A failed painter, he is now a failed forger. Awaiting him are two policemen anxious to remind him of his sins, and a letter from a woman with whom he had a passionate affair in his youth. Now dying, she summons him to tell him that he has a daughter, Connie.Sloane agrees to return to New York, a city of potent memories, to look for his daughter. But Connie is locked in a relationship with a man the police believe has killed once and who will not hesitate to kill again. Sloane has to decide whether to walk away or stay and fight for her. And the deeper the police dig into Vincent Delaney's business affairs, uncovering underworld associations, the more Delaney feels cornered, and the more unpredicable and dangerous he becomes.

    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.

    Today, he discovers she was murdered. Tomorrow, he will learn her most guarded secrets, leaving him to wonder: Who was the woman I married? Why was she murdered? And, above all . . . Who murdered her? Revenge is not sweet: It is essential. COLD VENGEANCE: Devastated by the discovery that his wife, Helen, was murdered, Special Agent Pendergast must have retribution. But revenge is not simple. As he stalks his wife's betrayers--a chase that takes him from the wild moors of Scotland to the bustling streets of New York City and the darkest bayous of Louisiana--he is also forced to dig further into Helen's past. And he is stunned to learn that Helen may have been a collaborator in her own murder. Peeling back the layers of deception, Pendergast realizes that the conspiracy is deeper, goes back generations, and is more monstrous than he could have ever imagined--and everything he's believed, everything he's trusted, everything he's understood . . . may be a horrific lie. Nothing is what it seems. TWO GRAVES: For twelve years, he believed she'd died in an accident. Then, he was told she'd been murdered. Now, FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast discovers that his beloved wife, Helen, is alive. And Pendergast must embark on a furious cross-country chase to rescue her. But all this turns out to be mere prologue to a far larger plot: one that unleashes a chillingly--almost supernaturally--adept serial killer on New York City. His pursuit of the murderer will take Pendergast deep into the trackless forests of South America, to a hidden place where the evil that has blighted both his and Helen's lives lies in wait . . . a place where he will learn all too well the truth of the ancient proverb: Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.

    She also gave us Come, Tell Me How You Live, a charming, fascinating, and wonderfully witty nonfiction account of her days on an archaeological dig in Syria with her husband, renowned archeologist Max Mallowan. Something completely different from arguably the best-selling author of all time, Come, Tell Me How You Live is an evocative journey to the fascinating Middle East of the 1930s that is sure to delight Dame Agatha’s millions of fans, as well as aficionados of Elizabeth Peters’s Amelia Peabody mysteries and eager armchair travelers everywhere.

    What she never expected was to find herself at the heart of a 200-year-old mystery that still has the power to put lives on the line. And with each new lead she pursues, death follows hard on her heels….

    His business card describes him as the “Vinyl Detective” and some people take this more literally than others. Like the beautiful, mysterious woman who wants to pay him a large sum of money to find a priceless lost recording — on behalf of an extremely wealthy (and rather sinister) shadowy client.  Given that he’s just about to run out of cat biscuits, this gets our hero’s full attention. So begins a painful and dangerous odyssey in search of the rarest jazz record of them all…

     She is terrified – but begs Poirot not to find and punish her killer. Once she is dead, she insists, justice will have been done.Later that night, Poirot learns that three guests at a fashionable London Hotel have been murdered, and a cufflink has been placed in each one’s mouth. Could there be a connection with the frightened woman? While Poirot struggles to put together the bizarre pieces of the puzzle, the murderer prepares another hotel bedroom for a fourth victim...

    And he delivers, too, a chilling invitation to the four men responsible for his conviction: ‘You four, I summon to meet me at the time appointed, at the Assize of the Dying.’The meaning of the sinister words becomes clear almost immediately with two unexpected deaths. And a young couple, convinced that an innocent man has been wrongly condemned, determine to unmask the real murderer—before he strikes again...Murder is committed, too, in ‘Aunt Helen’, a story of blind obsession and psychological suspense that starts with what looks suspiciously like the perfect crime...Two vintage tales of murder most foul from the bestselling pen of Ellis Peters.

    When an evening of fun and games turns to murder, Miss Marple plays by her own rules to solve the whodunit.

    There is a long and honourable tradition of great detectives and Dirk Gently does not belong to it. Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Dirk Gently, however, does not like to eliminate the impossible.In Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency a simple search for a missing cat reveals two ghosts, a dodo, an Electric Monk, the devastating secret that lies behind the whole of human history and threatens to bring it to a premature close, and, finally, the utterly terrifying reason why Richard MacDuff has had a sofa stuck on his stairs for three weeks.As The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul opens a passenger check-in desk at Terminal Two, Heathrow Airport, shoots up through the roof engulfed in a ball of orange flame. The usual people try to claim responsibility. However, no rational cause can be found for the explosion - it was simply designated an act of God. But, thinks Dirk Gently, which God? And why? What God would be hanging around Terminal Two of Heathrow Airport trying to catch the 15.37 to Oslo?What do a dead cat, a computer whizz-kid, an electric monk, quantum mechanics, a chronologit over 200 years old, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and pizza have in common? Apparently not much, until Dirk Gently begins his investigation.