Crime Club

Four wealthy women, sailing from New York to Genoa aboard the Italian luxury liner Beatrice Cenci: Mrs. Abercrombie, regal, imperious, and accustomed to giving orders, but confined to a wheelchair by a heart attack. Valerie Meadows, her nurse companion, equally, if less publicly, rich; a woman with a past. Gloria Grandi Pontini, a self-made career woman, with a husband who's jealous enough to kill. Susan Emery, a young Englishwoman who soon will be fabulously wealthy, if she lives long enough to gain her inheritance. Then there's Butler, a secretive chain-smoker with a blurry newspaper photograph, and a contract for murder. As the passengers frolic in the sumptuous elegance of her staterooms and cabarets, a killer stalks the decks under a full moon.

Singers and musicians are gathered for a course in folk music that will occupy a weekend in the fantastic country mansion called Follymead. Most come only to sing or to listen, but one or two have non-musical scores to settle. When brilliantly talented Liri Palmer sings "Black, black, black is the color of my true-love's heart!" she clearly has a message for someone in the audience. Passions run high, and there is murder brewing at Follymead.

> What could be more pleasant, or indeed more healthy, than a skiing vacation high in the Alps at a delightfully secluded and quiet resort: or so thought Chief Inspector Tibbett and his wife, Emmy. Because one really didn't need to ski all that much--a token effort on the nursery slopes and then one could sit back and relax in the sun with a long drink and an exhausted air. >Not so. >Not when that exclusive little resort so neatly and conveniently set on a border may in fact be cover for the nefarious smuggling of who knows what kind of contraband--a delightful way-station for, say, drugs on their way to market via the innocuous bags and pocket books of innocent holiday-makers. >Or are they innocent? >One of them at least is not. For one of them is willing to kill. >And suddenly the sunny, snowy slopes, the high crevasses and hidden falls become ominous. Even the staid and safe-seeming chair lift is monstrously threatening, dangerous beyond the wildest nightmares of a timid skier. >For death is much longer lasting than a broken leg.

Dan Braille who is a novelist and sick takes a walk on a stormy night, the question is why? The police are eventually called by his family when he doesn't return and it is discovered he had claimed someone was trying to poison him. But a more horrible conclusion emerges.

No one knew that Lord Charlton, one of Britain's wealthiest bachelors, had an heir until the terminally-ill textile magnate summoned his solicitor, Ambrose Quince, to his London townhouse in Belgrave Terrace. There he revealed that he wished to alter his will in favor of his nephew, the son of his black-sheep brother. The boy had been secretly adopted by American parents and taken to live in the United States when his own parents were killed in a bombing raid on London during World War II. His present whereabouts: unknown. When Lord Charlton dies suddenly, he takes with him the secret of Simon Warwick's identity. Two men come forward claiming to be Warwick. Then one turns up dead in Ambrose Quince's office and Henry Tibbett, Chief Superintendent of Scotland Yard, is faced with a double mystery: Who is the murderer? And who is Simon Warwick?

"Cockfighter is a fiction of the American south loosely modeled, according to the author, on Homer's Odyssey. Frank Mansfield is the titular cockfighter--a silent and fiercely contrary man whose personal code and obsession with winning allows him no mercy on himself or those around him. Mansfield haunts the cockpits, bars, and roads of the rural South in the early 1960s, offering reflections on honor and gaming, as well as a stark look at manhood, class, and sex."--Page 4 of cover.

An opera company in Manchester is struggling not only with attempting to get recognition and support, but also with the world's most obnoxious mezzo soprano. When she is murdered, the police struggle also, because there are too many motives and too many people who despised her. A sophisticated and witty mystery story by Robert Barnard with a surprising twist or two before the denouement.

Classics. Detective and mystery stories. Latest range of classic crime novels from the 20th century, published with stylish retro cover artwork.

Professor Belville-Smith had bored university audiences in England with the same lecture for fifty years. Now he was crossing the Australian continent, doing precisely the same. Never before had the reaction been so extreme, however, for shortly after an undistinguished appearance at Drummondale University, the doddering old professor is found brutally murdered.

