When Miss Seeton walks out after a performance of Carmen and witnesses a real-life stabbing, all she can recall is a shadowy figure. But how could she have guessed that her latest artistic endeavor is a picture-perfect portrait of the killer? Her sketch puts her in a perilous position, for back at her recently inherited cottage in Plummergen village, she's fated to be a sitting duck...for murder most foul!

Lady Emily Hardcastle is an eccentric widow with a secret past. Florence Armstrong, her maid and confidante, is an expert in martial arts. The year is 1908 and they've just moved from London to the country, hoping for a quiet life. But it is not long before Lady Hardcastle is forced out of her self-imposed retirement. There's a dead body in the woods, and the police are on the wrong scent. Lady Hardcastle makes some enquiries of her own, and it seems she knows a surprising amount about crime investigation...

There’s a literary niche for all tastes including those who think that either Agatha Christie wasn’t funny enough or that PG Wodehouse didn’t feature anywhere near as many baffling murders as he could have. The Case of the Canterfell Codicil is a classic, cozy, locked-room mystery written in the style of an homage to PG Wodehouse.

Judith Potts is 77 years old and blissfully happy. She lives on her own in a faded mansion just outside Marlow, there’s no man in her life to tell her what to do or how much whisky to drink, and to keep herself busy she sets crosswords for The Times newspaper. One evening, while out swimming in the Thames, Judith witnesses a brutal murder. The local police don’t believe her story, so she decides to investigate for herself and is soon joined in her quest by Suzie, a salt-of-the-earth dog-walker, and Becks, the prim and proper wife of the local vicar.

Recently divorced and reluctantly retired, Julia Bird has fled London to enjoy idyllic rural life in the Cotswolds. Determined to have the perfect English garden, her first job is to tear down the old shed, where she unearths much more than she’d bargained for: a body, apparently buried for decades. But who could it be, and who killed them? The police draw a blank, and even the gossip-fest that is the local book club can’t remember anyone going missing in the village.

June 1933. Independent, young Kitty Underhay has been left in charge of her family’s hotel, The Dolphin, on the tranquil English coast. But when several rooms are broken into and searched, including Kitty’s own, she quickly realizes that something out of the ordinary is afoot at the hotel. Soon, rumors are flying in the cozy town that someone is on the hunt for a stolen ruby. A ruby that Kitty’s mother may well have possessed when she herself went missing during the Great War.

England. 1923. After a year away at finishing school where she learned etiquette, deportment, and the difference between a fish fork and a salad one, Kitty Worthington is eager to return home. But minutes after she and her brother Ned board the Golden Arrow, the unthinkable happens. A woman with a mysterious connection to her brother is poisoned, and the murderer can only be someone aboard the train. When Scotland Yard hones on Ned as the main suspect, Kitty sets out to investigate.

Stephen Munro, a demobbed army officer, reconciles himself to taking a job as a footman to make ends meet. Employed at Wintringham Hall, the delightful but decaying Sussex country residence of the elderly Lady Susan Carey, his first task entails welcoming her eccentric guests to a weekend house-party, at which her bombastic nephew—who recognises Stephen from his former life—decides that an after-dinner séance would be more entertaining than bridge. Then Cicely disappears!

England, 1925. After years shut away from the world, former detective Lord Edgington of Cranley Hall plans a grand ball to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday. But when someone starts bumping off members of his scheming family, the old man enlists his teenage grandson to help find the killer, before one of them is next.

Mrs. Virgil (Emily) Pollifax of New Brunswick, New Jersey, was a widow with grown children. She was tired of attending her Garden Club meetings. She wanted to do something good for her country. This first in the series sends Emily on her first case after she successfully persuades a skeptical CIA recruitment officer that she is the best person for the job.

Edinburgh, 1911: When Maud McIntyre and her lady’s maid, Daisy, form a detective agency, they never dream their first case will take place at a glamorous house in the Scottish Highlands. But when the duchess of Duddingston, concerned that a notorious jewelry thief will target her lavish weekend party, employs Maud to go undercover as a guest to find the culprit, the agency has its first case to solve....

December 1927. Mystery-writer Marius Quin has one previous bestseller, endless looming mortgage payments, and no idea how to write his next book. When his childhood friend Lady Isabella Montague invites him to an intimate New Year’s Eve party hosted by a narcissistic actor, Marius seizes upon the distraction. With his perpetually glum Basset hound along for the ride, he navigates the snowy lanes to the opulent estate of Everham Hall. As the celebrations begin, fireworks light up the sky, champagne corks pop, and then the host is murdered…

Librarian Sylvia Ashe knows nothing about her past, having grown up without a father and a mother who refused to discuss him. When she stumbles upon a diary that suggests she's descended from magicians, she's skeptical. After all, magicians are special, and she's just an ordinary woman who loves books. She seeks answers from a member of the most prominent family of magicians, but she quickly learns that finding the truth won't be easy, especially when he turns out to be as artless as her, and more compelling and dangerous than books.

The year is 1920: Flying in the face of convention, legendary American adventuress Beryl Helliwell never fails to surprise and shock. The last thing her adoring public would expect is that she craves some peace and quiet. The humdrum hamlet of Walmsley Parva in the English countryside seems just the ticket. And, honestly, until America comes to its senses and repeals Prohibition, Beryl has no intention of returning stateside and subjecting herself to bathtub gin.

At the end of her first unsuccessful season out in society, Lady Georgiana has all but given up on attracting a suitable man - until she receives an invitation to a masked Halloween ball at Broxley Manor. Georgie is uncertain why she was invited, until she learns that the royal family intends to marry her off to a foreign prince, one reputed to be mad.

