Classic English Mystery

The Secret Seven have a new meeting place - a treehouse! But someone else is using it, too. The gang is furious, but then they learn the intruder is in big trouble and needs their help.

A short story from the British Library Crime Classic collection Final Acts. The Great Detective recounts the tale of an old case to Inspector Cockrill, which, solved too late, failed to bring about a conviction. But Cockrill draws his own conclusions on the case.

In The Secret of the Indian, Omri vowed to lock his magical cupboard forever. But now, in The Mystery of the Cupboard, he finds an old journal written by his great-great aunt that reveals that Omri is compelled to open the cupboard just once again.

Homicide detective Kara Gillian has a special talent: she can sense the "arcane" in our world, and there's quite a bit of it, even in Beaulac, Louisiana. She's also a summoner of demons, and works on a task force that deals with supernatural crimes. Her partners are attractive and smart FBI agents, but they're not summoners, and they're not telling Kara why they are on this special force with her.

Milos Vesely, aka Cowboy, kills Nazis. After the events of SecondWorld, a failed attempt by modern Nazi forces to carry out a worldwide genocide and claim the planet for the Aryan nation, he now hunts down the enemy. Most of them are running for cover. But others, as Cowboy discovers beneath the sands of Tanis, Egypt, are searching for a way to strike again.

When Harold Merefield returned home in the early hours of a winter morning from a festive little party at that popular nightclub, the Naxos, he was startled by a gruesome discovery. On his bed was a corpse. There was nothing to show the identity of the dead man or the cause of his death. At the inquest, the jury found a verdict of ‘death from natural causes’ - perhaps they were right, but yet?

Both the skeleton and the corpse have died with suspicious convenience for Georgia Wells, a monstrous but charming actress with a raffish entourage. Georgia's best friend just happens to be Valentine, a top couturière and Campion's sister. In order to protect Valentine, Campion must unravel a story of blackmail and ruthless murder....

Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 - 30 years after its original publication - Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder. One of the 20th century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator.

A fourth floor room, a door locked with the key inside, no way in, no way out. Edgar Allan Poe is the true grandfather of the murder mystery. Decades before Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, Poe gave us C. Auguste Dupin, a man able to solve mysteries through observation and deduction.

Step into a world of intrigue, danger, and adventure with Agatha Christie's The Man in the Brown Suit. This thrilling audiobook introduces listeners to Anne Beddingfeld, a young woman with a thirst for excitement who finds herself entangled in a mystery far beyond her imagination. When Anne witnesses a tragic accident in a London Tube station, her curiosity leads her to uncover a cryptic clue left behind by a mysterious man in a brown suit.

The gods are dying. But for one man, death is only the beginning. Murdered as a ritual sacrifice, amateur thief and professional charmer Dustin Graves mysteriously survives, finding himself gifted with strange, dark magic. Then more dead bodies turn up. Some are human, but one is a god of the old world, slain at his own doorstep.

A deadly swarm of earthquakes shakes the planet. In the sky above, the sun appears to stand still. While the world reels from the vast destruction, George Pierce and the Cerberus Group, a team of scientific and historical experts, uncover an imminent threat straight out of history that must be stopped. But not everyone wants them to succeed. An apocalyptic death cult, made up of suicidal martyrs and true believers who will do whatever it takes to ensure the destruction of all life on Earth, goes head-to-head with a billionaire tech genius commanding an army of robots on a quest to own the sun itself.

Poet Gabriel Syme believes in the beauty of order and, as such, is recruited by Scotland Yard to an anti-anarchist police corp. While undercover, Syme meets fellow poet Lucian Gregory, a verse writer devoted to disorder, who introduces him to London’s anarchist underworld. Just as Gregory is to be elected to the central council, Syme’s cover is revealed and he is forced to make a decision that sends the cabal into chaos. Is anyone in this underground faction who or what they seem? Syme suddenly realizes he doesn’t have all the answers.

Read the best mystery and adventure short stories. Be it cozy, historical, detective or murder mystery stories; our collection includes them all: The Red-Headed League by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Arrow of Heaven by G. K. Chesterton, The Sign of the Broken Sword by G. K. Chesterton, The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allan Poe, The Master of Mystery by Jack London.

Toward the end of the Renaissance period, John Dee and Edward Kelly famously engaged in experiments with alchemy, crystal balls, and conversations with otherworldly entities during this important chapter of real occult and magical history. Here Adams explores the life of Dee and his relationship with Kelly, regarding these experiments. He offers examples of the sorts of dialogue that occurred, which Dee dutifully recorded for the sake of posterity. Adams also documents the tragic final years of the lives of both men, after they went their separate ways.

Is the ‘perfect murder’ possible? Can that crime be committed with such consummate care, with such exacting skill, that it is unsolvable—even to the most astute investigator? In this unique collection, legendary crime writers Margery Allingham, Anthony Berkeley, Freeman Wills Crofts, Ronald Knox, Dorothy L. Sayers and Russell Thorndike each attempt to create the unsolvable murder, which Superintendent Cornish of the CID then attempts to unravel.

From the strange case of 'The Red-Headed League' to the extraordinary tale of 'The Engineer's Thumb', Sherlock Holmes and his assistant Dr Watson grapple with treachery, murder and ingenious crimes of all kinds. But no case is too challenging for the immortal detective's unique power of deduction.

Published in 1948, this cautionary tale follows a lone protagonist who struggles under the rule of a repressive totalitarian government. Set in a future version of England, called Airstrip One, the novel is famous for its imagined language that conjures a cruelly cynical authoritarian regime. One of the most popular novels in the English language, it is part political thriller and part science fiction, and it established the word Orwellian to describe official deception, unwarranted surveillance, and revisionist history by the state.

When Mark Trevelyan dies on a journey to a remote Pacific atoll, the verdict that it was natural causes doesn't convince his brother, Mike. The series of violent attacks that follows only adds to his suspicions. Just two clues - a notebook in code and a lump of rock - are enough to trigger off a hazardous expedition and a violent confrontation far from civilization....

Sarah Crowe left Atlanta, and the remnants of a tumultuous relationship, to live alone in an old house in rural Rhode Island. Within its walls she discovers an unfinished manuscript written by the house's former tenant - a parapsychologist obsessed with the ancient oak growing on a desolate corner of the property. And as the gnarled tree takes root in her imagination, Sarah risks her health and her sanity to unearth a revelation planted centuries ago.