Showing results by publisher "Highbridge Audio" in Mystery

The rural town of Balaclava greets Groundhog Day as an excuse for one last cold-weather fling. The students and faculty of the local agricultural college drink cocoa, throw snowballs, and when the temperature allows, ice skate. But Oozak's Pond is not quite frozen this year, and as the celebrations reach their peak, the students see someone bobbing through the ice. Long past help, the drowning victim is badly decomposed and dressed in an old-fashioned frock coat with a heavy rock in each pocket.

Walking home wearily from an evening spent poring over the books of the Parchly Heights Methodist Ladies' Aid searching for a fifty-eight-cent error, Miss Jennifer Murdock becomes witness to a terrible scene: A man, stumbling drunk, arrives home–and just as he fumbles with his keys, gunfire erupts and kills him on the spot.

A strange encounter with a little girl named Claudia and a dead toad sparks elderly detective fiction fan Rachel Murdock's obsessive curiosity, and she winds up renting the house next door just to see how things play out. But soon after she and her cat Samantha move in, Rachel realizes they've landed right in the middle of a deadly love triangle that's created animosity among the three families who now surround her.

April 1903: Emma and Derrick Andrews have been invited to the wedding of her cousin Reggie Vanderbilt and heiress Cathleen Neilson at the Bellevue Mansion, Arleigh. Their hosts are a popular young couple who are leasing the home for the summer—Harry and Elizabeth "Bessie" Lehr. Known for his practical jokes, Harry is the toast of parties, earning a reputation as the court jester of the Gilded Age. However, as Emma soon learns, behind closed doors he is dead serious.

From its launch in 1920 until its demise in 1951, the magazine Black Mask published pulp crime fiction. The first hard-boiled detective stories appeared on its pages. Never before in audio, these vintage stories are the darkest of the dark, and the best of the best.

Crime fiction fans old and new will delight in rediscovering these taut, character-rich, heart-stopping tales, now on audio for the first time.

The Moscow Film Festival is in town, and the elite artists of the East and West have convened at the legendary Metropole Hotel to drink, gossip, and flirt. But the party is about to come crashing down. Four men - one American, one Japanese, and two Russians - will all be dead by morning, poisoned. To keep the killings under wraps, the Kremlin hands the investigation over to the famously discreet police investigator Porfiry Rostnikov.

Anyone growing up in Lobelia Falls is taught to learn the elegant, ancient, and occasionally deadly art of shooting with a bow and arrow. Practicing the craft, freelance secretary Dittany Henbit is strolling through the woods with her bow at her side when she meets a surveyor making surveys where he shouldn't. Dittany is giving him what-for when an arrow goes whizzing above her head. It is sharp enough to kill, and was not fired by accident, but Dittany wasn't the target.

Arly Hanks has caught all sorts of killers since she returned home to Maggody, Arkansas, population 759, but she's never tangled with anyone as devious as the local youth group. While chaperoning a trip to Camp Pearly Gates, Arly watches the kids as closely as she would any hardened criminal, but when teenagers have a mind to get into trouble, there's nothing a police chief can do but limit the damage. She's just about got the situation under control when one of the kids finds a body, and all hell breaks loose in classic Maggody manner.

The uniformed man standing before Toby Peters is General Douglas MacArthur, a soldier who considers himself the only man who can defeat the Japanese. But though he may be all-powerful in the South Pacific, today he is in Los Angeles with a problem only a detective can solve. The general has an eye on a postwar promotion to the White House, and an aide has stolen his war chest, his donor list, and a handful of embarrassing private letters. To get them back, Toby may need some help.

Massachusetts horticulturalist Peter Shandy is famous for his rutabagas, but he comes to Maine with a loftier plant in mind. Specifically, he wants to size up the world-renowned lupines of Frances Rondel, a nonagenarian whose legendary flowers are even more beautiful in life than they are in myth. Shandy is bitterly jealous but finds a major distraction in the dining room of the country inn where he's staying. He may grow wretched lupines, but no gardener can solve a murder like Peter Shandy.

Emory Emmerick comes to Balaclava Agricultural University as a scout for a television station. Although the faculty and students are hardly ready for prime time, Emmerick's interest is in environmental programming - a subject that inspires even the driest Balaclava professor to wax poetic. In his search for material, Emmerick joins Peter Shandy and a few of his colleagues on the annual owl count.

In the darkest hours of communist rule, Father Merhum fought to protect the sanctity of the Orthodox Church. Now the Soviet Union is gone, but the bureaucracy survives, and within it lurk men who would do anything to undermine the fragile new Russian democracy. Father Merhum is on his way to Moscow to denounce those traitors when he is struck with an ax and killed.

The giant hogweed, a creeping menace known for crushing the life out of any plant foolish enough to get in its way, has put the hedgerows and pastures of the English countryside in jeopardy. Fishermen find their streams clogged, young lovers are caught with rashes in embarrassing places, and the English nudist colony has been all but exterminated. Only Peter Shandy, the famed horticulturalist responsible for the world's finest rutabaga, can save the day.

Nothing ever happens in Maggody, Arkansas, population 755. Aside from handling the occasional barroom brawl or exploding still, Chief of Police Arly Hanks spends her days sipping coffee and squashing flies. She returned to Maggody two years ago, licking her wounds after a bad Manhattan divorce, and she fell backward into the role of sheriff. From Hizzoner the Moron to Ruby Bee Hanks, the people of Maggody are all crazy in their own ways, and that craziness is about to turn deadly.

Nicolae Polscaru, a three-and-a-half-foot-tall dwarf, is tossed into a Hollywood swimming pool by four drunken screenwriters, who take bets on how long he can tread water. Minor Jackson, his OSS training still fresh a year after World War II's end, beats the bullies senseless and pulls Nicolae from the water. A friendship is born. Jackson is broke, his spying days over, and Nicolae offers him a job.

When a scream shatters the summer night outside their country house in the Hudson Valley, reformed literary forger Will and his wife Meghan find their daughter Maisie shaken and bloodied, holding a parcel her attacker demanded she present to her father. Inside is a literary rarity the likes of which few have ever handled, and a letter laying out impossible demands regarding its future.

In the waning days of the Russian Empire, the Czar inked a secret treaty with Japan that was stolen en route by one of the workmen on the Trans-Siberian Railway. More than 100 years later, the Soviet Union has gone the way of the Czardom, and police inspector Porfiry Rostnikov is trying to find his way in the Russia of Vladimir Putin.

Christmas has served as a fertile background for mystery fiction for a very long time, perhaps because it has the appearance of a time of peace and love while being so deeply at odds with violence, crime, and even murder. Many of the stories in this anthology have been written by some of the greatest Golden Age authors, undoubtedly inspired by the juxtaposition of the disparate elements of love and hate.

A thriller writer is embroiled in a real-life whodunit when a friend drops dead with her hatpin impaled in his back. The violation of a sealed West Bank tomb, its rock walls intact, provides a Thebes investigator with a mystifying conundrum. Two sisters take shelter in a shuttered old house at the end of a country road . . . only to discover they're not alone. And the author's most beloved characters, Amelia Peabody and Radcliff Emerson, make an appearance in a newly uncovered tale with a witty nod to Sherlock Holmes.

Agatha Christie's cherished housekeeper, Phyllida Bright, not only keeps the celebrated author's home running smoothly, but she has also proven herself an accomplished sleuth. So when a murderer brings mayhem to a wedding, in this USA Today bestselling series' latest installment, she's on hand...