Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Traditional Detectives

A priceless royal treasure. A desperate father. A broken coronet with three missing beryls. In The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet, Sherlock Holmes is drawn into one of the most emotionally charged and high-stakes cases of his career. When a distinguished gentleman seeks Holmes’s help after a glittering coronet is mysteriously damaged in his own home, suspicion falls on his own son — but nothing is as simple as it seems.

Ellie Haskell aspires to live a perfectly normal life with her husband and children in their lovely old house. But bizarre events and outlandish characters keep landing on her doorstep in Chitterton Fells, the charming little village by the sea. Just when Ellie means to escape her hectic life by taking a vacation in France, her long-lost father shows up with the ashes of his lady love in his suitcase. Ellie becomes suspicious as Daddy recounts the details of his storybook romance with Harriet, the platinum-blonde ideal of English womanhood....

Fresh from her first murder case, Nantucket detective Merry Folger is unwillingly sucked into her second. When Joe Duarte, a fishing boat captain with decades of experience on the wild seas off Nantucket, is swept overboard during a spring storm, his death is pronounced accidental. But his estranged daughter, Del, is convinced it's murder. She moves back to Nantucket to get closer to the truth and enlists her old friend, Detective Merry Folger, to help. But Del is also hiding secrets of her own.

Eleven stories including “The Speckled Band”, “The Man with the Twisted Lip” and “The Blue Carbuncle.”

Private investigator Sarah Booth Delaney and her friends are celebrating New Year's Eve at the party of the year, a smashing Winter White Garden party at the newly renovated King Cotton Boutique Hotel. It's a dazzling success, until Frangelica "Sister" McFee walks through the door. Sarah Booth knew Sister in college, before Sister became a best-selling author and moved to New York, and fame and fortune don't seem to have tempered her arrogance and cruelty.

As a Category 3 hurricane bears down on Nantucket, Dionis Mather and her father have their work cut out for them. Their family business is to ferry goods and people back and forth from Tuckernuck, the private island off Nantucket’s western tip, a place so remote and exclusive that it is off the electric grid. As caretakers of the small plot of sand in the middle of the Atlantic, the Mathers are responsible for evacuating Tuckernuck’s residents, who range from an elderly native who refuses to leave her family home to the abandoned summer house pets of an absentee NFL quarterback.

One year after moving to his late wife’s Tuscan hometown of Gravigna, Nico Doyle has fully settled into life there, seeing friends in the course of daily errands and helping to serve and test recipes at his in-laws’ restaurant. But the town is shaken by the arrival of wine critic Michele Mantelli in his flashy Jaguar. Mantelli holds his influential culinary magazine and blog over Gravigna’s vintners and restaurateurs. Mantelli’s lavish, larger-than-life, and often vindictive personality has made him many enemies, and when he is poisoned, Maresciallo Perillo needs help....

Catherine Wynne's introduction reappraises the stories by looking at Conan Doyle's medical background and its influence on the creation of the famous detective.

The third book in the recently revamped Nantucket mystery series. When two children make a grisly discovery on Sconset beach, Detective Meredith Folger finds herself with a perplexing case on her hands. The crime lab can tell her only that the newly unearthed skeletal remains belonged to a woman who was strangled to death somewhere between two and 10 years ago - a conclusion that sends Merry sifting through old missing-persons files. But then a shocking piece of news changes everything.

London, 1889: After Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat became a Victorian best seller, rowing on the Thames was the great craze of 1889. When an elementary school teacher in training takes a midnight swim in the Thames and witnesses a body being dumped, Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackerey are called to investigate. They uncover strange parallels with the enormously popular Victorian novel, but nobody will take them seriously. Following their instincts, they stick doggedly to the trail, which leads upstream to Oxford.

A sadistic practical joker is haunting the popular music halls of London, interfering with the actors and interrupting their acts by orchestrating humiliating disasters that take place in view of the audience. A trapeze artist misses her timing when the trapeze ropes are shortened. Mustard has been applied to a sword swallower's blade. A singer's costume has been rigged. The girl in a magician's box is trapped. Then the mischief escalates to murder. Or was murder intended all along?

London, 1879. Crowds have gathered at Islington's chilly Agricultural Hall to place their bets on who will become the next world champion in a six-day, 500-mile speed-walking race, the wobble. When one of the highly favored contenders dies under suspicious circumstances, Sergeant Cribb also has a race on his hands - to pursue a ruthless murderer.

Like most women, Elizabeth Miles assumes many roles; unlike most, hers have made her a woman on the run. Living on the edge of society, Elizabeth uses her guile to relieve so-called respectable men of their ill-gotten gains. But brutal and greedy entrepreneur Oscar Thornton is out for blood. He's lost a great deal of money and is not going to forgive a woman for outwitting him. With his thugs hot on her trail, Elizabeth seizes the moment to blend in with a group of women who have an agenda of their own.

From mysterious origins through the Victorian sleuths and the "Golden Age" of the genre (the 1920s through the 1940s) and to the present day, detective fiction, mysteries, and spy thrillers have consistently topped best-seller lists around the world. Professor M. Lee Alexander provides listeners with a lively discussion of groundbreaking authors from Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle to Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, and modern writers such as Nevada Barr and Jonathan Kellerman.

Brighton, 1882: Albert Moscrop spends his holiday peering at beachgoers through a telescope, piecing together disarmingly trivial observations into a compelling drama for his own amusement. A keen student of human nature, Moscrop concentrates his interest on one particular family - the Protheros, especially the beautiful Zena Prothero, whose husband appears to take her for granted. Moscrop gradually moves into the circle of the Prothero family, only to become involved in a sensational murder.

Forbidden in Victorian England, the grim and violent world of bare-knuckle fighting has gone underground. So when a headless body is found floating in the Thames, his hands "pickled" for fighting, Sergeant Cribb knows he is facing a challenge. Desperate for information, they select the young constable Henry Jago to infiltrate the gang, subjecting him to a rigorous program of purging, pickling, and training. Cribb is certain that the losing fighters are being killed, or worse, so getting Jago out just in time is crucial....

Spencer Murphy is a national treasure. A famous correspondent during the Vietnam War who escaped captivity in Southeast Asia, he made a fortune off of his books and television appearances. But Spence is growing forgetful with age; he's started to wander and even fails to come home one night. When a body is discovered at Step Above, the sprawling Murphy house near Steps Beach, Nantucket police detective Meredith Folger is called in to investigate.

Three cell phones ring in an opulent London suite. The calls go unanswered, because their recipients are dead. Earlier that night, four old friends and lovers meet for a reunion dinner. Miko and Robert haven't seen each other in 10 years; Miko hates Robert for the money he's made with shady ethics. Unbeknownst to Miko, his wife, Veera, also slept with Robert the last time everyone was together. Robert's young trophy wife, Elise, has no old grudges to bear, but will be swept up in the murderous fray.

Merry Folger is more than ready for a romantic vacation with her fiancé, Peter, when fate - and her police chief father - intervenes. Twenty-one-year-old Jay Santorski never should have drowned in the frigid waters off the Nantucket shore. What was the athlete, Harvard scholar, and part-time scalloper doing out alone in the storm-churned bay? At her father's insistence - and over Peter's objections - Merry returns to the island to investigate.

Ellen Wingate thinks she's hit the jackpot when she learns the millions she's inherited comes with a super-exclusive condo in the mountains outside of Las Vegas. But leaving Minnesota for paradise turns out to be the ultimate nightmare. Trapped with her neighbors in a freakish winter avalanche, a chilling discovery at the bottom of an indoor pool signals a frightening turn of events.