Classic Thrillers

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.

Nothing can come between a mother and her child in this haunting sequel to Eden’s Children from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Flowers in the Attic and Landry series—now popular Lifetime movie events. Faith Eden’s brief foray into motherhood is marked by tragedy...

Poirot’s peace is disturbed when a local gentleman, Roger Ackroyd, is found murdered in his study. Clues include a vanished letter, a scrap of cambric cloth, a goose quill, and an elaborately tooled Tunisian dagger. We follow Poirot, aided by the village doctor, James Sheppard, as he traces his way through a tangle of suspects that include Ackroyd’s sister-in-law, niece, secretary, adopted son, and housemaids—all of whom appear to have motives for killing him.

Maigret stumbles upon a series of murders in Fontenay-le-Comte while visiting an old school friend. On his way home from a conference, Maigret stops to visit an old school friend in Fontenay-le-Comte. A man in the same train car introduces himself and asks if Maigret has come to help solve the murder case. In fact, the man's brother-in-law had been murdered four days earlier, followed by the murder of a local widow in the same way, a blow to the head with a pipe.

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....'

Englishman Edward Prendick finds himself shipwrecked on the open ocean. When a passing ship takes him aboard and revives him, things are starting to look less gloomy for the young scientist. Yet little does he know things about to get much worse. He is taken to an abandoned island occupied only by Dr. Moreau, a disgraced English scientist for his unethical treatment of live creatures. Prendick finds that the Doctor has been up to old habits, using the island's animals to create animal-human hybrids.

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.

It may not be front page news, but Island Times food and cocktails columnist Hayley Powell is now happily married. Before she can set sail on her honeymoon cruise, however, Hayley's mom, Sheila, pays an impromptu visit - and promptly becomes the prime suspect in a murder. The victim is Sheila's old high school rival, Caskie Lemon-Hogg, known for her homemade blueberry pies and her home-wrecking flirtations. As Hayley teams up with her BFFs Liddy and Mona to clear her mother's name, Sheila reunites with Liddy's mom Celeste and Mona's mom Jane for their own amateur sleuthing.

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.

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 Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the first novel Nabokov wrote in English, is a tantalizing literary mystery in which a writer’s half brother searches to unravel the enigma of the life of the famous author of Albinos in Black, The Back of the Moon, and Doubtful Asphodel. A characteristically cunning play on identity and deception, the novel concludes “ I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.”

'Past acquaintances resurface in the sun-drenched south of France in this new translation.' The palm trees around the railway station were motionless, fixed in a Saharan sun.... It really felt as if they were stepping into another world, and they were embarrassed to be entering it in the dark clothes that had been suited to the rainy streets of Paris the evening before.

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.

Arc kept his end of our bargain and helped me with my family's problem. Now it was time to return the favor. He's been on the run ever since waking up next to his dead on again/off again girlfriend. He swears he didn't kill her. I believe him. He also says she wasn't in his bed when he went to sleep. That's a harder pill to swallow. Arc is a very powerful witch in his own right. And from what I've seen, when he sets a ward, it sticks. So how did the killer not only get through his wards, but plant poor Sonya's body right next to him without him knowing it?

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.

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.

The streets of London have been home to many great detectives since the days of Sherlock Holmes and Watson, with some of the best authors in the genre taking to the short story form to pit their sleuths against crimes ranging from murders on the Tube to heists from the capital's finest jewellers. Featuring a roster of Scotland Yard's meticulous best, a cohort of daring doctors and a cadre of characterful private investigators, this new selection by Martin Edwards includes 18 vintage mystery stories which showcase the city's most compelling classic cases.

The Birches was one of the grand mansions of the 1920s, with a ballroom, tennis courts, and, of course, a swimming pool. But after the crash of '29, when Lois and Judith's father killed himself to escape his debts, the family turned the summer home into a fulltime retreat from the world. Decades later, Judith is the queen of New York society, a fast-living beauty whose nerves are beginning to fray, while Lois still lives in the dilapidated old mansion, writing mystery novels to pay the bills. She is about to encounter a mystery of her own.

Published in January 1922, The Secret Adversary is the second detective fiction novel by British crime novelist Agatha Christie. The book introduces the characters of Tommy Beresford and Prudence Tuppence Cowley, two out-of-work 20-somethings in post-war London. The two agree to form The Young Adventurers, Ltd, hiring themselves out with the slogan no reasonable offer refused. They are quickly enlisted to solve the mysterious disappearance of a young woman who was entrusted with sensitive diplomatic documents amid the sinking of the RMS Lusitania.

Long before Western writers had even conceived the idea of writing detective stories, the Chinese had developed a long tradition of literary works that chronicled the cases of important district magistrates. One of the most celebrated of these was Judge Dee, who lived in the seventh century.