Cock Robin mystery

> Haltingly, a boy tells his fearful story to Scotland Yard officials - how he alone had witnessed from the vantage point of his commuter train a scene of terror in a dingy room . . . a blood-chilling tableau framed in a lighted window, glimpsed for a moment between patches of fog, and then gone. Chief-Inspector Johnson listens tolerantly, yet official credence can hardly be given to such a tale. Terry Byrnes is an impressionable, imaginative lad. No crime of violence has been reported in the Battersea area, and if the boy has witnessed murder, where is the corpse? But if Scotland Yard is not worried, Janet Lapthorn is; and sometimes a fretful woman can be a powerful agent in the processes of justice. She has a number of questions which demand answers. Why have her letters to her close friend, Felicity Hilton, gone unanswered? Why has Felicity abandoned her husband, Alastair? Why has Alastair lied about his wife's whereabouts? To come straight to the point, where is Felicity Hilton? The evidence is disjointed. The clues are scattered. But slowly the mists of conjecture dissolve - as the police, like patient archaeologists themselves, reconstruct the hideous form and face of an unspeakable crime.

Ludovic Travers saw it happen. He saw a strange young woman assault the great Clement Foorde, and all because Foorde had expressed his dislike for a certain best-selling novel. Was it a publicity stunt? Travers wondered, but then the matter went out of his mind until he heard on the radio one night that the author of the novel in question had been drowned in a Sussex river. Everyone, including the police, thought the affair to be no more than a tragic accident; everyone except the dead man's brother, who came to see Travers at the Broad Street Detective Agency with a piece of information that placed the Case of The Silken Petticoat in an entirely new light. Christopher Bush again proves himself a master of the true detective story and provides plenty of hard thinking and fast action before a solution is reached.

The urbane Ludovic Travers is engaged on what seems like a fairly routine assignment-investigating for a client the possibility that his aunt was a victim of the wealthy-widows racket. But as might be expected in anything involving the redoubtable Mr. Travers, the pace quickens and the plot thickens. To the original ring of the puzzle are added two others: blackmail and MURDER. The problem is to put the three rings together and come out with a solution, for they all seem completely separate and unrelated. But rest assured. Christopher Bush, that old master of the genuine detective story, solves the whole affair with his usual grand flourish.

Brad Withers, president of the Sloan Guaranty Trust, asks senior banker John Putnam Thatcher as a personal favor to help negotiate a property settlement that is at the contentious center of the pending divorce of his sister and her husband, millionaire blueblood Gil Austin. Thatcher travels to veddy-veddy upscale Shaftesbury, Connecticut, just in time for the murder of Austin’s intended bride, who is found with her neck broken in a closet at the local inn. Was she murdered in a fit of passion by one of the parties affected by the divorce, or did someone have an even more compelling motive than jealousy? The second of Emma Lathen’s witty mysteries featuring elegant, urbane John Putnam Thatcher, senior vice president and head of the trust department at Sloan (third largest bank in the world) and a formidable ferreter-out financial - and other - secrets.

Inspector Mallett mystery - 6 Francis Pettigrew mystery - 5 Francis Pettigrew, on holiday on Exmoor, relives memories of finding a dead body as a child--and then he finds a dead body on the same spot, in very similar circumstances. When the body subsequently disappears and reappears, he tries simply to keep out of the whole business, but his old friend Inspector Mallet, now retired, gets him involved in solving the mystery.

Review from fantasticfiction dot com: "Hector Berrenton returns home from hospital after a serious car accident to find a terse note: San Podino. This is yours. Fallon next. Suspecting Berrenton's car has been tampered with, the North Sussex Police call in Scotland Yard. Chief Inspector John Poole, put in charge of the investigation, quickly discovers that three years earlier Berrenton and his partner, Jocelyn Fallon, had been on trial accused of fraud. The crime they were accused of was in connection with a Bolivian goldmine, San Podino, and though the two men were acquitted, a number of investors suffered considerable financial loss. Soon Inspector Poole is dealing with attempted murder . . ."

Lian Trevor was forced to make a hurried decision. Stranded in Buenos Aires, she must choose between remaining in her very dangerous predicament, or marrying a stranger. It was like something out of a dream...or a nightmare. Lian didn't want to be Ricardo Mendoza's wife for the next six months; nor did she want the cash settlement he promised her.

