National Network for Equitable Library Service

A most eligible gentlemen, Gerrard Debbington is uninterested in marriage; his driving passion is to paint the fabled gardens of Lord Tregonning's estate. When the opportunity arises to paint Lord Tregonning's daughter, he discovers that Jacqueline Tregonning stirs him as no other.

When Lucy travels to Blackwell Manor, she finds the lord of the manor unsettled by the recent deaths of his young wife and his sister. Because he is plagued by a family curse, he is horrified to think he might be to blame. But who then is the ghost that haunts the halls? A vampire?

First published in a 1843 edition of The Pioneer, The Tell-Tale Heart is one of Poe's best-known stories. In it, an unreliable narrator is increasingly troubled by the clouded eye of the old man he lives with. Similar to The Black Cat, The Tell-Tale Heart focuses on the effects of mental instability, crime, and guilt.

First published in a 1841 edition of Graham's Magazine, The Murders in the Rue Morgue is often cited as the first modern detective story. The first of three stories to center around C. Auguste Dupin, Poe's fictional detective, The Murders in the Rue Morgue involves Dupin's investigation of two women's murders.

First published in a 1843 edition of The Saturday Evening Post, The Black Cat tells the story of a man and his increasingly antagonistic relationship with his cat. Akin to The Tell-Tale Heart and The Cask of Amontillado, The Black Cat investigates the psychological effects of guilt as well as the potentially destructive and violent consequences of alcoholism.

Truth and Honour explores the 2011 murder of Saint John businessman Richard Oland, of the prominent family that owns Moosehead Breweries, the ensuing police investigation and the arrest, trial, and conviction of the victim's son, Dennis Oland, for second ­degree murder. Oland's trial would be the most publicized in New Brunswick history.

A forty-year-old skeleton is found encased in a concrete slab at a recently decommissioned nuclear energy site. It becomes a case for the Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI) and its leader, Joe Gunther, since they have the resources and the ability to investigate an old, very cold, missing persons case that has now been reclassified as murder. The victim was Hank Mitchell, and Gunther must chase down old rumors and speculations: Who benefited from his death and the disappearance of his body?

Cat Mateo, a once-stray teenager, owes her rescue to Detective Stride. But Cat holds something else to her chest: a secret, the sheer power of which she could not possibly comprehend. A secret that, once out of the bag, will viciously scratch at Duluth's still-healing wounds.

Simeon Grist is drawn into the Asian underworld of Los Angeles when two children vanish in Chinatown and the parents refuse to inform police for fear that Vietnamese hit men will do them in.

It is a stormy Christmas Eve in little Union Grove when Daniel Earle arrives back from his two-year sojourn. Sick and exhausted, he shares the story of the break-up of the nation into three uneasy independent regions. Meanwhile, Union Grove has been shocked by a Christmas Eve double murder.