Love stories. Celestria always spends her summer holiday at Pendrift Hall, the rambling, shabby Cornish mansion adorned with wisteria and clematis that has been home to the Montague family for generations. In the summer of 1958, the highlight is a lavish ball in honour of Archie Montague's fiftieth birthday, and the beautiful girl, on the cusp of womanhood, is looking forward to practising her flirtation skills on the Wilmotte boys. But what is supposed to be a night of celebration ends in catastrophe. As a result, Celestria's grandfather encourages her to play detective, to seek out an explanation for the bewildering events. The quest takes her to the heel of Italy, to the rugged beauty of Puglia and the cool cloisters of the Convento di Santa Maria del Mare. Here Celestria meets an enigmatic stranger and confronts unwelcome truths about her family - and about herself. Once she has done so, she is able to transform herself from selfish girl to mature woman and save the family home.

"After narrowly escaping with his life at the hands of a murderous Hollywood pimp, detective Happy Doll, bullet-ridden but healing, has landed on a remote Mexican beach. In a humble shack and with his dog for company, Doll settles into a peaceful idyll of Buddhist study. But then trouble, as it always does, comes to paradise. Doll is the witness to a murder for which he is framed, and now, with an expired passport and the Mexican authorities on his tail, he must sneak across the border back to L.A. by any means necessary, with the goal of bringing the true murderer to justice. But it's not just trouble that expels Doll from paradise! His dark past reaches for him, like a hand from the grave, old enemies want him dead, including the Jalisco Cartel, and Doll, a reluctant instrument of mayhem, yearns to end this cycle of violence and tip the karmic scales in his favor. But how can he do this without getting blood on his hands? Karma Doll marks the third installment in a madcap, bloody, and impossibly fun series, bringing us back in the good company of Happy Doll: a beloved, introverted anti-hero who has taken more hits to the head than a linebacker, yet still always manages to come out on top." -- Amazon.

A murder mystery originally published in 1987, which is now a Radio 4 dramatisation, and concerns Detective Kate Baeier who is hired by a wealthy woman to act as minder for her musically gifted daughter.

Someone is brutally murdering men in New York City, and Max Segal, the nervous, sophisticated detective assigned to the case, is struggling to find the killer before even morey observed social satire and side-splitting humor by the author of the bestselling Love Kills.

When a girl is murdered in a Mayfair Mews, Superintendent Manners is convinced that the secret of the crime lies in the affluent suburban housing estate called The Dell. Dell-dwellers, like architect Dick and wine and food expert Jack Jellifer, think of themselves as living a civilised life, but there is one explosive element: red-headed roughneck Solomon Grundy. Could Grundy have killed the girl?

Vigilante JusticeSpider Webb and her partner Tommy Chan are police detectives on the edge of serious burnout. They've spent too much of their lives and too much energy collaring perps just to watch them slip through gaping holes in the system. So when a vigilante, dubbed "The Fry Guy" by the news media, starts to systematically kill the scum of the city by somehow microwaving their brains, they don't think of him as a "serial killer," they see him as an implement of justice. As far as they're concerned, "The Fry Guy" is doing their job for them and in a way that they never could - a permanent way."Strange Robby is a sharp, satisfying page-turner, a thrilling ride like a cross between N.Y.P.D. BLUE and THE X-FILES. Be smart: Buy your ticket -now-." -Esther M. Friesner"Selina Rosen's 'just like' nothing else. She's a creative soul, a builder in wood and stone and words. Out of this absolute wealth of experience come truly outrageous ideas and a way of looking at the universe with attitude with a capital 'A'. She's one in a million " -C.J. Cherryh"She's a great gal and a damn good storyteller." -Michael Sheard

Detective Sam Birge investigates a strangely unnecessary murder at a Midwestern resort and gradually unravels a many-layered tragedy

