National Network for Equitable Library Service

"The small man standing on the narrow ledge stared fixedly forward with eyes made wide and blank by terror." At 2pm on a Monday in 1966, Ned Balfour wakes in Corsica beside a beautiful woman. In the same instant, back in London, fellow art dealer and Dachau survivor Sam Weiss falls ten stories to his death. Ned refuses to believe that Sam's death was intentional, and his investigation thrusts him into the deceit and fraudulence of the art world, where he unmasks more than one respectable face.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MARTIN EDWARDS 'The death was an odd one, it was true; but there was after all no very clear reason to assume it was anything but natural.' In the winter of 1942, England lies cold and dark in the wartime blackout. One bleak evening, Councillor Grayling steps off the 6.12 from Euston, carrying 120 in cash, and oblivious to the fate that awaits him in the snow-covered suburbs.

Cyd Redondo, a young, third-generation Brooklyn travel agent who specializes in senior citizens, has never ventured farther than New Jersey. Yet even Jersey proves risky when her Travel Agents' Convention fling, Roger Claymore, leaves her weak in the knees-and everywhere else-then sneaks out of her Atlantic City hotel room at three a.m. Back in Brooklyn, when she reads about smugglers stopped at JFK with skinks in their socks or monkeys down their pants, she never imagines she will join their ranks.

'Don't talk bunk!' said Mr Douglas. 'You can't carry on with the show with a man dying on stage. Drop the curtain!' When Douglas B. Douglas - leading light of the London theatre - premieres his new musical extravaganza, Blue Music, he is sure the packed house will be dazzled by the performance. What he couldn't predict is the death of his star, Brandon Baker, on stage in the middle of Act 2. Soon another member of the cast is found dead, and it seems to be a straightforward case of murder followed by suicide.

The circus is in town for St Kilda's first Flower Festival, which includes a parade. And who should be Queen of said Flowers but the Honourable Phryne Fisher' She has dresses to purchase, cinemas to visit, and agreeable cocktails to drink. However, one of her flower maidens is unstable and has vanished. So Phryne investigates, trudging through the underworld with the help of Bert, Cec, her little beretta, an old flame from Orkney, the owner of the most exclusive brothel in St Kilda, and several elephants.

This book tells the story of crime fiction published during the first half of the twentieth century. The diversity of this much-loved genre is breathtaking, and so much greater than many critics have suggested. To illustrate this, the leading expert on classic crime discusses one hundred books ranging from The Hound of the Baskervilles to Strangers on a Train which highlight the entertaining plots, the literary achievements, and the social significance of vintage crime fiction.

The Great War has ended, and the army is keen to be demobbed. But Willoughby, the new British High Commissioner in Egypt, has managed to affront the Khedive by refusing to receive rival delegations fueled by rising nationalism. Then, when some Armenians, Copts, and English civil servants are attacked, a state of emergency is declared. Gareth Cadwallader Owen is the Mamur Zapt, the Head of the Khedive's Secret Police. Unlike his British colleagues, Owen works for the Khedive. His is an uncomfortable perch as agitation for political and social restructuring grows.

It's World War I. Britain's shadow government, headed by its Agent and Consul General under the nominal authority of Egypt's hereditary ruler the Khedive, has ruled Egypt since 1881. The head of the Secret Police is the Mamur Zapt, an office currently held by a Welshman, Captain Gareth Cadwallader Owen. And as the clouds of the war further darken Egypt's sun-lit skies, he has his hands full. On the professional front, there's all that commotion that started in Cairo's Camel Market.

Egypt, 1914. The outbreak of war in Europe casts ripples that can be felt even in Cairo. Gareth Owen, Mamur Zapt and Head of the Khedive's Secret Police, is given the unhappy task of rounding up enemy aliens. But in a land where the adoption of foreign nationality is a popular means of avoiding trial by an Egyptian court, determining who counts as a German proves contentious. And then there's the face in the cemetery. A cat cemetery, at that.

With an Introduction by Martin Edwards Two classic cases featuring Detective Inspector Littlejohn. In the winter of 1940, the Home Guard unearth a skeleton on the moor above the busy town of Hatterworth. Twenty-three years earlier, the body of a young textile worker was found in the same spot, and the prime suspect was never found - but the second body is now identified as his. Soon it becomes clear that the true murderer is still at large... * * * Nathaniel Wall, the local quack doctor, is found hanging in his consulting room in the Norfolk village of Stalden - but this was not a suicide.