Brighton, 1950. The body of a girl is found cut into three pieces. Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens is convinced the killer is mimicking a famous magic trick—the Zig Zag Girl. The inventor of the trick, Max Mephisto, is an old war friend of Edgar’s. They served together in a shadowy unit called the Magic Men, a special ops troop that used stage tricks to confound the enemy. Max is on the traveling show circuit, touring seaside towns with ventriloquists, sword-swallowers and dancing girls.

We are 40 years into the future, and London is a city in decay. John Watson has returned from medical service in the war in Afghanistan and lives by himself in a run-down part of ​town. On his way home from work, he stumbles upon a beaten man in the street – unconscious and completely naked. His chances of survival are minimal. The same evening, a passenger plane crashes in Richmond Park. There are several hundred victims, and Watson and the mysterious man are left to their own devices.

Clare Cassidy is no stranger to murder. A high school English teacher specializing in the Gothic writer R. M. Holland, she teaches a course on it every year. But when one of Clare’s colleagues and closest friends is found dead, with a line from R. M. Holland’s most famous story, “The Stranger”, left by her body, Clare is horrified to see her life collide with the story lines of her favorite literature.

Natalka and Edwin are perfect if improbable partners in a detective agency. At eighty-four, Edwin regularly claims that he’s the oldest detective in England. He is a master at surveillance, deploying his age as a cloak of invisibility. Natalka, Ukrainian-born and more than fifty years his junior, is a math whizz, who takes any cases concerning fraud or deception. Despite a steady stream of minor cases, Natalka is frustrated. She loves a murder, as she’s fond of saying, and none have come the agency’s way. That is until local writer Melody Chambers dies.

As the year comes to a close, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson must set out through snow laden London to investigate the theft of a priceless clock and the receipt of seven macabre Christmas cards. Will they solve the murderous mystery before they too receive the unwanted 'compliments of the season'? Written by esteemed writer, Anthony Horowitz, and originally published in the Daily Mail, this short story is a festive treat for all fans of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective, Sherlock Holmes.

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.

Cherringham - a quiet town in the Cotswolds. Nothing ever happens there, or so it seems - until one morning a woman's body is found in the river. A terrible accident, according to the police. But is this true? Sarah believes there must be more to it. In Jack, a former NYPD homicide detective, she finds a partner who is willing to start investigating with her. They soon find out that things are not as clear as the police want them to be ... This first - of many cases brings Sarah and Jack together in an unlikely partnership.

In the sleepy village of Cookingdean, Dr Nell Ward is busy working in the grounds of a local manor house. Whilst inspecting an old tunnel, she did not expect to overhear a murder. As the only person with any clues as to what happened, Nell soon finds herself in the middle of the investigation. Desperate to clear her name Nell, along with her colleague Adam, set out solving the murder using their skills as ecologists to uncover details no one else would notice. But it soon becomes clear that playing Agatha Christie is much harder than it might, at first appear.

DI Jan Talantire is called to a cottage in Ilfracombe, where the female occupant is found dead, impaled with a crucifix. The woman, who had been renting the house for a few months, is well known locally, but the documents at the house indicate her real name is Ruth Lyle. The name means nothing to the young PC who found her, DI Talantire knows this cannot be the body of Ruth Lyle.

When a landslip on Pembrokeshire’s stunning coastal path reveals the harrowing remains of two bodies, ex-DCI Evan Warlow’s quiet retirement is shattered.

In 1965, Frances Adams is at an English country fair where a fortune-teller makes a bone-chilling prediction: One day, Frances will be murdered. It is a prediction that sparks her life’s work—trying to solve a crime that hasn’t happened yet. Nearly sixty years later, Annie Adams is summoned to a meeting at the sprawling country estate of her wealthy and reclusive great-aunt Frances. But by the time Annie arrives in the quaint English village of Castle Knoll, Frances is found murdered, just like she always said she would be.

The elderly owner of Mogdon Manor, Victor Hamblyn, dies in a mysterious fire. But was it really an accident? Jack and Sarah are skeptical... The victim's three middle-aged children, who all live in the village of Cherringham, are possible heirs. And possible murderers... Did one of them set the fire?

Every day Iona, a larger-than-life magazine advice columnist, travels the ten stops from Hampton Court to Waterloo Station by train, accompanied by her dog, Lulu. Every day she sees the same people, whom she knows only by nickname: Impossibly-Pretty-Constant-Reader and Terribly-Lonely-Teenager. Of course, they never speak. Seasoned commuters never do. Then one morning, the man she calls Smart-But-Sexist-Manspreader chokes on a grape right in front of her. He’d have died were it not for the timely intervention of Sanjay, a nurse, who gives him the Heimlich maneuver.

This boxed set contains the first three books in C. J. Archer's popular Ministry of Curiosities series. Titles in the set include The Last Necromancer, Her Majesty's Necromancer, and Beyond the Grave. Description of The Last Necromancer: For five years, Charlotte (Charlie) Holloway has lived as a boy in the slums. But when one theft too many gets her arrested, her only means of escape lies with a dead man.

Northern Ireland, spring 1981. Hunger strikes, riots, power cuts, a homophobic serial killer with a penchant for opera, and a young woman’s suicide that may yet turn out to be murder: on the surface, the events are unconnected, but then things—and people—aren’t always what they seem. Detective Sergeant Duffy is the man tasked with trying to get to the bottom of it all. It’s no easy job—especially when it turns out that one of the victims was involved in the IRA but was last seen discussing business with someone from the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force.

Brighton, 1950. The body of a girl is found cut into three pieces. Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens is convinced the killer is mimicking a famous magic trick—the Zig Zag Girl. The inventor of the trick, Max Mephisto, is an old war friend of Edgar’s. They served together in a shadowy unit called the Magic Men, a special ops troop that used stage tricks to confound the enemy. Max is on the traveling show circuit, touring seaside towns with ventriloquists, sword-swallowers and dancing girls.

Natalka and Edwin are perfect if improbable partners in a detective agency. At eighty-four, Edwin regularly claims that he’s the oldest detective in England. He is a master at surveillance, deploying his age as a cloak of invisibility. Natalka, Ukrainian-born and more than fifty years his junior, is a math whizz, who takes any cases concerning fraud or deception. Despite a steady stream of minor cases, Natalka is frustrated. She loves a murder, as she’s fond of saying, and none have come the agency’s way. That is until local writer Melody Chambers dies.

Clare Cassidy is no stranger to murder. A high school English teacher specializing in the Gothic writer R. M. Holland, she teaches a course on it every year. But when one of Clare’s colleagues and closest friends is found dead, with a line from R. M. Holland’s most famous story, “The Stranger”, left by her body, Clare is horrified to see her life collide with the story lines of her favorite literature.

Elly Griffiths has always written short stories to experiment with different voices and genres as well as to explore what some of her fictional creations such as Ruth Galloway, Harbinder Kaur, and Max Mephisto might have done outside of the novels. The Man in Black gathers these bite-sized tales all together in one splendid volume.

Forensic archeologist Ruth Galloway is in her late thirties. She lives happily alone with her cats in a remote area near Norfolk, land that was sacred to its Iron Age inhabitants—not quite earth, not quite sea. But her routine is harshly upended when a child’s bones are found on a desolate beach. Detective Chief Inspector Nelson calls Ruth for help, believing the bones to be the remains of Lucy Downey, a little girl who went missing a decade ago and whose abductor taunts him with bizarre letters referencing ritual sacrifice, Shakespeare, and the Bible.