NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The voice belongs to a woman, but Dr. Alex Delaware remembers a little girl. It is eleven years since seven-year-old Melissa Dickinson dialed the hospital help line for comfort—and found it in therapy with Alex Delaware. Now the lovely young heiress is desperately calling for the psychologist’s help once more. Only this time it looks like Melissa’s deepest childhood nightmare is really coming true. “A page-turner from beginning to end.”— Los Angeles Times Twenty years ago, Gina Dickinson, Melissa’s mother, suffered a grisly assault that left the budding actress irreparably scarred and emotionally crippled. Now her acid-wielding assailant is out of prison and back in L.A.—and Melissa is terrified that the monster has returned to hurt Gina again. But before Alex Delaware can even begin to soothe his former patient’s fears, Gina, a recluse for twenty years, disappears. And now, unless Delaware turns crack detective to uncover the truth, Gina Dickinson will be just one more victim of a cold fury that has already spawned madness . . . and murder.

V.I. Warshawski, private investigator, uncovers a network of corruption when she goes back to her old neighborhood in Chicago.

When it appeared in 1972 'Bloody Murder' was greeted as the classic study of crime fiction, a book "heartily recommended to anyone who has ever enjoyed a detective story or a crime novel" as Kingsley Amis wrote. Subsequent edition ensured that this study was kept up to date to include later authors, and a third and final revised edition was issued in 1993 in celebration of distinguished author/critic Julian Symons' 80th year. The views expressed are as candid as ever. One bestselling writer is called unreadable, another compared to writers of "strip cartoon stories". But the general tone is warmly appreciative of every sort of book within the genre.

Crime is common ground for the twenty-one women writers in this extraordinary collection of contemporary mystery fiction, introduced and edited by Sara Paretsky The voices here include professional crime solvers who take you from the mean streets of V.I. Warshawski’s Chicago in a case of music and murder . . . to the California freeway where Kinsey Millhone's beloved VW skids into a shooting . . . to the gang-held turf of Sharon McCone’s San Francisco, where an eye witness to a slaying says mum’s the word. And then there are mothers, grandmothers, battered wives, and social workers—ordinary women in extraordinary situations whose voices reveal contemporary life as seen through a woman’s eye. From the opening tale of a girl down-and-out in London and what she steals from a corpse . . . to the final story of a summer vacation in the Berkshires, complete with romance and sudden death . . . this unique collection brings us great mystery writing that engages both our intellects and our hearts. This collection features stories from twenty-one authors, including: Sara Paretsky • Sue Grafton • Marica Muller • Susan Dunlap • Carolyn Hart • Antonia Fraser • Dorothy Salisbury Davis • Amanda Cross • Nancy Pickard • Dorothy B. Hughes • Faye Kellerman • Julie Smith • Barbara Wilson • Mary Wings • and more!

This is a collection of articles, reviews, interviews and essays by the 1990 Cartier Diamond Dagger award winner - critic and writer, Julian Symons. Following an introduction entitled The Crime Story Yesterday, Today, Tommorrow, this book offers a collection of Symons's writing on crime fiction from Britain, the United States and elsewhere, plus a section on real life stories, such as The Hiss Affair and the Yorkshire Ripper.

In Manhatten a serial killer is at large and revenge gets personal for private detective R.J. Brooke when his mother becomes the next victim.

Wieder Gut Machung-making good again-reparations. In London, James Raison, a lawyer, was preparing to take a quick trip to Munich in the interest of his client, Mrs. Wolff, and the estate of her late father, Helmut Bamberger. Bamberger had been a very wealthy and very complex man who had, apparently, died in a Nazi concentration camp. In Tel Aviv, Dr. Grunwald, an elderly lawyer who had been crippled by the Nazis, was planning to go to Munich, too, as the representative of a Jewish organization intensely interested in the fate of Bamberger's fortune. In pre-holocaust Germany, Grunwald had represented Bamberger and had helped him get the bulk of his money safely into a Swiss bank. In Munich, the German lawyer in charge of the Bamberger case, Heinz Haffner (who took pride in not actually having been a Nazi, though his sister still was one), was preparing to meet with his colleagues to discuss some puzzling new elements in the case. Haffner had problems of his own. So did the English and the Israeli lawyers. And even when one means to concentrate on the business at hand, one's mind sometimes strays. Even with three good lawyers at work, the Bamberger question became frustrating, mystifying, and, at last, explosive --

When Mycroft Holmes is murdered, it is up to retired shadow detective Smith to track down his killer, leading him to stumble onto the greatest conspiracy of his life. Young Lucy Westerna, Holmes' protégé, must follow her own path to the truth, while on the other side of the world, a young Harry Houdini must face his greatest feat of escape -- death itself. As their paths converge the body count mounts up, the entire world is under threat, and in a foreboding castle in the mountains of Transylvania a mysterious old man weaves a spider's web of secrets and lies.