Classic Mystery

Randy and Oliver Melendy awake one morning full of gloom. Their brothers and sisters are away, the house seems forlorn and empty, and even Cuffy, their adored housekeeper, can't pick up their spirits. Will they have to face a long and lonely winter?

Join Giovanni Vecchio and Beatrice De Novo as they travel to a hidden island on the far edge of China and seek the help of an ancient immortal court. Can they weave their way through the tangled web of centuries-old alliances and ruthless feuds to find what they've been looking for? Friends will be revealed, enemies will find them, and a dangerous secret will come to light. The Force of Wind is the third book in the four-part Elemental Mysteries series. It is a paranormal mystery/romance for adult listeners.

Europe, 1940. As war rages across the continent, America watches anxiously from the sidelines. And President Franklin Roosevelt has been keeping an even closer eye on developments in the Third Reich. At the president’s personal request, Lanny Budd gained the confidence of the Nazi high command and began transmitting valuable information back to the White House. Espionage is a dangerous game, however, and Presidential Agent 103 soon finds himself a target of the French Resistance fighters he is attempting to assist.

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.

In the only novel Conrad set in London, The Secret Agent communicates a profoundly ironic view of human affairs. The story is woven around an attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1894 masterminded by Verloc, a Russian spy working for the police, and ostensibly a member of an anarchist group in Soho. His masters instruct him to discredit the anarchists in a humiliating fashion, and when his evil plan goes horribly awry, Verlac must deal with the repercussions of his actions.

'The Third Man' is Graham Greene's brilliant recreation of postwar Vienna, a 'smashed dreary city' occupied by the four Allied powers. Rollo Martins, a second-rate novelist, arrives penniless to visit his friend and hero, Harry Lime. But Harry has died in suspicious circumstances and the police are closing in on his associates...'The Fallen Idol' is the chilling story of a small boy caught up in the games that adults play. Left in the care of the butler and his wife whilst his parents go on a fortnight's holiday, Philip realises too late the danger of lies and deceit.

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.

As a young double agent infiltrating the Soviet spy network in Nazi-occupied Paris, Andrew Hale finds himself caught up in a secret, even more ruthless war. Two decades later, a coded message draws Professor Andrew Hale back into Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Elements from his past are gathering in Beirut, including ex-British counterespionage chief and Soviet mole Kim Philby, and a beautiful former Spanish Civil War soldier-turned-intelligence operative.

As a dense yellow fog swirls through the streets of London, a deep melancholy has descended on Sherlock Holmes, who sits in a cocaine-induced haze at 221B Baker Street. His mood is only lifted by a visit from a beautiful but distressed young woman - Mary Morstan, whose father vanished 10 years before. Four years later, she began to receive an exquisite gift every year: a large, lustrous pearl. Now she has had an intriguing invitation to meet her unknown benefactor and urges Holmes and Watson to accompany her.

From the acclaimed master of action and suspense. The all-time classic. Paul Sherman of Interpol's Narcotics Bureau flies to Amsterdam on the trail of a dope king. With enormous skill the atmosphere is built up: Amsterdam with its canals and high houses; stolid police; psychopaths; women in distress; and above all, murder.

'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...

Penniless graduate Blair Wilkes has always felt one step behind everyone else. Unemployed and out of luck, with the uncanny ability to cause havoc wherever she treads, when she receives a job offer from a strange town called Fairy Falls, she's certain it's too good to be true. It turns out Fairy Falls isn't just eccentric: it's magical...and so is Blair.

Avoided by the Coast Salish tribes for generations, Hurst Island is one of the last remnants of untracked wilderness on the British Columbia coastal frontier. Not yet overtaken by logging or commercial fishing, it is a final outpost where myth lives on, heedless of human progress or desire. As their boat sinks, Amy and Ian find themselves stranded on this island, unaware of what they are about to face.

In Agatha Christie’s short story, “The Cornish Mystery,” Poirot is asked to help a Cornwall woman who believes she is being poisoned by her husband. When Poirot and Hastings visit her home, they are shocked to find she has died. But is it really her husband who did the poisoning? This short story originally appeared in the November 28, 1923 issue of The Sketch magazine.

The Moonstone, a priceless yellow diamond, is looted from an Indian temple and maliciously bequeathed to Rachel Verinder. On her 18th birthday, her friend and suitor Franklin Blake brings the gift to her. That very night, it is stolen again. No one is above suspicion, as the idiosyncratic Sergeant Cuff and the Franklin piece together a puzzling series of events as mystifying as an opium dream and as deceptive as the nearby Shivering Sand.

For Portier de Savin-Duplais, failed student of magic, sorcery's decline into ambiguity and cheap illusion is but a culmination of life's bitter disappointments. Reduced to tending the library at Sabria's last collegia magica, he fights off despair with scholarship. But when the king of Sabria charges him to investigate an attempted murder that has disturbing magical resonances, Portier believes his dreams of a greater destiny might at last be fulfilled.

Richard Hanney is an ordinary man, drawn into mysteries he does not understand, and no one is willing to help him. In these 2 suspense novels written by the father of the modern spy thriller, Hanney must outwit villains in unnerving situations that lay bare the thin veneer separating civilized man from the barbarian.

Susan Wittig Albert delights mystery lovers with this series based on the life and stories of beloved English children's author Beatrix Potter. When Beatrix finds an abandoned infant, Captain Woodcock and Dimity care for the child as Beatrix and her furry and feathered friends search for its mother.

The newly formed Ministry of Fine Arts has a staffing problem - one minister dead within six months of its inception, his successor snuffed out shortly before the General Election. When a third victim, Permanent Secretary Edwin Pompfret is fatally crushed by the fall of a giant bust, Inspector Julian Rivers is drawn into a case of murder of artistic devilment.

Peter Marlin's wife is found strangled and he becomes the prime suspect. She'd only just returned from an unexplained absence of several months. And during that time, Peter had found a new lover. Everything points to the husband but there's no real proof. Inspector John Crow is called in to help the local police. But his new colleagues aren't keen on an outsider. And Crow must solve the case before anyone else dies.