Showing results by publisher "Spoken Realms" in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Several girls, all bearing the name "Jenny Rogers", are being killed in the city of New York. In the middle of it, there are two suspects: a famous painter and a visiting stranger, who also happen to bear, in their turn, identical names. Behind it all, the dying wishes of a man and a nefarious plot to lay claim to a matter of millions.

Mary Roberts Rinehart was an American writer, most well-known for her mystery novels. She was often called the American Agatha Christie, though her first novel, The Circular Staircase, was published years before Christie's. The Circular Staircase is as complex a mystery as anyone could wish for, full of twists and turns, mysterious intruders, a murder and kidnapping, bank failure, all revolving around the sinister staircase itself.

In the pretty little town of Sibley, NY, the court has adjourned for lunch, and Judge Evans and some of the leading lawyers of the district stand outside the courthouse discussing the limitations of the criminal classes. A stranger describes to them just how a man might commit a murder and avoid detection - and only minutes later, the widow Clemmens is discovered struck down in her parlor by an unknown hand in circumstances eerily similar to those described by the stranger.

The brutal murder of the well-known French actress Rose de Bercy has rocked London. But when Chief Inspector Winter investigates, he finds himself facing more complications than expected. It doesn’t take long to discover Mademoiselle de Bercy was not who she had appeared to be, and her past is a mystery, too. Truly knowing who she was would affect solving her murder: was the murderer an anarchist bent on revenge, a rich American who believes he was her fiancé, or, as Winter comes to suspect, someone much closer, namely his own right-hand man, Detective Inspector Furneaux?

The series of detective stories Anna Katherine Green wrote were among the earliest in the 20th century, and depict modern America and the workings of the police departments. These unfold and are full of the details of a new 20th century world. Initials Only is set in New York, and purveys a certain atmosphere unique to that period. It revolves around the workings of the retired Detective Gryce and his young assistant, Mr Sweetwater. A seemingly unsolvable mystery, the death by apparent suicide of an heiress, is investigated by the two detectives and the New York Coroner.

Volume Seven of Alexander' Dumas' catalogue of crime features three colourful historical figures. Albanian tyrant Ali Pacha (or Pasha) was a brigand who later became an operative of the Ottoman empire. After extending his territory to include large areas of Greece and Macedonia, and aspiring to become an independent leader, he attracted the enmity of the Sultan and was declared a rebel. He died in battle at the age of 80.

Anna Katherine Green (1846-1935) was one of the first writers of detective fiction in America and has been called “the mother of the detective novel”. Her style would influence other writers such as Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Doctor, His Wife and the Clock is the sixth title in her mystery series and is more a novelette compared to her other books. The story features one of her reoccurring characters, Ebenezer Gryce, who is called in to find out who killed a well-loved and respected citizen in a small community where he had no enemies to speak of.

Credited by many as the mother of the detective novel, Anna Katharine Green published her first mystery novel - The Leavenworth Case - in 1878, almost a decade before Sherlock Holmes made his appearance. Green's intrepid Ebenezer Gryce, a seasoned New York detective, takes up the case of a brutally murdered millionaire philanthropist. One of the murdered man's two nieces is set to inherit an immense fortune, and she and her cousin are high on the suspect list.

In A Strange Disappearance, we have a small cast of characters, richly described and all engaged in discovering how and why a servant woman has disappeared from Mr Blake’s mansion in the middle of the night. A classic mystery!

Return with us to those thrilling days of yesteryear as Mike Vendetti narrates this early Zane Grey novel of hardy pioneers taming the wild west. Yes, despite the difficult times, romance flourishes and the bad guys are eliminated almost single-handedly as our heroes Jonathan Zane and his sidekick Lew “Deathwind” Wetzel fight their way through mud, blood, gore, savage Indians, and despicable outlaws, to make the land safe for pioneer families as they settle the wild west.

In Volume Four, Dumas relates the 1819 murder of German dramatist August von Kotzebue by Karl Ludwig Sand, the campaign to destroy Father Urbain Grandier in 1634, who was successfully convicted of witchcraft and put to a brutal death, and the consequences of the amorous relationship between the prince of Brancaleone and Nisida.

First serialized in the French magazine Je sais tout, The Hollow Needle was released in 1909. It featured the writer’s famed gentleman burglar, Arsene Lupin, who encountered the surprisingly apt amateur-detective qualities of young Isidore Beautrelet. As fans of Lupin would come to expect over subsequent novels, the burglar nonetheless always remained at least one step ahead of his adversaries, until...

The prolific Alexandre Dumas, père, first published his famous eight-volume crime series in Paris in 1839-40. It contained 18 stories, which, as the author notes in the introduction, had “the added value of giving the modern reader a clear picture of the state of semi-lawlessness which existed in Europe, during the middle ages.” In Volume 5, Dumas relates the lengths to which Antoine Derues will go in his pursuit of money, and the consequences of the dark works of Marie Leroux and her partner Claude Perregaud.

Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves. Six international artists are invited to a residency in southern Spain. One falls in lust. Two fall in love. One talks only about New York. One makes installations out of feathers and stones. And one is left for dead on the side of a mountain.

This volume relates the stories of the Borgias and the Cenci. The former, a family of Spanish adventurers, came to dominate the Italian peninsula, and, when Rodergio Borgia became Pope Alexander VI, the world of Christendom, in the late 15th century. The Cenci was an aristocratic family, in which rampant sexual and domestic abuse led to murder and very public execution.

Before she joined the Indestructibles, Kate Miller haunted the streets of her hometown, a hero trying to drive away the ghosts of her own losses and failures. Masked and alone against the dark elements of her city, Kate became known as the Dancer, the ballerina vigilante, fighting street-level crime and trying to make the world a better place, one fight at a time. But when an early mistake leads her back to her roots, will Kate have the strength to fight on?

Narrated by award-winning audiobook narrator Mike Vendetti, The House of the Vampire (1907) by George Sylvester Vierick is not only one of the first known gay vampire stories, but it is also one of the first psychic vampire stories - where a vampire feeds off of more than just blood.

If you had discovered a way to become invisible, would it bring you tremendous power? Or tremendous problems?

When Axe Cooper is murdered while picking up Chinese takeout, he's pretty irritated about the loss of a good dinner, not to mention being dead. Not prepared to move on just yet, Axe decides to stick around and haunt his best friend Lily Chan while trying to figure out why anyone would kill a janitor. In the meantime, Axe is hired by The Ghost Post to track down recently deceased writers. As he learns more about his new phantom friends, Axe realizes that his murder is not an isolated event and that if he doesn't learn to fly like Superman, Lily could be next.

Was Jesse James really shot from behind by friend Robert Ford in 1882? A 100-year-old man comes forward in the late 1940s claiming to be the Missouri outlaw, and he becomes a local sensation. Four affidavits supporting his claim are immediately signed by those who meet him and who knew Jesse James. This is the account of how J. Frank Dalton emerged from obscurity and claimed to be the "outlaw with a heart of gold".