sherlock Holmes. Last but not least, fans will be especially thrilled by Mary's account of her decision, at age ninety-two, to publish her memoirs and how she concluded that Ms. King should be the one to introduce her voice to the world.

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden


Denis Johnson - 2018
    It follows the groundbreaking, highly acclaimed Jesus’ Son. Written in the same luminous prose, this collection finds Johnson in new territory, contemplating old age, mortality, the ghosts of the past, and the elusive and unexpected ways the mysteries of the universe assert themselves. Finished shortly before Johnson’s death in May 2017, this collection is the last word from a writer whose work will live on for many years to come.

The Mammoth Book Of Pulp Fiction


Maxim Jakubowski - 1996
    Action-packed stories featuring hit men, underworld bosses, rogue cops, private dicks, and shady ladies are assembled here, written by such renegade authors as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ed McBain, Jim Thompson, James Ellroy, Robert Bellum, and Ed Gorman.

In the Company of Sherlock Holmes


Laurie R. KingCornelia Funke - 2014
    King, author of the New York Times-bestselling Mary Russell series (in which Holmes plays a co-starring role), and Leslie S. Klinger, editor of the New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, have assembled a stellar group of contemporary authors from a variety of genres and asked them to create new stories inspired by that canon. Inside you ll find Holmes in times and places previously unimagined, as well as characters who have themselves been affected by the tales of Sherlock Holmes. The game is afoot again!

The Complete Short Stories


Ambrose Bierce - 1984
    Brought together in this volume, these stories represent an unprecedented accomplishment in American literature. In their iconoclasm and needle-sharp irony, their formal and thematic ingenuity and element of surprise, they differ markedly from the fiction admired in Bierce's time. Readers familiar with the classic An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge will want to turn to Bierce's other Civil War stories. Also included here are his horror stories, among them The Death of Halpin Frayser and The Damned Thing, and such tall tales as Oil of Dog and A Cargo of Cat.

A Study in Sherlock


Laurie R. KingJacqueline Winspear - 2011
    In the thirteen decades since A Study in Scarlet first appeared, countless variations on that theme have been played, from Mary Russell to Greg House, from 'Basil of Baker Street' to the new BBC Holmes-in-the-internet-age.We suspect that you have in the back of your mind a story that plays a variation on the Holmes theme...And what if these great writers read that proposal and decided that yes, they did have that kind of tale in the back of their minds? The result is A Study in Sherlock, Stories Inspired by the Sherlock Holmes Canon, with stories by Alan Bradley, Tony Broadbent, Jan Burke, Lionel Chetwynd, Lee Child, Colin Cotterill, Neil Gaiman, Laura Lippman, Gayle Lynds and John Sheldon, Phillip and Jerry Margolin, Margaret Maron, Thomas Perry, S.J. Rozan, Dana Stabenow, Charles Todd, and Jacqueline Winspear.