"For Ellery Queen, there is no puzzle that reason cannot solve. In his time, he has faced down killers, thugs, and thieves, protected only by the might of his brain - and the odd bit of timely intervention by his father, a burly New York police inspector. But when a university professor asks Queen to teach a class, the detective finds there are people whom reason cannot touch: college students. Queen's adventure on campus is only the first of this incomparable collection of short mysteries. In the tales that follow, he tangles with a violent book thief, an assassin of acrobats, and New York's only cleanly shaven bearded lady. And the only thing more dazzling than the mysterious murders he confronts are his brilliant solutions at the end. Ellery Queen was a master of the short mystery, so closely associated with the form that the longest-running magazine for such tales bears his name; the excellent stories in this volume show why he continues to be considered one of the greatest American practitioners of the Golden Age whodunnit"--

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...

A grotesque figure burst into the girl's room. Its head piled with fake curls, its face concealed behind a smiling mask, it wore the rubber gloves of a surgeon or perhaps a mortuary attendant. It seized the girl from behind and chloroformed, suffocated, and finally, decapitated her.

The police receive a series of literary clues to the brutal murders in the Chelsea section of London. They include snips of verse and an intricate reading of a Times crossword puzzle --

Romance, Contemporary: Private investigator Jeff Haley doesn't believe in love, especially when it involves a wacky blonde blackjack dealer named Casey Madison. But when scandalous photos from Jeff's latest case fall into -- then out of -- Casey's hands, Jeff and Casey embark on a tri-state chase for the photos...and love.

Judith Lassiter has a handsome architect husband who dotes on her, no financial worries, and a beautiful house. But when she begins to change the course of her life--and takes a lover--she soon feels that murder may be the essential next step.

Hired by the accounting firm of Plumbeck and Ergenweiler to investigate the disappearance of the partners's shared mistress, San Francisco investigator Aaron Asherfeld finds himself embroiled in a sexual harassment suit and a drug dealer's pursuits.

A stunning and epic finale to the series, pitting Fandorin against both Ninjas and terrorists on the Trans-Siberian Express! The first of the interlinked plotlines is set in Russia during the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Fandorin is charged with protecting the Trans-Siberian Railway from Japanese sabotage in a pacy adventure filled with double agents and ticking bombs. Then we travel back to the Japan of the late 1870s. This is the story of Fandorin's arrival and life in Yokohama, his first meeting with Masa and the martial arts education that came in so handy later. He investigates the death of a Russian ship-captain, fights for a woman, exposes double-agents in the Japanese police, fights against, and then with the ninjas, and becomes embroiled in a shocking finale that interweaves the two stories and ties up the series as a whole.

After a stranger named Sebastian drops dead in front of him while waiting to buy a stamp, Luke Wakefield discovers a macabre letter leading to a bizarre correspondence and murder

A diabolically versatile serial killer is targeting talk show hosts for extinction. The industry is in panic, their revenues threatened, their very existence under attack, not only from the killer, but from certain sectors of society who, in some ways, side with the killer's grievances. To him talk show hosts are the sleazy practitioners of the art of destroying people's lives before a television audience. As New York City police detectives Charlie Marchetti, nighttime alcoholic, and his partner Angela Buonfiglio set out as lead investigators assigned to catch the assassin his tally of victims keeps steadily rising. The pressures on them from above to solve the case intensify. Then, in his twisted contempt for Marchetti, the killer begins writing letters to the detective--his way of upping the stakes in his insatiable thirst for gamesmanship, knowing that Charlie will never figure out the meanings behind his messages. The killer is too clever for any mere civil servant detective. Or is he? Charlie and Angela find out the hard way as they come face to face with a murderer determined to add them to his list of victims.

A film studio sets out to create a documentary about the Tuskegee Airmen, a unit of African-Americans who flew combat missions in World War Two - but filming has barely begun when a corpse is found on the set. Hobart Lindsey, insurance investigator turned detective, enters the scene, aided by Marvia Plum, his policewoman girlfriend. Soon he uncovers a mystery stretching half a century into the past - and suddenly and unexpectedly is flying through a hazardous murder investigation by the seat of his pants!