Classic Thrillers Mystery

A retired manufacturer has been shot dead by his own pistol, last seen alive by his son-in-law. In this seemingly motiveless murder, Inspector Maigret must rely on his famous intuition to discover the truth. This novel has been published in a previous translation as Maigret and the Black Sheep.

The Thirty-Nine Steps begins John Buchan’s series of spy novels featuring adventurer Richard Hannay. Having just returned from South Africa, he finds life dull until a mysterious American tells him about an assassination plot before being murdered in Hannay’s London flat.

When one of his best inspectors is shot, Maigret decides to book himself into Mademoiselle Clément's well-kept Paris boardinghouse nearby in order to find the culprit. 'What he thought he had discovered, in place of the joyful candour that she usually displayed, was an irony which was neither less cheerful nor less childish, but which troubled him....'

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.

In the coming-of-age story, we follow a young Italian nobleman, Fabrizio Valserra, Marchesino del Dongo, on many adventures, including his experiences at the Battle of Waterloo, and romantic intrigues.

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.

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.

Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight! When young Jim Hawkins unexpectedly inherits a treasure map, he little knows what adventures await him. Pursued by pirates, betrayed by friends and beset by skulduggery, Jim must brave high seas and low cunning before he reaches the shores of Treasure Island. His fellow treasure hunters include the inflexible Captain Smollett, the indefatigable Doctor Livesey and the irrepressible Squire Trelawney.

The death of a homeless man in a condemned building in Les Halles leads Maigret on the trail of the vagrant's mysterious past and an event that happened years ago in the close-knit community of Montmartre.

Nineteen-year-old Frank - thug, thief, son of a brothel owner - gets by surprisingly well despite living in a city under military occupation, but a warm house and a full stomach are not enough to make him feel truly alive in such a climate of deceit and betrayal. During a bleak, unending winter, he embarks on a string of violent and sordid crimes that set him on a path from which he can never return. Georges Simenon's matchless novel is a brutal, compelling portrayal of a world without pity; a devastating journey through a psychological no-man's land.

Three men meet on a ship bound for Haiti, a world in the grip of the corrupt 'Papa Doc' and the Tontons Macoute, his sinister secret police. Brown the hotelier, Smith the innocent American, and Jones the confidence man - these are the 'comedians' of Graham Greene's title. Hiding behind their actors' masks, they hesitate on the edge of life. And, to begin with, they are men afraid of love, afraid of pain, afraid of fear itself.

Everything has a cost. And every act of magic exacts a price from its user---maybe a two-day migraine, or losing the memory of your first kiss. But some people want to use magic without paying, and they Offload the cost onto innocents. When that happens, it falls to a Hound to identify the spell's caster---and Allison Beckstrom is the best there is.

In 1962 and 1963, Thornton Wilder spent 20 months in hibernation, away from family and friends, in the town of Douglas, Arizona. While there, he launched The Eighth Day, a tale set in a mining town in Southern Illinois about two families blasted apart by the apparent murder of one father by the other. The miraculous escape of the accused killer, John Ashley, on the eve of his execution and his flight to freedom triggers a powerful story tracing the fate of his and the victim’s wife and children.

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.

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.

Lanning “Lanny” Budd spends his first 13 years in Europe, living at the center of his mother’s glamourous circle of friends on the French Riviera. In 1913, he enters a prestigious Swiss boarding school and befriends Rick, an English boy, and Kurt, a German. The three schoolmates are privileged, happy, and precocious - but their world is about to come to an abrupt and violent end. When the gathering storm clouds of war finally burst, raining chaos and death over the continent, Lanny must put the innocence of youth behind him.

El coronel no tiene quien le escriba fue escrita por Gabriel García Márquez durante su estancia en París, adonde había llegado, a mediados de los cincuenta, como corresponsal de prensa y con la secreta intención de estudiar cine. El cierre del periódico para el que trabajaba le sumió en la pobreza mientras redactaba en tres versiones distintas esta excepcional novela, que luego fue rechazada por varios editores antes de su publicación.

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.

Sean's found himself trapped in the realm of the demons, and he's also found a mystery there as well - a lioness. How and why she's there, and if she'll help him, he doesn't know yet. But if anyone knows the lay of the land, the demons, and how to get out of there, he figures it would have to be her.

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.