Showing results by publisher "Audible studios" in Traditional Detectives

Scandal hits the staid publishing house of Barnabas when one of the directors is found dead in the strong-room. Suspicion immediately falls on his wife's lover, the junior partner in the firm. But how does an unpublished Restoration comedy come to feature in the tragedy? And what of the odd disappearance of another director twenty years before?

Chesterton's talent as a mystery writer is displayed in this collection of detective stories, The Man Who Knew Too Much. In each story, the star detective, Horne Fisher, deals with another strange mystery: the vanishing of a priceless coin, the framing of an Irish "prince" freedom fighter, an eccentric rich man dies during an obsessive fishing trip, another vanishing during an ice skate, a statue crushing his own uncle, and a few more.

In the respectable seaside town of Flaxborough, the equally respectable councillor Harold Carobleat is laid to rest. Cause of death: pneumonia. But he is scarcely cold in his coffin before Detective Inspector Purbright, affable and annoyingly polite, must turn out again to examine the death of Carobleat's neighbour, Marcus Gwill, former prop. of the local rag, the Citizen. This time it looks like foul play, unless a surfeit of marshmallows had led the late and rather unlamented Mr Gwill to commit suicide by electrocution. ('Power without responsibility', murmurs Purbright.)

Evan Evans is settling into his role as Constable of Llanfair, a small town nestled in the mountains of North Wales. Here, he has been a mediator of the minor disputes of the locals, between competing ministers, country merchants, and seemingly every Welch eccentric throughout the region. But an unusual series of events brings unseen hostilities to light, and Evan realizes just how deep the townsfolk's passions and hostilities lie.

Judge Crowdy Lobbett has found evidence pointing to the identity of the criminal mastermind behind the deadly Simister gang. After four attempts on his life, he ends up seeking the help of the enigmatic and unorthodox amateur sleuth, Albert Campion. After Campion bundles Lobbett off to a country house in Mystery Mile deep in the Suffolk countryside, all manner of adventures ensue. It's a race against time for Campion to get the judge to safety and decipher the clue to their mysterious enemy's name.

Campion investigates once more, but this time he is on the run from the police - classic British crime writing at its best. Celebrated amateur detective Albert Campion awakes in hospital accused of attacking a police officer and suffering from acute amnesia. All he can remember is that he was on a mission of vital importance to His Majesty's government before his accident. On the run from the police and unable to recognise even his faithful servant Lugg or his own fiancée

Six months after the sudden death of her husband, Leonora Galloway sets out on a trip to France with her daughter Penelope. At last the time has come when secrets can be shared and explanations begin.... Leonora takes her daughter to the battlefields of WW1, where her father is commemorated on the Thiepval Monument. But the date of his death is surprising, and reveals that Captain John Hallows cannot possibly have been Leonora's real father.

Marcus Didius Falco discovers that rank brings problems, the most gruesome of which is a corpse buried under the tiles of his new bath house. The contractors have fled to Britain where, as the Fates have it, Falco is ordered. A local chief and ally of the Romans is having a Palace built by the Emperor Vespasian. However, the project is running late, and fatal accidents keep happening. Falco, troubleshooting for the Emperor, is without an ally and now next on the list for assassination.

Concealed by a shroud of dirty brown velvet was what looked like a heap of rags. In a desolate subterranean car park of a Shopping Centre, Dorothy Sanders pulled back the velvet curtain revealing the grim discovery of a woman’s body. Inspector Michael Burden, for a while conducting the investigation without the help of Wexford’s intuitive genius, blunders down a number of blind alleys before uncovering the truth.

Tanis Lyle was one of those passionate women who always get their own way. Her cousin Laura hated her. Most women did. But men found her irresistible and she used them mercilessly. So when Tanis was found murdered there seemed to be any number of suspects on hand. But Miss Silver had her own suspicions…

In the court of King George IV, Major Mearns - an old dog of war and veteran of Willington's army - is the guardian of Windsor Castle. Some would call him a spy; he calls himself a "watcher." Working with his close friend, the resourceful Sergeant Denny, the pair maintain a cool facade behind which they go about their duties quietly and unnoticed. Unnoticed, that is, until the day Mearns receives a parcel containing a gruesome surprise: a pair of severed human legs.

Detective Richard Jury is back in the 16th novel in Martha Grimes' extraordinary New York Times best-selling series - now enmeshed in a series of strange crimes and disappearances and an age-old tragedy that consumes his sidekick, Melrose Plant....

Sarah Hussain was not popular in the community of Kingsmarkham. She was born of mixed parents - a white Irishwoman and an immigrant Indian Hindu. She was also the Reverend of St Peter's church. But it came as a profound shock to everyone when she was found strangled in the vicarage. A garrulous cleaner, Maxine, also shared by the Wexfords, discovers the body. In his retirement, the former Detective Chief Inspector is devoting much time to reading, and has little patience with Maxine's prattle.

England, 1819. Two enigmatic Americans arrive in London and soon after, a bank collapses. A man is found dead on a building site; another goes missing in the teeming stews of Seven Dials. A deathbed vigil ends in an act of theft and a beautiful heiress flirts with her inferiors. A strange destiny links each of these events to the American boy Edgar Allen Poe, brought to England by his foster father and sent to the leafy village of Stoke Newington to be educated.

In a charming cozy mystery series debut, Leslie Nagel's irrepressible small-town heroine finds that her fellow book club members may be taking their Agatha Christie a bit too literally - and murder a bit too lightly.

London in the 1960s: gang wars, corrupt police, vice and pornography. Ex-boxer Charles Holborne has plenty of opportunities to build his reputation with the criminal classes as a barrister who delivers. But Charles, an East End boy made good, is not all he seems, and his past is snapping at his heels. When his philandering wife has her throat slashed, Holborne finds himself on the wrong side of the law and on the run. Can he discover the truth of the brutal slaying and escape the hangman's noose?

Love and need make unexpected bedfellows, and both are blind. As the grip of a long hard winter tightens on Lydmouth, a dead woman calls the dying in a seance behind net curtains. Two provincial newspapers are in the throes of a bitter circulation war. A lorry driver broods, and an office boy loses his heart. Britain is basking in the warm glow of postwar tranquillity, but in the quiet town of Lydmouth, darker forces are at play. The rats are fed on bread and milk, a gentleman's yellow kid glove is mislaid on a train and something disgusting is happening at Mr Prout's toy shop.

When Constable Evan Evans and his new fiancée decide to travel south from home in Llanfair, Wales, to visit his mother in Swansea, they're not expecting the disturbing news that greets them on their arrival: the young thug convicted of murdering Evan's father several years earlier is suspected of murder once again.

In Aunt Dimity Beats the Devil, Lori's twins are now toddlers, walking and talking enough to drive her nearly stir crazy. So she jumps at the offer of a break - a trip to evaluate a rare-book collection in a remote and misty corner of Northumberland. On a dark and stormy night in late October, she sets out for Wyrdhurst Hall, the grim neo-Gothic castle owned by newlyweds Nicole and Jared Hollander. On the way there she encounters Adam Chase, a charming, handsome stranger who knows more than he's telling about the hall's mysterious secrets....

Six new tales of crime presented by Dr Watson from the documents of Sherlock Holmes, which follow on from The Secret Cases of Sherlock Holmes. What were Holmes's views on Dr Crippen? What happened when Oscar Wilde visited Baker Street to seek advice? How did Holmes reveal a loving husband to be one of the most dangerous psychopaths of modern times? And just what horrors await Holmes in the darkened slums of Waterloo Road?