This collection features 42 crime stories by authors such as Margery Allingham, G.K. Chesterton, Edgar Wallace and L.P. Hartley.

Julian Barnes

Earl Derr Biggers

John Buchan

John Dickson Carr A curse shall befall anyone who takes the bronze lamp out of Egypt, so a seer has said. Lady Helen Loring thinks such tales are sheer poppycock. She takes the lamp back to England, she places it on the mantelpiece at Serven Hall, and she disappears, just as the seer said.

Raymond Chandler Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe is working for the Sternwood family. Old man Sternwood, crippled and wheelchair-bound, is being given the squeeze by a blackmailer and he wants Marlowe to make the problem go away. But with Sternwood's two wild, devil-may-care daughters prowling LA's seedy backstreets, Marlowe's got his work cut out and that's before he stumbles over the first corpse.

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

agatha christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha. Christie

Colin Dexter

Carter Dickson

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Loren D Estleman

Janet Evanovich

Jasper Fforde Pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and intertextual whimsy, Jasper Fforde's outrageous The Eyre Affairputs you on the wrong footing even on its dedication page, which proudly announces that the book conforms to Crimean War economy standard.

Fforde's heroine, Thursday Next, lives in a world where time and reality are endlessly mutable—someone has ensured that the Crimean War never ended for example—a world policed by men like her disgraced father, whose name has been edited out of existence. She herself polices text—against men like the Moriarty-like Acheron Styx, whose current scam is to hold the minor characters of Dickens' novels to ransom, entering the manuscript and abducting them for execution and extinction one by one. When that caper goes sour, Styx moves on to the nation's most beloved novel—an oddly truncated version of Jane Eyre—and kidnaps its heroine. The phlegmatic and resourceful Thursday pursues Acheron across the border into a Leninist Wales and further to Mr Rochester's Thornfield Hall, where both books find their climax on the roof amid flames.

Fforde is endlessly inventive: his heroine's utter unconcern about the strangeness of the world she inhabits keeps the reader perpetually double-taking as minor certainties of history, literature and cuisine go soggy in the corner of our eye. The audacity of the premise and its working out provides sudden leaps of understanding, many of them accompanied by wild fits of the giggles. This is a peculiarly promising first novel. —Roz Kaveney

Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde Word-of-mouth among readers often does more to make an author's name than any publicity campaign. That's certainly the case with Jasper Fforde, and The Well of Lost Plots will be eagerly devoured by his ever-growing coterie of admirers. Fforde writes playful and exhilarating books (which make delightful sport with the very art of fiction itself), and the experience his work offers the reader is quite unique. It's little wonder he has virtually created his own market. As in Lost in a Good Book and The Eyre Affair, this new novel is as much about itself and the whole world of books as it is about its putative plot. But a plot is needed so that Fforde can sustain his amazing inventiveness, and the narrative is kicked into action with the return of literary detective Thursday Next.

It's almost impossible to summarise the amazing adventures in which the beguiling (and confused) Ms Next becomes involved, but after she leaves Swindon (and her life inside an unpublished book called Caversham Heights), she becomes involved in the inauguration of a golden age of fictional narrative. But this turns out to be a very dangerous experience, and she finds herself having strange encounters with Dickens' Miss Havisham (even more eccentric than she was in Great Expectations) and enduring an unsettling journey into the world of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. But who is the villain laying waste to her memories? And will she come to terms with the fact that her husband Landen exists only in her mind?

As this synopsis indicates, The Well of Lost Plots is a truly unique jeu d'esprit. It helps to be familiar with many of the books being riffed on here, but even if you're not, this will be one of the most idiosyncratic and often hilarious experiences you will find a within the pages of a book. Jasper Fforde enthusiasts know that already. —Barry Forshaw

Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde The word of mouth on Jasper Fforde has long been enthusiastic, among those in the know. But now that his readership has expanded immeasurably, the expectations for such books as The Big Over Easy are considerable. And whether or not those expectations will be met by this new book depends on the readiness of readers to strike out in new directions—just as the author has done. Fforde's speciality has long been the outrageous teasing of narrative forms, and there's a measure of that here, although more disciplined than in earlier books.

Rather in the fashion in which Stephen Sondheim exploded the world of fairytale in Into the Woods, Fforde here brings all the apparatus of the tough crime thriller to bear on the nursery rhyme. Minor baronet Humpty Stuyvesant Van Dumpty III has been found dead—and in pieces—beneath a wall in a less salubrious area of town. The perpetrator would appear to be his ex-wife, but she has shot herself. Detective Inspector Jack Spratt and his colleague Mary Mary are assigned to the case, and soon find themselves knee-deep in money-laundering, bullion smuggling and major problems with beanstalks.

