Classic Thrillers

'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.

A celebrated writer by the time the war broke out in 1914, Maugham had the perfect cover for living in Switzerland. Multilingual and knowledgeable about many European countries, he was dispatched by the Secret Service to Lucerne - under the guise of completing a play. An assignment whose danger and drama appealed both to his sense of romance and of the ridiculous. Ashenden is a collection of stories rooted in Maugham's own experiences as an agent, reflecting the ruthlessness and brutality of espionage, its intrigue and treachery, as well as its absurdity.

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.

A novelist ambles down the lanes of a cosy country village, replete with Tudor houses and quaint cottages. In her writer's mind she pictures the sordid truth beyond the veneer, a seemingly laughable proposition - until the coming of the letters. Anonymous letters from a poisoned pen, sowing discord and defaming everybody from the Rector to the 'queen of the village' Miss Decima Asprey. Naturally, where there is venom in the air and dark secrets are threatening to come to light, the shadow of death is not far behind.

A sinister case of deadly poisoned chocolates from Sodbury Cross's high street shop haunts the group of friends and relatives assembled at Bellegarde, among the orchards of 'peach-fancier' Marcus Chesney. To prove a point about how the sweets could have been poisoned under the nose of the shopkeeper, Chesney stages an elaborate memory game to test whether any of his guests can see beyond their 'black spectacles'; that is, to see the truth without assumptions as witnesses.

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.

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.

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....'

K. J. Parker's new novel is the remarkable tale of the siege of a walled city, and the even more remarkable man who had to defend it. A siege is approaching, and the city has little time to prepare. The people have no food and no weapons, and the enemy has sworn to slaughter them all. To save...

Helen Turrell is a young and well-off single woman, living a the countryside village. But one day, she decides to travel to southern France and returns home with a baby called Michael. Helen says that Michael is the son of her brother, George, who died in India after falling off a horse. However, the truth is quite different and secretly, Helen tells Michael that he can call her "Mummy". Why did Helen travel to France? Is Michael really her nephew? Find out the truth in Rudyard Kipling’s story "The Gardener" from 1925. B. J.

In 2015 the Quantum Bomb exploded. An accident at an atom-smasher has fractured reality and opened Earth - now called Otopia - to waves of immigration from other dimensions, home to demons, fairies, elves and elementals. It is now 2021 and Lila Black, a special operative condemned to live as a cyborg after losing her limbs on a dangerous mission, has been assigned as bodyguard to Zal, a charismatic elven rock star.

Private investigator Charles Maddox is surprised when he is approached by Edward Tulkinghorn for help. The feared and shadowy attorney offers Charles a handsome price he can't refuse to do some sleuthing for a client. Charles learns that Sir Julius Cremorne has been receiving threatening letters, and now Tulkinghorn wants him to find and stop whoever is responsible. But what starts as a simple open-and-shut case swiftly escalates into something bigger and much darker. As he cascades toward a collision with powerful forces, Charles will need all the assistance he can get…

For The Penguin Book of Murder Mysteries, writer and anthologist Michael Sims did not summon the usual suspects. He sought the unfamiliar, the unjustly forgotten, and little-known gems by writers from outside the genre. This historical tour of one of our most popular literary categories includes stories never before reprinted, features rebellious early “lady detectives," and spotlights former stars of the crime field—Austrian novelist Auguste Groner and prolific American Geraldine Bonner among them.

When a tramp is recovered from the Seine after being badly beaten, Maigret must delve into the man's personal circumstances to figure out just who wanted to kill him. This novel has been published in previous translations as Maigret and the Dosser and Maigret and the Bum.

Vivian Lestrange - celebrated author of the popular mystery novel The Charterhouse Case and total recluse - has apparently dropped off the face of the Earth. Reported missing by his secretary Eleanor, whom Inspector Bond suspects to be the author herself looking for publicity, it appears that crime is afoot when Lestrange's housekeeper is also found to have disappeared. Bond and Warner of Scotland Yard set to work to investigate a murder with no body and a potentially fictional victim.