Classic Fiction Mysteries

Paris comes under siege when someone starts killing women on the streets one summer - and Maigret must hatch a plan to lure the murderer out. It was 4 August. The windows were wide open but brought no relief, since they allowed in even more warm air, which seemed to be rising from the melting tarmac, the burning hot stonework and even the Seine itself: one could imagine the river steaming like a pan of water on a stove.

In what many refer to as one of the first and greatest science fiction thrillers, a mysterious stranger wanders into an inn, wrapped head-to-toe in bandages. What lies beneath the bandages is something even more mysterious. As Wells tackles issues of identity, deception, and the deterioration of the human mind, listeners will be drawn into the story of the mysterious man, whose own mistakes end up whisking him into a whirlwind of deceit, terror, and even murder. In the end, the question will be asked: when your sense of self and identity vanish, who will you become?

From Timothy Zahn, Hugo Award winner and New York Times bestselling author of two landmark Star Wars series, comes an original new tale featuring a renegade space pilot, his unusual alien partner, and an unknown cargo that can change the course of galactic history. Jordan McKell has a...

When a self-made man appeals to Maigret for protection at his lavish home, a years-old grudge from the past resurfaces and the inspector finds himself questioning his own motives. Conflict rather than harmony probably reigned in eight out of 10 of the still magnificent houses that surrounded the park. But he had rarely had the opportunity to breath such a strained atmosphere as the one between these walls.

Actor David Ian Davies' telling of Poe's Gothic horror tale "The Tell-Tale Heart" captures this classic narrative of the unnamed murderer in all its exquisite vileness, its self-effacing insanity that poses rationality where none exists.

Accompanied by his trusty sidekicks, Pete Pienaar, John S. Blenkiron and Sandy Arbuthnot, Richard travels across war-torn Europe searching for a man with a secret. A prophet by reputation, the man possesses key information that could guarantee British victory, and he goes by the name of Greenmantle.

With a horse between his thighs and a weapon in his grip, the dashing Brigadier Etienne Gerard, Colonel of the Hussars of Conflans, gallops through the Napoleonic campaigns on secret missions for his beloved Emperor and his country. He encounters danger and hair-breadth escapes but never loses his bravado, his eye for a pretty girl, his boastfulness or his enormous vanity.

In this gripping work of historical fiction, Endore's werewolf, an outcast named Bertrand Caillet, travels across pre-Revolutionary France seeking to calm the beast within. Stunning in its sexual frankness and eerie, fog-enshrouded visions, this audiobook was decidedly influential for the generations of horror and science fiction authors who came afterward.

London, 1849. Charles Dickens has set up Urania Cottage as a sanctuary for fallen women. But he is shocked when the matron's assistant - Patience Brooke - is found hanging outside the property, covered in blood. Desperate to protect the reputation of the Home and to stop a scandal from spreading, Dickens takes the investigation into his own hands. With the help of his good friend, Superintendent Sam Jones of Bow Street, and a description of the suspect as "a man with a crooked face", Dickens's search takes him deep into the filthy slums of Victorian London.

When Philo Drax receives a letter from her wealthy grandfather saying he fears for his life at the hands of the vicious Slape family, she rushes to the rescue. But too late! Katie Slape, a monstrous girl with psychic powers and a penchant for smashing skulls with her hammer, has already finished him off and gotten hold of his cash.

The attempted suicide of a countess and the death of a billionaire in the same luxury Paris hotel send Maigret to the Riviera and then to Switzerland, as he searches for the truth amid the glittering world of the super rich. Eyes half closed, head tilted against the back of his seat, he seemed not to be thinking, as the plane flew over a thick carpet of bright clouds. In reality, he was making an effort to bring names and shadowy figures to life, names and figures that even this morning had been as unknown to him as the inhabitants of another planet.

Many others in the village have said that they would like to see the colonel dead, but a number of people have a more specific interest in his death: the colonel’s young wife, Anne; her lover, the artist Lawrence Redding; Archer, a local man given a harsh sentence by the colonel for poaching. Even the colonel’s daughter, Lettice, desperate for money, says, “If only father would be decent and die, I’d be all right.” These complexities lead to any number of dead ends for investigators. The only one able to see through the blinds and obscurities is Miss Marple, an elderly but sharp-eyed spinster.

A psychological thriller before its time, James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, published in 1824, takes us back to the world of 18th-century Scotland, into a mind haunted by religious obsession, and driven to commit murder. The events are told from several different viewpoints, so that truth and reality appear to dissolve in this disturbing story of the dark legacy of Calvinist doctrine, and how it led one man to madness.

Can You Forgive Her? is the first of the six Palliser novels. Here Trollope examines parliamentary election and marriage, politics and privacy. As he dissects the Victorian upper class, issues and people shed their pretenses under his patient, ironic probe.

There's something special about eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark. With her carefully plaited hair and her sweet cotton dresses, she's the very picture of old-fashioned innocence. But when their neighborhood suffers a series of terrible accidents, her mother begins to wonder: Why do bad things seem to happen when little Rhoda is around?

A novel set in the underbelly of upstate New York that's as hardboiled and punchy as a swift right hook to the jaw, a classic noir for fans of James Ellroy and John D. Macdonald. Isaiah Coleridge is a mob enforcer in Alaska--he's tough, seen a lot, and dished out more. But when he forcibly ends...

'One of the best British crime writers' – Lee Child Roy Grace is about to find out just how dangerous a dead man can be . . . Arriving late for a funeral, James Taylor spots a familiar face in the church – his old schoolfriend Rufus Rorke. Except it couldn’t be him, could it? Because two...

The two strikingly original short novels brought together here - in new translations by award-winning translators - were both literary gambles of a sort for Fyodor Dostoevsky. The first real expression of his genius, The Double is a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare in which a minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelgänger. Written 20 years later under the pressure of crushing debt, The Gambler is a stunning psychological portrait of a young man's exhilarating and destructive addiction.

Getting into Faerie is risky enough. Getting out again may prove impossible. Entering Faerie is enough of a risk, never mind trying to free a changeling. That's never been done before, but that's exactly what has to happen if I'm going to rescue my best friend. So when I run into a half-blood thief who offers to help, I can't exactly say no. I mean, the guy seriously hates the fae. After all, one of them knocked up his mother. Digging deeper into the labyrinthine fae city kingdom, we soon start to unravel a mystery I never could have imagined.

The Bellona Club is the picture of old-world respectability—a gentleman’s retreat where war veterans and aristocrats gather for quiet conversation, brandy, and a game of chess. But on Armistice Day, the peace is shattered when the body of General Fentiman is discovered slumped in his usual chair. At first glance, it seems the elderly war hero simply passed away, but something doesn’t add up. The time of death is unclear, his stiff posture is unnatural, and an inheritance worth half a million pounds hangs in the balance.