At first it seems that Lord Henry Grayle has taken an overdose of sleeping medicine, but the autopsy reveals a tiny amount of scopolamine along with the draught - harmless in itself, but fatal when mixed . . . A poisoner with apparently expert knowledge is at work in the great house at Tassart. But from what motive, and how? Before he can find an answer to these questions, Detective Inspector John Poole is faced with a second, more horrible murder. And when there are shocking revelations both above and below stairs, Poole starts to see light breaking on the horizon.

Omnibus composed of the three books: The singing sands, A shilling for candles, and The daughter of time. Classic mysteries.

For forty years, the Sloan Guaranty Trust has been administering the Schneider family trust. Now that the last of the Schneider siblings is dying, the heirs are pushing for a payout. All the ones that can be found, that is; black sheep grandson Robert came back from World war II and dropped out of sight, to everyone else’s relief. Sloan senior trust officer John Putnam Thatcher quickly learns that it would be very much in the family’s interest if Robert never reappeared. Throw into the mix a love nest, an estranged wife, a pending and potentially highly lucrative stock offering, and a very convenient blizzard, and Thatcher is faced with a murder that none of the suspects could possibly have committed. The first of Emma Lathen’s witty mysteries featuring elegant, urbane John Putnam Thatcher, senior vice president and head of the trust department at Sloan (third largest bank in the world) and a formidable ferreter-out of financial - and other - secrets.

> When the car of eminent sociologist Sir John Drewson is stolen from an airport car park, Detective Chief Superintendent Mitchell quickly links the theft to a failed wages snatch in south London. But only a few days later a body is found in the boot of the Jaguar, and not long after that a young woman drowns near to Sir John's home. >Returning from his trip abroad to a double murder enquiry, Sir John and those that surround him find themselves embroiled in a cat-and-mouse game of discovery and evasion. As suspicion clouds the air, time is running out to catch the killer.

Gillian lives happily with her elderly aunt, a retired doctor and former missionary, in a small English city. Gillian and Max want to marry but how will Aunt Olive support herself alone? The solution seems to be to hire a live-in couple--but Olive's demands are odd, the couple has secrets, and their little dog is headed for trouble.

There was something unique about the Case of the Treble Twist. It isn't often one gets a preview of a case or hovers round its fringes four years before it breaks, but that was just what happened here. The preview began the evening Ludovic Travers had a drink with Chief Inspector Jewle, and first heard the name of Harry Tibball, suspect involved in a series of big-scale robberies, Then a few months later Tibball's body was found in a wrecked car not far from a newly burgled house in Bedfordshire. The surviving accomplice was caught and gaoled, but nothing was recovered and nothing more discovered concerning Tibball's past history. Three years went by, and Travers had virtually forgotten the whole business when a pleasant-voiced woman from America rang the Broad Street Agency and asked him to undertake a highly confidential assignment. It proved to be a voice from the past, for it belonged to the daughter of the last man Tibball had robbed.

> Ludovic Travers had never come across a more ingenious fraud - three of them, in fact. All were perpetrated in only twenty-four hours. One was in Liverpool, the second and third in Southampton and London. The same two people, posing as an American married couple, had purchased a diamond ring at each of three jewellery stores, paying for all three with beautifully forged traveller's cheques to the tune of about two thousand pounds. The thieves had then done a highly successful vanishing act. >Shortly after Ludovic Travers is called in on the case, he is diverted from it by the search for a missing heir, one of the twin grandsons of an old friend. The twin on the scene - the Heavenly Twin, Travers calls him - is apparently doing very well. The other has definitely gone wrong, and has also disappeared. >On the missing twin's trail, Travers encounters yet another diversion: a jewel robbery in a country house in Hampshire. And then two more forged cheques turn up. Are they red herrings or pieces of the same puzzle?

"I'm sorry, gents. I thought for a moment I'd been coshed." An odd sort of way in which to thank two helpful strangers after a nasty accident in a City street, and one bound to provoke speculation; especially when the strangers happen to be Ludovic Travers and his senior operative, Mr. Hallows, of the Broad Street Detective Agency. There was in fact something altogether a bit furtive and even familiar about the welldressed man who had measured his length on the slippery road surface; so much so for Hallows that he tried a spot of spontaneous "tracking", only to be eluded with a skill that could have been practised. But this curious brief encounter seemed to have no real significance until by a quirk of fate it tied in with Travers' investigations into the matter of Julian Matching's young wife who had disappeared with some valuable jewellery belonging to the family business, and so became part of the case of the extra grave. Here is Christopher Bush at his most urbanely baffling, with a tale of murder and robbery that will please all connoisseurs of the genuine detective story.