Estleman, John Lescroart, Robert Goldsborough, and more.   If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin have been widely flattered almost from the moment Rex Stout first wrote about them in 1934. The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe collects two dozen literary tributes to one of crime fiction’s best-loved private detectives and his Man Friday. Included are: A 1947 pastiche by award-winning crime writer Thomas Narcejac Rollicking new stories written especially for this collection by Michael Bracken and Robert Lopresti Stories by bestselling authors including Lawrence Block and Loren D. Estleman Chapters from Robert Goldsborough’s authorized continuation of the Wolfe series; Marion Mainwaring’s 1955 tour de force Murder in Pastiche; and John Lescroart’s Rasputin’s Revenge, which reimagines a young Wolfe as the son of Sherlock Holmes Also featuring a reminiscence from Rex Stout’s daughter, this is a treasury of witty and suspenseful crime writing for every fan of the portly private detective.

    where magic is a science and science is an art... where the great detective Lord Darcy and the sorcerer Sean O'Lochlainn combine occult skills and brilliant deductions to bring criminals to the King's Justice and thwart those who plot against the Realm. Welcome to a world where murder may be committed by magic most foul, but crime still does not pay - as long as Lord Darcy is on the case.

    . . .In Boston, a disgraced medical student is sent to deliver a research paper that could save her career. . . . Four thousand miles away, in a jungle hospital in Cameroon, a brilliant, reclusive scientist, dying from an incurable disease that threatens to make each tortured breath his last, is on the verge of perfecting a serum that could save millions of lives, and bring others inestimable wealth. . . . In Chicago, a disillusioned private detective, on the way to his third career, is hired to determine the identify of a John Doe, killed on a Florida highway, with mysterious marks on his body.Three seemingly disconnected lives, surging unrelentingly toward one another. Three lives becoming irrevocably intertwined. Three lives in mounting peril, moving ever closer to the ultimate confrontation against a deadly secret society with godlike aspirations and roots in antiquity.Medical student. Scientist. Private eye. Three people who will learn the deeper meanings of brilliance and madness, truth and deception, trust and betrayal.Three lives linked forever by a single vial of blood--the fifth vial.

    The telephone on my desk had the look of something that knows it's being watched. Traffic trickled by in the street below, and there were a few pedestrians, too, men in hats going nowhere."So begins The Black-Eyed Blonde, a new novel featuring Philip Marlowe--yes, that Philip Marlowe. Channeling Raymond Chandler, Benjamin Black has brought Marlowe back to life for a new adventure on the mean streets of Bay City, California. It is the early 1950s, Marlowe is as restless and lonely as ever, and business is a little slow. Then a new client is shown in: young, beautiful, and expensively dressed, she wants Marlowe to find her former lover, a man named Nico Peterson. Marlowe sets off on his search, but almost immediately discovers that Peterson's disappearance is merely the first in a series of bewildering events. Soon he is tangling with one of Bay City's richest families and developing a singular appreciation for how far they will go to protect their fortune.Only Benjamin Black, a modern master of the genre, could write a new Philip Marlowe detective novel that has all the panache and charm of the originals while delivering a story that is as sharp and fresh as today's best crime fiction.

    For devotees of Sherlock Holmes: ingenious, well-crafted stories by the author of The Scarlet Pimpernel.

    He was educated in a country school and, later, attended briefly the University of Kansas before enlisting in the Navy where he served for two years. After he left the Navy in 1908, Rex Stout began writing freelance articles, but made his fortune devising and implementing a school banking system that was adopted in four hundred cities and towns throughout the country. In 1927 he retired from the world of finance and, with the proceeds, left for Paris to write serious fiction. Before turning to detective fiction, he wrote three novels that received favorable reviews, but it was writing detective fiction, and as creator of the Nero Wolfe character, that he become famous as a writer. The first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance, appeared In 1934. It was followed by many others, which established Nero Wolfe on a par with Erle Stanley Gardner’s famous Perry Mason. "Cordially invited to Meet Murder," published originally in "The American Magazine" in 1942, is also known as "Invitation to Murder," but should not be confused with a novella by the same name that appeared in the same magazine in 1953. This is a leasurly-paced story in the Christie tradition, featuring an American version of the English Manorhouse setting with an unusual household.

    "Straub at his spellbinding best".--Publishers Weekly.

    Now the author of the Lincoln Rhyme series ("The Cold Moon" and "The Bone Collector," among others) has compiled a second volume of his award-winning, spine-tingling short stories of suspense.While best known for his twenty-four novels, Jeffery Deaver is also a short story master -- he is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Reader's Award for Best Short Story, and he won the Short Story Dagger from the Crime Writers Association for a piece that appeared in his first short story collection, "Twisted. The New York Times" said of that book: "A mystery hit for those who like their intrigue short and sweet . . . [The stories] feature tight, bare-bones plotting and the sneaky tricks that Mr. Deaver's title promises." The sneaky tricks are here in spades, and Deaver even gives his fans a new Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs story.Deaver is back with sixteen stories in the tradition of O. Henry and Edgar Allan Poe. His subjects range from a Westchester commuter to a brilliant Victorian England caper. With these intricately plotted, bone-chilling stories, Jeffery Deaver is at the top of his crime-writing game.

