National Network for Equitable Library Service

The acclaimed Russian novelist's epic morality tale of a young man's horrifying crime and his struggle for redemption. Rodion Raskolnikov, a young man living in St. Petersburg, devises a gruesome experiment in morality. Theorizing that men of exceptional intelligence have license to kill others, he decides to test his theory with the murder of an elderly pawnbroker. Though no evidence can link him to his crime, it leaves him so deeply disturbed that he fights a constant urge to confess.

Artist Francis Bacon gets tangled up in murder while visiting the English countryside in the final mystery of this Lambda Award-winning series. Francis Bacon awakes in a four-poster bed with a punishing hangover and a naked footman beside him. The setting and company mean he's in the country, and that spells disaster for an up-and-coming artist whose natural habitat is the nightclubs and back alleys of swinging Soho.

The stylish tale of a dead poet, a rediscovered pulp novel, and a lovely lady with a story to sell from the author of the Charles Resnick Mysteries. Ex-Metropolitan Police Officer Jack Kiley spent his career discerning fact from fiction. Now a private detective, Kiley has agreed to investigate the provenance of a newly discovered manuscript. Lost for decades, Dead Dames Don't Sing is typical pulp fodder: "Hard, fast, and deadly," according to Daniel Pike, the rare book dealer who hires Kiley.

When a woman is shot in a cannabis patch, Arly Hanks must restore order to her Ozarks community, in this sharp-witted mystery by an Agatha Award-winning author. When small-town police chief Arly Hanks returns to Maggody, Arkansas, after vacation, she finds the population has risen to a booming 802. Among the newbies: Madame Celeste, the psychic who's holding locals in thrall with her predictions of doom; a handsome new high school guidance counselor; and a gaggle of mantra-chanting hippies who have turned the old general store into the source for cosmic harmony.

From a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master: A Manhattan PI heads to Florida to deal with movie stars, a mysterious guru, and murder. New York City private eye John Milano's new client is an old flame-and the fire is still burning in Miami Beach. It wasn't too many years ago that superstar Sharon Bauer dumped John for an aged and infirm billionaire at the instruction of her very persuasive yogi, Kalos, renowned master of "The Path." Following Kalos's advice was practically a guarantee of enlightenment for his receptive disciple.

Edgar Award Finalist: A former Miami Beach tennis pro discovers the dangerous price of marrying for money in "one of the year's best chillers" (The New York Times Book Review). There was a time when Davis Cup winner Chris Monte had it all. Now, down and out in Dade County, restringing racquets at a South Beach tennis shop and hiring himself out for an occasional lesson, he's dead broke. Then, along comes Elizabeth Jones, a mousy student with an irresistible proposition: fifty thousand dollars in exchange for marrying her.

A young drug runner gets revenge on a crime syndicate in this novel of deception and international double crosses from an Edgar Award-winning author. By the time David Hanna Shaw is shuttled off to an Ivy League school by his preoccupied mother, the brilliant young linguist is already fluent in a half dozen languages. He's also a quick study in international swindling, deceit, drug smuggling, and currency profiteering. That's what comes from having been dragged across every European capital by a mendacious diplomat father.

From a three-time Edgar Award-winning author: Local rituals and a lost painting draw a New York businessman into intrigue on a remote Pacific island. Ben Smith, a market researcher from New York City, has arrived on Santo Stefano, an island two hundred miles off the coast of Peru. At the behest of his company's seafood division, he's gauging the potential profitability of the island's abundance of rock lobsters. Encouraging a little tin-pot country to draw foreign investment should be a breeze-a beautiful one, too, berthed, as he is, in such an exotic locale.

Edgar Award Finalist: The explosive politics of the Middle East shatter a California family in this "wonderful thriller" (The New York Times). Among the Tylers of Santa Clara are a matriarch lauded as the first lady of American theater, a judicial appointee of the president, a noted fundraiser for international charities, a university vice-chancellor, and an esteemed and admired surgeon. The Tylers are, in their own words, "worthy of Paradise." Then, a violently anti-US Middle Eastern leader sends his son to California to be treated by the young Dr. Michael Tyler.

This MacDougal Duff Mystery launched the career of the Edgar Award-winning "American queen of suspense novelists" (New York Telegraph). Feeling unmoored since the death of her father, twenty-year-old Bessie Gibbon has left upstate New York to live with an aunt and uncle, Lina and Charles Cathcart, in their four-story Manhattan home.