Perennial mystery library

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

Presents the traditional nursery rhyme 'There was a crooked man'. On board pages. Suggested level: junior.

Clinton Shartelle doesn't seem like a good choice to run a political campaign in Albertia. For one thing, he's American, and Albertia is a small coastal republic in Africa, about to be cut loose from the English Crown. For another, Shartelle is Southern and fiercely proud of it, and his ideas about racial politics veer unpredictably from progressive to rigidly old-fashioned. Rich natural resources make Albertia attractive to businessmen on both sides of the Atlantic, opening it up to political corruption. For his part, Shartelle is hired to make sure that a British industrialist's favored candidate wins the presidency. But the opposition is backed by the CIA, for whom murder is just another political tool.

When the unpopular president of King's College, Dublin, begins getting threatening anonymous letters, he asks retired professor John Daly to investigate. Unfortunately for Daly and his friend, Garda Inspector Mike Kelley, there is no shortage of suspects -- the entire faculty loathes the president, who is cruel, arrogant, and a bully. A witty look at academe in the 1950's and full of quotable observations.

Conventions of college professors frequently produce scholarship and conviviality, occasionally bad temper and quarrels, but they seldom result in murder. The members of the English department of Wilton, a small New England university, are having a quiet drink together in the convention hotel when one of them drops dead. Gradually, a group of men who have known each other for years realize that among them is a killer. When classes resume in an atmosphere of mutual suspicion, it becomes clear that the clue to the murder lies in the professional relationships among the people in the department. The teaching duties of the murdered man are taken over by a breezy and delightfully wacky old Englishwoman. She is a distinguished medievalist who fancies herself an amateur detective and insists on trying to help the police, to the discomfiture of the young detective in charge of the case. Layer after layer of hidden motives is revealed until it is apparent that each member of the department had good reason to commit the murder. Scholarly serenity and academic in-fighting give way to horror at the imminent danger of the killer's striking again. Only the Englishwoman retains her aplomb, alternating her teaching with dog-training, too much bourbon, and unfazed confidence in her far-fetched attempts at detection. Deadly Meeting, a fast-moving, urbane thriller, is a unique combination of terror and humor set against the tranquility and erudition of academe. Robert Bernard is the pseudonym of Robert B. Martin, Professor of English at Princeton University and author of scholarly works on Victorian literature. Under his pseudonym he has written another mystery, Death Takes a Sabbatical.

With the Allied invasion of Italy about to get underway British POWs at an Italian-run camp plan an escape before they can be turned over to the Germans. Unfortunately, there's a traitor in their midst. Gilbert was a POW at such a camp during the war.