    It perched concealed at the head of a split and tortuous valley that descended to another far grander. Montana had ritzier ranches, with finer cuisine and glitzier guests. But there were few, if any, so beautiful. Its guests came by word of mouth and returned again and again. ... more » And thus it was with the Cooper family. For the last two weeks in June, they always took cabins six and eight. This was their fourth visit and it would be their last, the vacation that would change their lives forever.On a crystalline Montana morning, two backcountry skiers find the body of a young women embedded in the ice of a remote mountain creek. All through the night police work with floodlights and chainsaws to extract her. Identifying her, however, takes no time at all. Abbie Cooper is wanted for murder and acts of ecoterrorism, and her picture is on law enforcement computers all across the country. But how did she die? And what was the trail of events that led this golden child of a loving family so tragically astray?A devastating journey of discovery that extends from the streets of New York to the daunting grandeur of the Rocky Mountains, The Divide tells the story of a family fractured by betrayal and struggling in search of lost happiness. It explores the pain we inflict on those we love the most, and charts the passions and needs, the dashed hopes and disillusionments that connect and divide all men and women.

    Tonight the audience waits to hear Miles discuss recent developments in his sister's case -- unaware that pieces of this complex puzzle of violence, unknown even to the author, are about to be revealed.Six years earlier, life was much simpler for everyone involved, especially seventeen-year-old Ashley Spencer, a popular high school soccer star. Then one night an intruder entered Ashley's home and murdered her father and her best friend. Traumatized and suffering from a crippling sense of survivor guilt, Ashley is ready to give up on both soccer and life until help comes from an unexpected source -- a scholarship to an elite private school is extended to her by school dean Casey Van Meter. The school quickly becomes a haven for both Ashley and her mother, Terri. As Ashley regains her sense of self through the school's soccer program, Terri joins a writing group for adults led by Joshua Maxfield, a former literary wunderkind who has disappeared from the bestseller lists since his second book was panned by both critics and fans.Then tragedy strikes again and Ashley has to run for her life, unaware that the key to her survival is in the one book she's afraid to read -- Sleeping Beauty.

    For James, that stranger is awakened when his wife, Arlette, proposes selling off the family homestead and moving to Omaha, setting in motion a gruesome train of murder and madness. In "Big Driver," a cozy-mystery writer named Tess encounters the stranger along a back road in Massachusetts when she takes a shortcut home after a book-club engagement. Violated and left for dead, Tess plots a revenge that will bring her face-to-face with another stranger: the one inside herself. "Fair Extension," the shortest of these tales, is perhaps the nastiest and certainly the funniest. Making a deal with the devil not only saves Dave Streeter from a fatal cancer but provides rich recompense for a lifetime of resentment. When her husband of more than twenty years is away on one of his business trips, Darcy Anderson looks for batteries in the garage. Her toe knocks up against a box under a worktable and she discovers the stranger inside her husband. It's a horrifying discovery, rendered with bristling intensity, and it definitely ends a good marriage. Like Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight, which generated such enduring films as The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me, Full Dark, No Stars proves Stephen King a master of the long story form.(front flap)Contains:1922Big DriverA Fair ExtensionA Good Marriage

    Detective-Adjutant Gripstra and Sergeant de Gier of the Amsterdam police are sent to investigate what looks like a simple suicide, but they are immediately suspicious of the circumstances.    This now-classic novel, first published in 1975, introduces Janwillem van de Wetering’s lovable Amsterdam cop duo of portly, worldly-wise Gripstra and handsome, contemplative de Gier. With its unvarnished depiction of the legacy of Dutch colonialism and the darker facets of Amsterdam’s free drug culture, this excellent procedural asks the question of whether a murder may ever be justly committed.

    There are people here, in plain sight, that no-one ever notices at all.DS Alexandra Cupidi has done it again. She should have learnt to keep her big mouth shut, after the scandal that sent her packing - resentful teenager in tow - from the London Met to the lonely Kent coastline. Even murder looks different in this landscape of fens, ditches and stark beaches, shadowed by the towers of Dungeness power station. Murder looks a lot less pretty.The man drowned in the slurry pit had been herded there like an animal. He was North African, like many of the fruit pickers that work the fields. The more Cupidi discovers, the more she wants to ask - but these people are suspicious of questions.It will take an understanding of this strange place - its old ways and new crimes - to uncover the dark conspiracy behind the murder. Cupidi is not afraid to travel that road. But she should be. She should, by now, have learnt.Salt Lane is the first in the new DS Alexandra Cupidi series.

    Showcasing many of the organization’s bestselling authors as well as rising stars in the genre, here are twenty-five brand-new, never-before-published stories packed with murder, mystery, and mayhem.• A cunning criminal thinks he can use a child to take the rap for his crimes.• A hospital intern turned body snatcher• A priest who comes face-to-face with his wife’s murderer on death row• A Confederate soldier comes home to his love, but changed by more than just the war . . . he comes back wrong.• The discovery of a flying saucer in the ocean depths brings one man to the brink of a massive revelation.• A dying man’s last request proves to his ex-wife that he’s still rotten to the core.• A clandestine operative finds himself caught in a wicked game of confusion . . . but who is calling the shots? No matter what type of thriller you listen to, you’ll find something here that will entertain you . . . and perhaps a new writer you’ll cherish for years to come.

    Ridley Pearson traces a famous author of horror tales who becomes trapped in a real one after his wife vanishes while jogging. Joyce Carol Oates travels to a New Jersey racetrack where the animals that break down are of the two-legged type. Lawrence Block tells the story of Keller, a hitman for hire who happens to live in Greenwich Village, loves spicy food, and collects stamps as a hobby. And Scott Wolven plunges us into the world of an ex-con who takes a job at a private and very illegal Nevada racetrack where each day millions are won and lost. Mostly lost.As Carl Hiaasen notes in his introduction, “The stories in this collection would do honor to any anthology of short literature. More than transcending the genre of crime, they blow away its nebulous boundaries.” The Best American Mystery Stories 2007 is a powerful collection certain to delight mystery aficionados and all lovers of great fiction.