Published in 1937, it's a fascinating story of murder and intrigue, with the killer dying half-way through, and his narrative picked up by the policeman who'd been trailing him. Unique. And worth it just for the fake quotes by leading literary figures of the day.

    Feeling terribly alone and afraid, she finds comfort in the company of a strange woman she knows only as "Miss Froy." But comfort soon turns to horror when Miss Froy mysteriously vanishes without a trace. Fearing madness, risking death, Iris desperately tries to solve the sudden disappearance of her traveling companion-a woman no one else on the journey remembers seeing at all!

    "But she was strangled to death. And the murderer had to leave after he had killed. He's not here now. But in some fashion, explain it how you like, he or she or some damnable witch of the low tide managed to leave without a footprint in all that wet sand!"

    Christie burst onto the literary scene in 1920, with The Mysterious Affair at Styles; her last novel was published in 1976, a career longer than even Conan Doyle’s forty-year span.The truth is that it was due to the success of writers like Anna Katherine Green in America; L. T. Meade, C. L. Pirkis, the Baroness Orczy, and Elizabeth Corbett in England; and Mary Fortune in Australia that the doors were finally opened for women crime-writers. Authors who followed them, such as Patricia Wentworth, Dorothy Sayers, and, of course, Agatha Christie would not have thrived without the bold, fearless work of their predecessors—and the genre would be much poorer for their absence. So while Agatha Christie may still reign supreme, it is important to remember that she did not ascend that throne except on the shoulders of the women who came before her—and inspired her—and who are now removed from her shadow once and for all by this superb new anthology by Leslie S. Klinger.Featuring: Mary Fortune, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Ellen Wood, Elizabeth Corbett, C. L. Pirkis, Geraldine Bonner, Ellen Glasgow, L. T. Meade, Baroness Orczy, Augusta Großer, M. E. Braddon, Anna Katherine Green, Carolyn Wells, Susan Glaspell

    1929 genteel country house guests are shocked by the death of their famous guest, world traveler Mountjoy, in a bathtub. Suspects include his quiet (but extremely competent) fiancee Eleanor, pompous Alastair and forceful son Garde, engaged to lovely Dorothy, plus curious naturalist Carstairs.

    Scotland Yard's Inspector Roderick Alleyn arrives to find a complete collection of alibis, a missing butler, and an intricate puzzle of betrayal and sedition in the search for the key player in this deadly game.

    The crime writer was found 11 days later in a hotel in Harrogate,Yorkshire, claiming to be the victim of amnesia. Up till now none of her biographers has come up with conclusive evidence as to what Agatha Christie did in the first 24 hours after she disappeared or whether her memory loss was genuine. Although the notoriety made Agatha Christie famous, she never recovered from the intense press scrutiny, and the private anguish that surrounded the episode ensured that she made no reference to it in her memoirs. Illustrated with many hitherto unpublished photographs, Jared Cade's riveting book—on which a BBC television documentary has been based—provides all the answers, including startling accounts by the novelist's surviving relatives, that reveal for the first time why she staged the disappearance with the help of a co-conspiritor and how it all went terribly wrong.

     Joe never wanted to come back to Arnhill. After the way things ended with his old gang—the betrayal, the suicide—and what happened when his sister went missing, the last thing he wanted to do was return to his hometown. But Joe doesn’t have a choice, not after a chilling email surfaces in his inbox: I know what happened to your sister. It’s happening again . . . Lying his way into a teaching job at his former high school is the easy part. Facing off with onetime friends who aren’t too happy to have him back in town—while avoiding the enemies he’s made in the years since—is tougher. But the hardest part of all will be returning to the abandoned mine where his life changed forever, and finally confronting the horrifying truth about Arnhill, his sister, and himself. Because for Joe, the worst moment of his life wasn’t the day his sister went missing. It was the day she came back.

    The dead man had switched rooms the night before with a stranger he met and drank with in the hotel bar. And before that, he’d registered under a fake name at the hotel, told his drinking companion a fake story about his visit to the Windy City, and seemingly made no effort to contact the actress, performing in a local show, to whom he was married. All of which is more than enough to raise eyebrows among those who discovered the body.Enter theatre critic and amateur sleuth Riley Blackwood, a friend of the hotel’s owner, who endeavors to untangle this puzzling tale as discreetly as possible. But when another detective working the case, whose patron is unknown, is thrown from a yacht deck during a party by an equally unknown assailant, the investigation makes a splash among Chicago society. And then several of the possible suspects skip town, leaving Blackwood struggling to determine their guilt or innocence—and their whereabouts.Reissued for the first time in over eighty years, The Great Hotel Murder is a devilishly complex whodunnit with a classical aristocratic setting, sure to please Golden Age mystery fans of all stripes. In 1935, the story was adapted for a film of the same name.