Benedictines in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective. His tools are the logic of Aristotle, the theology of Aquinas, the empirical insights of Roger Bacon—all sharpened to a glistening edge by wry humor and a ferocious curiosity. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey, where “the most interesting things happen at night.”

    Ordinary people plunge into insurmountable personal debt and fall prey to dangerous webs of underground creditors-so dangerous, in fact, that murder may be the only way out. A beautiful young woman vanishes, and the detective quickly finds she was not whom she had claimed to be. Is she a victim, a killer, or both? In a country that tracks its citizens at every turn, how can two women claim the same identity and then disappear without a trace?

    There's no identification on the body. Only the dogged work of a pair of local newspapermen and a graduate student in forensics turns up any clues. But that's just the beginning of the mystery. Because the more they learn about the man and the baffling circumstances of his death, the less they understand. Was it an impossible crime? Or something stranger still...? No one but Stephen King could tell this story about the darkness at the heart of the unknown and our compulsion to investigate the unexplained. With echoes of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and the work of Graham Greene, one of the world's great storytellers presents a surprising tale that explores the nature of mystery itself...

    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.

    Volume 2. Introduction / by Loren D. Estleman --The hound of the Baskervilles --The valley of fear --His last bow : The adventure of Wisteria Lodge : The singular experience of Mr. John Scott Eccles ; The tiger of San Pedro ; The adventure of the cardboard box ; The adventure of the red circle ; The adventure of the Bruce-Partington plans ; The adventure of the dying detective ; The disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax ; The adventure of the devil's foot ; His last bow --The case-book of Sherlock Holmes : The adventure of the illustrious client ; The adventure of the blanched soldier ; The adventure of the Mazarin stone ; The adventure of the three gables ; The adventure of the Sussex vampire ; The adventure of the three Garridebs ; The problem of Thor Bridge ; The adventure of the creeping man ; The adventure of the lion's mane ; The adventure of the veiled lodger ; The adventure of Shoscombe old place ; The adventure of the retired colourman.

    Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent’s Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna’s limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank Minna, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable, so who cares if the tasks he sets them are, well, not exactly legal. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, one of Lionel’s colleagues lands in jail, the other two vie for his position, and the victim’s widow skips town. Lionel’s world is suddenly topsy-turvy, and this outcast who has trouble even conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head. Motherless Brooklyn is a brilliantly original homage to the classic detective novel by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.

    We first meet ex-policeman Bernie Gunther in 1936, in March Violets (a term of derision which original Nazis used to describe late converts.) The Olympic Games are about to start; some of Bernie's Jewish friends are beginning to realize that they should have left while they could; and Gunther himself has been hired to look into two murders that reach high into the Nazi Party. In The Pale Criminal, it's 1938, and Gunther has been blackmailed into rejoining the police by Heydrich himself. And in A German Requiem, the saddest and most disturbing of the three books, it's 1947 as Gunther stumbles across a nightmare landscape that conceals even more death than he imagines. (For a review of Kerr's latest novel, The Grid, see our Thrillers section.)

    Police waste no time in making an arrest, but the victim's family isn't convinced that the right man is in custody. They ask Thóra Guðmundsdóttir, an attorney and single mother of two, to investigate. It isn't long before Thóra and her associate, Matthew Reich, uncover the deceased student's obsession with Iceland's grisly history of torture, execution, and witch hunts. But there are very contemporary horrors hidden in the long, cold shadow of dark traditions. And for two suddenly endangered investigators, nothing is quite what it seems ... and no one can be trusted.

    When she’s called to investigate a gruesome murder near a mountainside town, she’s paired with a young male inspector she’s not sure she trusts. But she has no choice—in this remote town full of secrets, eerie folktales and primal instincts, the killer seems drawn to a group of local children, who may be in grave danger.As Teresa inches closer to the truth, she must confront the possibility that her faculties, no longer what they once were, may fail her before the chase is over.

    Investigating the strange ways in which love, in spite of everything - time, war, betrayal - can last, Zweig tells the story of Ludwig, an ambitious young man from a modest background who falls in love with the wife of his rich employer. His love is returned, and the couple vow to live together, but then Ludwig is dispatched on business to Mexico, and while he is there the First World War breaks out. With travel and even communication across the Atlantic now shut down, Ludwig makes a new life in the New World. Years later, however, he returns to Germany to find his beloved a widow and their mutual attraction as strong as ever. But is it possible for love to survive precisely as the impossible?

    When the celebrated actor Eugen Bischoff is found dead in his garden pavilion, suspicion falls immediately on Baron von Yosch, a well-to-do army officer who was once the lover of the dead man’s wife. By all appearances—the door was locked from the inside when the two shots rang out—the actor took his own life, but someone, or something, drove him to it. The baron sets out to learn all he can about the actor’s death in order to clear his name. Meanwhile, within a few days, similar apparent suicides are reported. What started out as a straightforward quest to establish Bischoff’s last deeds and discover the truth of his death becomes a search through the ages for an invisible enemy identified only by the actor’s dying breath, when he whispered: “. . . the Day of Judgment.” Leo Perutz combines his hallmark blend of suspense and the fantastic in this spine-tingling mystery.

    Now he's a drifter, on the run after escaping from a mental institution. One afternoon he meets Fay, a beautiful young widow. She is smart and decent -- at least when she's sober. Soon Collins finds himself involved in a kidnapping scheme that goes drastically wrong almost before it even begins. Because the kid they've picked up isn't like other kids: he's diabetic and without insulin, he'll die. Not the safest situation for Collins, a man for whom stress and violence have long gone hand-in-hand.

    He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. This is the Code of the Private Eye as defined by Raymond Chandler in his 1944 essay 'The Simple Act of Murder.' Such a man was Philip Marlowe, private eye, an educated, heroic, streetwise, rugged individualist and the hero of Chandler's first novel, The Big Sleep. This work established Chandler as the master of the 'hard-boiled' detective novel, and his articulate and literary style of writing won him a large audience, which ranged from the man in the street to the most sophisticated intellectual.

    He has an operating theatre in the basement of his chateau and keeps his partner Eve imprisoned in her bedroom, a room he has equipped with an intercom and 300-watt speakers through which he bellows orders. Eve is only allowed out to be paraded at cocktail parties and on the last Sunday of each month, when the couple visit a young woman in a mental asylum. Following these outings, Lafargue humiliates Eve by forcing her to perform lewd sexual acts with strangers while he watches through a one-way mirror. In alternating chapters, Jonquet introduces seemingly unrelated characters - a criminal on the run after murdering a policeman, and an abducted young man who finds himself chained naked in a dark chamber, forced to endure all manner of physical torture at the hands of a mysterious stranger, whom he calls 'Mygale', after a type of tropical spider. All of these characters are caught in a deceitful web, doomed to meet their fate.

    The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahlia—and so begins the greatest manhunt in California history. Caught up in the investigation are Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard: Warrants Squad cops, friends, and rivals in love with the same woman. But both are obsessed with the Dahlia—driven by dark needs to know everything about her past, to capture her killer, to possess the woman even in death. Their quest will take them on a hellish journey through the underbelly of postwar Hollywood, to the core of the dead girl's twisted life, past the extremes of their own psyches—into a region of total madness.