Penguin Crime

Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane marry and go to spend their honeymoon at Talboys, an old farmhouse in Hertfordshire which he has bought her as a present. The honeymoon is intended as a break from their usual routine of solving crimes (him) and writing about them (her), but it turns into a murder investigation when the seller of the house is found dead at the bottom of the cellar steps with severe head injuries. - Wikipedia.

I am still uncertain which surprised me more, the telegram calling my attention to the advertisement, or the advertisement itself. The telegram is before me as I write. It would appear to have been handed in at Vere Street at eight o'clock in the morning of May 11, 1897, and received before half-past at Holloway B.O. And in that drab region it duly found me, unwashen but at work before the day grew hot and my attic insupportable.

George Smiley was doing a favour for an old friend, Ailsa Brimley who edited a small religious newspaper. She had received a letter from a woman reader saying she wasn't mad and that her husband was trying to kill her. Stella Rode was the writer of the letter and was the wife of an assistant master at Carne School in Dorset. By the time the letter had arrived Stella was dead. George Smiley goes to the school to listen, ask questions and to think. He intends to uncover, layer upon layer, the complexities, skeletons and hatreds that comprised this little English institution.

Colonel St. George was definitely an unwanted guest as far as Mary Gould was concerned--but how could she throw out the charming, disturbing Englishman who had saved her husband's life? There was something secret and suspicious about him, something both heroic and roguish. Yet when the shadow of a monstrous horror darkened her life, the Colonel proved to be surprisingly adept in the fantastic and chilling climax to this fast-paced tale of suspense and brooding terror

Reminiscences of a childhood and youth in the South of the eighties and nineties, and of later years in New York.

A series of cruel letters upends life in a small village, and Miss Silver searches for the anonymous scribe. It is through her friend Frank Abbott, of Scotland Yard, that Miss Silver first learns of the anonymous letters. A widowed cousin of his, living in a small country village, is being tortured by an unknown author who insinuates that the young woman’s husband may not have died of natural causes. It is a case of the kind of cruelty that is all too common in the countryside, and the governess-turned-detective listens with only polite interest. Then the first death comes. Another target of the letter-writing campaign, tortured by the threats to reveal her darkest secrets, drowns herself in the manor-house pond. The Yard sends Abbott to unmask the sinister letter-writer, and he brings Miss Silver along as an undercover agent, masquerading as a tourist as she attempts to stop the next death before it happens. Miss Silver Mystery #30