From the book: Tommy Hambledon, back in England, was a gift that the intelligence department lost no time in using. He was an espionage agent par excellence with the additional qualifications of having been a practical police officer for many years. When one ship after another sank mysteriously not long out of Portsmouth harbor, Tommy was called on to find the source of the trouble. The case of the sinking ships turned into the case of the murdered MacGregor, and Mr. Hambledon of the Intelligence functioned as a police officer as well as a government agent. His activities, accompanied by a running fire of his ironic, humorous comments on an England he had not know for twenty years, constitute a superlatively entertaining mystery story.

FOR THE TWISTED AND TALENTED, MURDER IS A GAME Scotland Yard Chief Superintendent John Coffin is properly skeptical of the evil reputation of the house at No. 22, Church Row. True, the house has seen violent death over the centuries. None of it suspicious. Until now. Malcolm Kincaid, student. Bill Egan, recidivist. Terry Place, villain. Edward, Irene and Nona Pitt, victims. Phyllis Henley, policewoman. Why have they died? Coffin suspects something more than a haunted house. He sees a human, complex web of relationships, interlocking and interacting in a way he can't yet fathom, and in which people get caught up and destroyed--as they play into the game of a very clever killer.

Twelve people sat down for dinner at Strontfield Park, William Fent’s ancestral home. Thirteen would have been most unlucky. For the host, however, the evening could not have been unluckier. By midnight he was dead—killed instantly when his motorcar smashed into another on a bad bit of road. The problem for Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan was the autopsy. The victim, it seemed, was about to die in any event. Along with the cold cucumber soup, crown of lamb, raspberry crémets, and a fine aged port, someone served the lord of the manor a dose of deadly poison. But which of the surviving eleven had the opportunity… and who had the motive to want him dead?

As I've often told you, you suffer from a pathological trust in the human race. ... One day I can see it getting you into serious trouble. And who knows, that time may just have come.... Martha Crayle's latest errand of mercy did seem to be having rather unpleasant repercussions. Harboring a young lady who had applied for assistance at the National Guild for Unmarried Mothers was something that Martha was more than happy to do until the girl could get settled. Which didn't take long, because within twenty-four hours a husband materialized. He should have been the answer to this maiden's prayer. Except for one thing: he had a bullet in him. For the first time she could remember, Martha Crayle doubted the motives of someone else. And in so doubting, she discovered an elaborate tissue of deceit that dramatically changed her life. In fact, it almost ended it....

> To Sarah Hollis and her flat-mates a ramshackle villa in the French Pyrenees seemed to offer the perfect holiday; 'romantic, restful, remote' was how the advertisement described the Villa Abercrombie. >Sarah went ahead of the others in her own little car. On the way she had met by chance a man called Arthur Crook, though she could scarcely believe his assertion, made with hearty and cosy vulgarity, that he was by profession a lawyer. A time would come when Sarah would have need of Crook's services . . .

Brigadier Basil Patricott, presently engaged on hush hush business for the foreign office, is a man able to cope with anything - except his two small motherless sons. As a result they run wild in the company of an eccentric Irish pigeon fancier, living with his sinister brother in a house of mysterious locked doors. Then one of the boys goes exploring, and what he sees behind those doors marks him down for immediate death. 'She has the gift of creating instantly credible characters' Sunday Times 'Twists and turns all over the place' Observer

The murder of young York Cragg, stabbed like a pin-cushion until the stuffing comes out, is the first of two violent killings. His twenty-four-year-old wife Easter, every inch a lady, refuses to move out of the house where he is found quite dead, and riddled with knife wounds. Meanwhile, her father-in-law, Jason Cragg, and an enigmatic new friend, Nathaniel Sapperton, try to unmask the killer. Clue number one is a photograph of an actress found in Cragg's dresser drawer ...

The scene is Helsinki's splendid harbour overlooked by a South American Embassy where the Ambassador carries out his ambassadorial duties. Every human drama in the calendar takes place at some time or another in the small cosmos he surveys, including the one that begins on his own front doorstep in the pale early light of a new day. It involves a kind old Russian who befriends drop-outs; a red-headed cosmetic demonstrator from New England on a business tour of Northern Europe; an English business executive turned street busker with a missing ear; and a wild Lapp reindeer farmer from the Arctic Circle who is becoming Americanized. None of it need have happened if the Lapp had not lost his nerve about the fortune he was carrying in a plastic bag, but why he did so and what the consequences were will provide Joan Fleming's many fans with one of the best and brightest of her scintillating entertainments.