Classic Suspense Fiction

First published in 1911, The Innocence of Father Brown contains stories involving one of the greatest characters in the history of detective fiction: Father Brown. He is a Roman Catholic priest who has an uncanny insight into human evil. Rather than the large serial villains in, for example, Sherlock Holmes stories, the mysteries Father Brown solved were more local murders by small-town crooks, narrowing the suspect list down to those in the area of the crime.

During a quiet spell in June, Maigret, is called to investigate the disappearance of a reputable businessman. When a body is discovered near the famous Père Lachaise cemetery, Maigret struggles to find any clues to the perpetrator and loses his temper when his own reputation is threatened by the case.

Imperious, clever, mysterious: Maigret meets his match in the alluring form of Félicie in book 25 of the new Penguin Maigret series. In his mind's eye he would see that slim figure in the striking clothes, those wide eyes the colour of forget-me-not, the pert nose and especially the hat, that giddy crimson bonnet perched on the top of her head with a bronze-green feather shaped like a blade stuck in it.... Félicie had given him more trouble than all the 'hard' men who had been put behind bars.

In Poirot Investigates, Agatha Christie presents eleven riveting short stories featuring the famous Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. From high-stakes jewel thefts to baffling murders, Poirot faces a variety of complex and puzzling cases that challenge his remarkable intellect and investigative prowess. In these tales, Poirot must unravel a web of deception involving missing persons, secret identities, and shocking crimes, using his keen observation and logical deductions to reveal the truth.

Art teacher Walter Hartright is on the road to London when he encounters an enigmatic woman dressed entirely in white. She's an unnerving portent of strange things to come as Hartright starts a new job as drawing-master at Limmeridge House. There the teacher falls in love with Laura, his betrothed pupil, who bears a striking resemblance to the woman in white. Soon Walter is drawn into a family intrigue of greed, secrets, madness, and revenge.

The Count of Monte Cristo is a tale of revenge and retribution. Edmond Dantes, a young, energetic sailor, is falsely accused of treason on his wedding day and incarcerated in the forbidding Chateau d'If prison. His escape and ultimate revenge on those who wronged him makes this one of the most thrilling stories in French literature, as compelling now as when it was first published in 1846.

Shirley Jackson's third novel, a chilling descent into multiple personalities Elizabeth is a demure twenty-three-year-old wiling her life away at a dull museum job, living with her neurotic aunt, and subsisting off her dead mother’s inheritance. When Elizabeth begins to suffer terrible...

When a man’s headless body is discovered in Paris’ Saint-Martin Canal, Maigret is quick to answer the call. It is in this very neighborhood that he meets a strangely taciturn woman who runs a cafe. Her husband is away on a trip - or so she says. As is often the case, Maigret soon learns that there is more to the story than meets the eye.

Hercule Poirot comes out of retirement to solve one of the most vexing cases of his career. The quiet village of King’s Abbot is still reeling from the death of the widow Ferrars from an overdoes of Veronal, when not twenty-four hours later it is learned that the man she planned to marry, Roger Ackroyd, has been brutally murdered. Prior to his death, Ackroyd had been reading an article in the Evening Post to discover who had been blackmailing his wife over poisoning her first husband. But before he could learn who the blackmailer was, he was stabbed through the neck in his own study.

Dr. Watson is called upon late at night by a female friend of his wife whose husband has been absent for several days. Frantic with worry, she seeks help in fetching him home from an opium den. Watson finds his friend Sherlock Holmes in the den, disguised as an old man, trying to extract information about a new case from the addicts therein.

Maigret's old colleague becomes an unexpected rival in book 24 of the new Penguin Maigret series. In everyone's eyes, even the old ladies hiding behind their quivering curtains, even the kids just now who had turned to stare after they had passed him, he was the intruder, the undesirable. No, worse, he was fundamentally untrustworthy, some stranger who had just turned up from who knew where to do who knew what.

The events of the story occupy a single June day in post-World War I Central London, as wealthy and fashionable society hostess Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party she is to give that evening. Through her thoughts and memories, the voices of others who have touched on her life and will attend her party, Virginia Woolf shows her genius as a writer who is both accessible and popular.

The eclectic surgeon-detective Mr. Reggie Fortune solves a fourth collection of Golden Age mysteries, including: the sudden disappearance of a husband; a skillful but oddly undiscriminating cat burglar; a jewel theft at a society party; a cryptic inscription on an ancient oak chest; a fatal poisoning and a troubled woman; and the whimsical theft of a Persian kitten—which leads Mr. Fortune to a far more chilling and sinister crime.

Children’s classics for decades, Donald J. Sobol’s Encyclopedia Brown stories have garnered a Young Readers’ Choice Award and a Special Edgar Award. In this installment, the 10-year-old detective’s probing questions continue to trip up thieves, frauds, and other scoundrels—from a headless haunter to a slimy slanderer. Kids will love trying to crack each of these 10 cases before the pint-sized super sleuth reveals his solution.

En El Sabueso de los Baskerville, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle nos sumerge en uno de los relatos más icónicos y sobrecogedores del universo de Sherlock Holmes. Tras la misteriosa muerte de Sir Charles Baskerville en las cercanías de su mansión en los desolados páramos de Devonshire, resurge una antigua leyenda familiar: la de un sabueso asesino que persigue a los Baskerville desde generaciones atrás.

Sherlock Holmes se enfrenta a un misterio aparentemente incomprensible: la destrucción sistemática de bustos de Napoleón. Las estatuillas, todas originadas de un mismo molde, son destrozadas una tras otra por un agresor desconocido en Londres. A través de su característico ingenio deductivo, Holmes descubre una trama que va más allá del simple vandalismo. El detective desenmaraña los hilos de un pasado enterrado que impulsa la frenética búsqueda del agresor.

It's Valentine's Day and private detective John Justin Mallory is planning on closing up the office early and taking his partner, Col. Winnifred Carruthers, out to dinner, since he's sure no one else will do so. But before he can turn off the lights and lock the door, a panic-stricken Buffalo Bill Brody visits them. It seems that the Eastminster pet show is being held the next day, and his dragon, Fluffy, the heavy favorite, has been kidnapped.

The most popular and perhaps the greatest of Maupassant's full-length novels, A Woman's Life is the story of the unfortunate Jeanne, a Norman gentlewoman. Avarice and lechery, cruelty and greed, conspire against Jeanne wherever she goes. Maupassant exposes the evil around Jeanne with characteristic detachment and precision, yet his pessimism is, as always, qualified by passages of great lyric beauty, and by the touching sympathy and tenderness with which he portrays his heroine.

A collection of 6 short stories from the golden age of detective fiction, introducing H. C. Bailey's amateur sleuth Mr. Reginald Fortune, surgeon and general practitioner: a man interested in everything, but not in anything in particular, whose vast store of eclectic knowledge makes him just the man to help Scotland Yard unravel the most complex of murders, no matter how privileged or powerful the perpetrator may be...

A desperate young man plans the perfect crime - the murder of a despicable pawnbroker, an old woman no one loves and no one will mourn. Is it not just, he reasons, for a man of genius to commit such a crime - to transgress moral law - if it will ultimately benefit humanity? So begins one of the greatest novels ever written: a powerful psychological study, a terrifying murder mystery, and a fascinating detective thriller infused with philosophical, religious, and social commentary.