This isn't quite the Fforde mixture as before, although he has previously favoured a crime motor for his plots. The skill in this outrageously entertaining (and rigorously plotted) concoction lies in a double conjuring trick: we are always amazed to find ourselves reading so assiduously about ludicrous figures (who become quite as interesting heroes as, say, Philip Marlowe) when common sense dictates only children should find such conceits entertaining. Not so! No child could appreciate the dazzling wordplay and witty imagination on offer here, and most readers will be more than happy to encounter detective Inspector Jack Spratt (and his contrary sidekick kick Mary Mary) again and again. —Barry Forshaw

Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde

Erle Stanley Gardner

Erle Stanley Gardner

Erle Stanley Gardner

Erle Stanley Gardner

Charlaine Harris Shakespeare, Arkansas, is home to endless back roads, historic buildings, colorful residents—and the occasional murder. It is also home to Lily Bard, the local karate expert/cleaning woman with a particular knack for finding skeletons in closets.

But when the local woman of ill repute is found murdered, being familiar with her dirty laundry could make Lily the next Shakespearean to die.

Charlaine Harris Welcome back to the sleepy little town of Shakespeare, Arkansas, where secrets come to hide.

Lily Bard has joined a group therapy session, determined finally to face her past. It sounds positively enlightening, until the murder of a fellow member sends a warning. But who was the message meant for? Why? And who's next to fall victim to a killer's head games?

Charlaine Harris When cleaning lady Lily Bard discovers the dead body of her nosy landlord, her plan of starting a quiet new life may end in her death.

Charlaine Harris When Lily stumbles upon the well-built corpse of a local body builder-his neck broken by a barbell-the town's underlying racial tension begins to boil over. The white victim was somehow connected to two unsolved murders of black residents of Shakespeare-and a dogged policeman is determined to stop the killing. But it is Lily herself who may have to decide whether to stay and fight for justice, or run away one more time.

Charlaine Harris Lily Bard heads home for the holidays.

Lily heads to her hometown of Bartley for her estranged sister’s Christmas Eve wedding. But there is something in the air besides holiday cheer—there’s murder. And Lily must work fast to clean up the messy case before her sister promises to love, honor, and obey a killer.

Mabel Maney Let me be the first to state plainly that Miss Mabel Maney is a pernicious influence on American boys and girls. Her dangerous spoofs of the 1950s surely threaten the morale of impressionable young people, who must learn to accept and appreciate their proper places in life. Nancy Clue, the famous girl detective, may be able to solve exciting mysteries without displacing her shiny Titian locks, but why does her friend Midge dress like a boy, use curse words, and smoke cigarettes? And why does Nancy's sweet new girlfriend, Cherry Aimless, tremble under her starched white nurse's cap as she admires the bulging biceps of police detective Jackie Jones? I suspect that in her private life, the author freely mixes plaids with stripes and wears white after Labor Day. As for her devilish success at demeaning the finest epoch in American manners, I can only say, "Darn and double darn." —Regina Marler

Raymond Paul

Sapper

Sapper

Dorothy L Sayers

Barbara Vine In The Blood Doctor, as in others of the books she has written as Barbara Vine, Ruth Rendell stretches the boundaries of what we mean when we describe a book as a psychological thriller. Nanther is a biographer who is in crisis in most areas of his life—he has run out of inspiration, his other "job" as a hereditary peer is in the course of being voted out of existence and his relationship with his second wife is threatened by the difficulties she is experiencing in bringing a child to term. He throws himself into a study of his great-grandfather Henry—a doctor ennobled by Queen Victoria for his work on the haemophilia which dogged her descendants—and finds something not quite right. Henry was not just a repressed Victorian—there was something about his ruthless jilting of mistresses and fiancées which implies something a lot more peculiar and Nanther sets out to work out what it was. This novel is acute on the intellectual pleasures of historical research including the guilty prurience of working out dead people's secrets; it is also genuinely insightful in its portrait of Nanther, a man who thinks he is a worse and more useless man than he is, and finds out from Henry what real human evil might be. —Roz Kaveney

Liz Williams

Liz Williams

Liz Williams

Liz Williams, Jon Foster Detective Inspector Chen is back! The Snake Agent returns in The Shadow Pavilion, the fourth Detective Inspector Chen novel from Liz Williams. When Chen's partner, the demon Seneschal Zhu Irzh, disappears, along with Chen's wife and Inari's guardian badger, Chen must enlist all of his allies and assets in order to locate them! From the strange streets of Singapore Three to the rough and tumble world of Bollywood, where money flows fast and emotions flare even faster; from the realms of the Celestial to the haunts of the Infernal and all the spaces in-between, The Shadow Pavilion delivers the thrills, excitement, and near-future occult action fans have come to expect.