"Helen Kendal's woes begin when she receives a phone call from her vanished uncle Franklin, long presumed dead, who urges her to make contact with criminal defense attorney Perry Mason; soon after, she finds herself the main suspect in the murder of an unfamiliar man. Her kitten has just survived a poisoning attempt, as has her aunt Matilda, the woman who always maintained that Franklin was alive in spite of his disappearance. Lucky that Helen took...

"Can Lord Peter Wimsey prove that Harriet Vane is not guilty of murder--or find the real poisoner in time to save her from the gallows? Impossible, it seems. The Crown's case is watertight. The police are adamant that the right person is on trial. The judge's summing-up is also clear. Harriet Vane is guilty of killing her lover. And Harriet Vane shall hang. But the jury disagrees."--P. [4] of cover.

The Jackal, a killer at the top of his profession, unknown to any secret service in the world, has a contract to kill French president Charles de Gaulle, one of the world's most heavily guarded men. As the minutes count down to the final act of execution, it seems that there is no power on earth that can stop the Jackal.

"When Ellery Queen, described by the London Times as "the logical successor to Sherlock Holmes," is invited by his friend, a doctor, to witness an operation, he accepts the offer in hopes of furthering his capabilities as an amateur detective, but soon ends up testing those same skills. The patient who is about to undergo the delicate procedure is Abigail Doorn, the richest and most famous woman in America; the doctor who will perform it is her protégé,...

California private eye Kinsey Millhone takes on a case where nothing seems to add up-one apartment burgled of worthless papers, another mindlessly ransacked and destroyed, a house destroyed by arson and a woman brutally slain.

Kinsey meets Bobby Callahan in the local gym. Callahan is a scarred young man struggling back to life after a car forced his Porsche over the edge of a canyon, battering his body and muddling his memory. All he remembers is that someone, for some reason, tried to kill him. Desperate for clues about his own past life and certain he is being stalked, he asks Kinsey to protect him. Kinsey can't resist the brave kid - and neither can the killers. Three...

Los Angeles police detective Peter Decker had grown very close to Rina Lazarus' young sons, as he had to their mother, and he looked forward to spending a day of his vacation camping with the boys. When one of the boys stumbles on two human skeletons, charred beyond recognition but identified by a forensic dentist as teenage girls, vacation time is over for Decker. The father of a teenage daughter himself, Decker throws himself into the murder case,...

Two detectives, upper-crust Thomas Lynley and working-class Barbara Havers, are sent by Scotland Yard to Yorkshire to investigate a teenager who supposedly killed her father with an axe. The more they investigate the crime, however, the more lies and secrets they uncover about the girl, her father, their family, and the entire village.

Perhaps it was fitting justice: a dentist who enjoyed inflicting pain was murdered in his own chair.

Hired to bring a woman's mother back from the Mojave desert, female investigator Kinsey Millhone returns to unearth a gruesome, long-buried secret and make the top billing of Tyrone Patty's hit list.