Simon Vance

Spring, 1921. Scotland Yard sends Inspector Ian Rutledge to the sea-battered village of Walmer on the coast of Essex. At Benton Abbey, a grand manor with a storied past, the lady of the house claims she saw a violent murder-- but there is no body, no blood. She also insists she recognized the killer: Captain Nelson. Only it could not have been Nelson because he died during the war. Everyone in the village believes that the losses of the grieving widow...

"In November 1980, Nick Hartley returns home from a university lecture to find his house crawling with police. His ex-girlfriend, Alice Poole, has been found murdered, and her new boyfriend Mark Woodcroft is missing. Nick is the prime suspect. The case quickly goes cold, but Nick cannot let it go. He embarks on a career in investigative journalism, determined to find Alice's murderer--but his obsession leads him down a dangerous path. Decades later,...

"When property developer Connor Clive Blaydon is found dead, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks and his Yorkshire team dive into the investigation. As luck would have it, someone had installed a cache of spy-cams all around his luxurious home. The team hope that they'll find answers, and the culprit, among the video recordings. Instead of discovering Connor's murderer, however, the grainy and blurred footage reveals another crime: a brutal rape....

Agatha Christie demonstrates her unparalleled mastery with Three Blind Mice and Other Stories-a classic compendium of mystery and suspense, crime and detection, whose title novella served as the basis for The Mousetrap, the longest running stage play in the history of the London theater. A blinding snowstorm-and a homicidal maniac-traps a small party of friends in an isolated estate. Out of this deceptively simple setup, Agatha Christie fashioned...

Chris Ewan's The Good Thief's Guide to Vegas is the next caper in a series that's being called "impressive... comic...fresh" (Publishers Weekly-starred review). Charlie Howard isn't only a part-time crime writer and part-time thief; he's also a magician. For his next trick, he'll relieve Josh Masters, the famous illusionist vying for the affections of Charlie's friend Victoria, of $60,000 in casino chips stashed in his hotel safe. Revenge would...

Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It...

"First published in 1838, ‘Oliver Twist' is one of the most admired novels by Charles Dickens, an English writer, and social critic. It is the story of a young orphan who dares to say, ""Please, sir, I want some more."" After escaping from the dark and dismal workhouse where he was born, Oliver finds himself on the mean streets of Victorian-era London and is unwittingly recruited into a scabrous gang of scheming urchins. In this band of petty thieves,...

In 1780s London, Dr. Thomas Silkstone investigates the mysterious disappearance of the sole survivor of an ill-fated scientific expedition, which is linked to a potion that has the power to raise the dead, drawing him into a dark world of vengeance, murder and the trafficking of corpses for profit.

Newly released from the notorious asylum known as Bedlam, Lady Lydia Farrell finds herself in an equally terrifying position--as a murder suspect--when she stumbles upon the mutilated body of Sir Montagu Malthus in his study at Boughton Hall. Meanwhile Dr. Thomas Silkstone has been injured in a duel with a man who may or may not have committed the grisly deed of which Lydia is accused. Despite his injury, Thomas hopes to clear his beloved's good name...

"If you're a security expert, what do you do if your fiancee suddenly goes missing, presumably kidnapped? If you're Daniel Trent, a highly trained specialist in hostage negotiation, the answer is simple: You find out who took her and you make them talk. But what if your chief suspect is taken as well? How do you get him back quickly--and alive--so you can find out what really happened to your fiancee? Set in Marseille, Chris Ewan's Dead Line is a...