Bridgestead is a peaceful spot: a babbling brook, rolling hills, and a working mill at its heart. Pretty and remote, nothing exceptional happens...until the day that Master of the Mill Joshua Braithwaite goes missing under dramatic circumstances, never to be heard of again. Now Joshua's daughter is getting married and wants to make one last attempt at finding her father. Kate Shackleton has always loved solving puzzles. So who better to get to the bottom of Joshua's mysterious disappearance?

Oxford, 1960. There's a murderer on the loose, and two unlikely heroes are poised to solve the case. Meet Probationary WPC Trudy Loveday - smart, enthusiastic and always underestimated. In the hope of getting her out of the way, Trudy’s senior officer assigns her to help coroner Clement Ryder as he re-opens the case of a young woman's death. She can't believe her luck – she is actually going to be working on a real murder case.

In 1921, the bloodied bodies of Colonel Fletcher, his wife and two staff are found in a manor house in Surrey. The police have put the murders down to a violent robbery, but Detective Inspector Madden from Scotland Yard has his own suspicions. In the meantime the killer is plotting his second strike.

Kidnapping is Andrew Douglas's business: they take them, he finds them. But it isn't so simple when Alessia Cenci, golden-girl jockey, disappears, followed by the young child of a derby winner and the senior steward of the Jockey Club. From Italy to England to Washington, D.C., Andrew's caseload is suddenly, violently overflowing. And he must fight triply hard to keep his own name off the growing list of victims.

The sisters at a lonely Cornish convent share a chilling secret they cannot confess...Sister Sophia is dead. Another disappears. And a mysterious last letter from a dying nun is sent to the prioress. Sister Joan has faced her own demons. Now she is sent to the convent to investigate, as well as teach the local children. There are whispers of virgin sacrifice and suicide, and the mother prioress certainly wears pink nail varnish. And who is the young man hiding in the bracken?

Following the disastrous retreat of the British army from Dunkirk in 1940, England is plunged into a state of fear. The threat of a German invasion is real, and many German Nationals are interned in camps across the country. One such camp is on the ancient moor land of Prees Heath, near the small town of Whitchurch in Shropshire, where Tom Tyler is the sole detective inspector. Young women from all walks of life have joined the Land Army, to help desperate farmers keep the country fed. Then one turns up dead.

Into Keldale's pastoral web of old houses and older secrets comes Scotland Yard Inspector Thomas Lynley, the eighth earl of Asherton. Along with the redoubtable Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, Lynley has been sent to solve a savage murder that has stunned the peaceful countryside. For fat, unlovely Roberta Teys has been found in her best dress, an ax in her lap, seated in the old stone barn beside her father's headless corpse. Her first and last words were "I did it. And I'm not sorry".

Who could have suspected that the exciting stag party for the groom would be the prelude to the murder of his close friend Charlie Hatton? And Charlie's death was only the first in a string of puzzling murders involving small-time gangsters, cheating husbands, and loose women. Now Chief Inspector Wexford and his assistant join forces with the groom to track down a killer....

The fiction world of today needs a “Saint” more than it ever did. For years now that scene has been dominated by the “anti-heroes"—those grim gray operators in a sunless sub-culture where global issues are worked out with totally unemotional pragmatism, those hapless uninspired puppets manipulated and expended by ruthlessly dedicated little brothers of Big Brother. It made morbidly fascinating narrative, but it never gave anyone a lift until it climaxed in the hyper-gadgeted parodies of 007 extravaganzas.

The first of the classic mysteries featuring governess-turned-detective Miss Silver, who investigates a deadly conspiratorial ring. Charles Moray has come home to England to collect his inheritance. After four years wandering the jungles of India and South America, the hardy young man returns to the manor of his birth, where generations of Morays have lived and died. Strangely, he finds the house unlocked, and sees a light on in one of its abandoned rooms. Eavesdropping, he learns of a conspiracy to commit a fearsome crime.

You won't remember Mr. Heming. He was the estate agent who showed you around your comfortable home, suggested a financial package, negotiated a price with the owner, and called you with the good news. The less good news is that, all these years later, he still has the key. That's absurd, you laugh. Of all the many hundreds of houses he has sold, why would he still have the key to mine? The answer is; he has the keys to them all. William Heming's most at home in a stranger's private things.

The year is 1924. Only a few years removed from the trenches of Flanders, Lieutenant Eric Peterkin has just been granted membership in the most prestigious soldiers-only club in London: the Britannia. But when a gentleman's wager ends with a member stabbed to death, the victim's last words echo in the lieutenant's head: that he would "Soon right a great wrong from the past". Eric is certain one of his fellow members is the murderer. But who?

A week's holiday in a luxurious hotel is just what Scotland Yard's Superintendent Duncan Kincaid needs. But his vacation ends dramatically with the discovery of a dead body in the whirlpool bath. Despite a suspicious lack of cooperation from the local constabulary, Kincaid's keen sense of duty won't allow him to ignore the heinous crime, impelling him to send for his enthusiastic young assistant, Sergeant Gemma James. But the stakes are raised significantly when a second murder occurs....

It’s amazing what bodily injury can do for a man. A fall from a racehorse left brilliant jockey Sid Halley dangerously depressed, with a wrecked hand and the need for a new career. It was a bullet wound that helped him find one.

Three critically acclaimed recordings are joined together in this dazzling Agatha Christie Triple Bill, read by award-winning narrators Alison Larkin and James Warwick, star of the Partners in Crime TV series on Masterpiece Theater.