He was a tall, cleanly attractive young man, the kind you'd like to have for a neighbor. Press the wrong button and he'd mow you down with the ruthlessness of a Sherman tank. His name was Daniel Port. He was a gangster, the brain and spirit behind the machine that milked the dirty pennies from the city. Now Port wanted out. He had a bellyful of corruption, a one-way ticket to New York, and a dark, shining girl to go along with it. The problem was to get there alive, because the one way out for Daniel Port was over his own freshly dug grave...

Vera Caspary, the famed author of Laura , gives us another gripping crime drama, told through shifting points of view. John Ansell, young and idealistic editor of Truth and Crime magazine, wants to breathe new life into the stale and formulaic publication. Instead of rehashing a story that's already been proven popular elsewhere, he finds a fresh one: the murder of Warren G. Wilson, famed figurehead of a correspondence course. The murder itself isn't too remarkable--just a bullet in the back--but the victim is another case, as it becomes apparent that despite having a household name, nothing is known about him. Perhaps even more peculiar is how Ansell's boss absolutely refuses to run the story and, soon thereafter, Ansell is poisoned. Caspary masterfully allows the truth to slowly untangle in this incredibly woven mystery, finally available as an ebook.

After sending her résumé to the CIA on a whim, New Yorker Selena Keller is contacted by an Agency recruiter, who asks her how she would feel about convincing another human being to commit treason. Despite her checkered past, Selena passes the background investigation and a battery of bizarre aptitude tests. Living under cover as a government budget analyst, she begins her education in espionage at the Farm, the CIA's covert facility. All CIA officers must survive a demanding training program, and it is there that Selena becomes romantically involved with Stan, a brilliant but darkly paranoid fellow student with presidential ambitions. What happens next is a fascinating inside portrait of the Agency--how spies are recruited, how they are trained, who they meet, where they go, and most important . . . what happens when they fall in love, and begin spying on one another.

If you like period pieces and murder-mysteries with a twist of romance, you will enjoy this book. The protagonist becomes the chief suspect in the murder of Sir Geoffrey Kynaston and must clear his name. Set in Victorian England, there are flashbacks to Italy. Filled with aristocrats, there are colorful characters, too, lending an air of the Dickensian comic relief, ― like the money-obsessed private sleuth. E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946) was an enormously popular and prolific writer of suspense fiction and romance. Notably easy to read, Mr. Oppenheim has few equals among modern English novelists. He is untiring in the invention of mysterious plots, he is a clever weaver of the plausible with the sensational, and he has the necessary gift of facile narrative. (Boston Transcript.) He is a master of the art of telling a story. He has humor, a keen sense of the dramatic, and a knack of turning out a happy ending just when the complications of the plot threaten worse disasters. (New York Times.)

Kenneth Makeer - intelligent, South African and black - travels to London to study law where he meets a fellow South African - a white girl - whom he eventually marries. Yet mixed marriages are outlawed in the Union, and so when they return home they come face to face with racial intolerance and hatred at its most brutal. This is a passionate, harrowing and dramatic story which hurtles towards its ugly and untimely conclusion.

Reproduction of the original: A Duel by Richard Marsh

novel

The Great Prince Shan By E. Phillips Oppenheim