Paul Halter

Seven people receive invitations to a singular experience during a weekend in Cornwall in a castle reputedly built on the site of King Arthur's, and situated on an island tenuously connected to the mainland. The sinister host announces that a murder will be committed that night, shows them a sword embedded in a stone --which none of them is able to pull out --and a golden chalice which he claims is the Holy Grail sought by the Knights of the Round Table. Thus begins a nightmarish series of events including impossible murders, the disappearance of the Grail, and communication with the mainland cut off. Has the vengeful king indeed returned? And is there any connection to the recent release of the host's homicidal half brother?

Did Harold Vickers, the best-selling author of impossible crimes foresee his own death, or did he possibly even arrange it? When two guests knock on her door with dinner invitations, Mrs. Vickers is dumbfounded, for her husband has been locked in his study for several days. Yet there are sounds and cooking smells emanating from the room, and when the door is broken down, a dead body resembling her husband is slumped over the fully-laden dinner table with its hands and face in a pan in which the oil is still boiling. The room is sealed and nobody could have got out of the room without being seen, yet the food is still cooking. A mysterious half-filled bowl of water sits beneath the shuttered windows.

176 pages ; 23 cm

Presents a collection of impossible crime stories, including "The Dead Dance at Night," "The Tunnel of Death," and "Rippermania."

"In this fascinating novel, one of the masters of impossible crime fiction takes on one of the greatest criminals of all time. Sticking scrupulously to the facts, Paul Halter explores the Jack the Ripper murders and offers his own theories about the identity of the monster, what drove him, and how he was able to vanish under the noses of the police during the spree of escalating horror which sent the citizens of fog-ridden London into paroxysms of fear in the autumn of 1888"--Back cover.

> The fairy-like Stella Deverell is a girl of many gifts. Not only can she vanish into thin air, she can turn rocks into gold and predict the future, including the deaths of several inhabitants of the village of Pickering, who are all plucked off cliffs by the wind, close to where her own father committed suicide. >Meanwhile, why does the mysterious Mr. Usher, who lives in the manor on a steep hill where Stella once lived, avoid all contact with the villagers? And why did many of the previous inhabitants, including her own mother, throw themselves off the hill when the wind was at its height? >Twist and Hurst investigate the apparent miracles, past and present, and reach an astonishing conclusion.