On a quiet morning in St. Mary Mead, a maid wakes Colonel Bantry and his wife to inform them that a young woman is dead in their library. The victim is dressed in a tawdry dress, with dyed hair and heavy make-up. Mrs. Bantry knows that as long as the murder remains unsolved her husband will be the target of suspicion and gossip, so she asks Miss Marple for help. The victim is 18-year-old Ruby Keene, a dancer at the Majestic Hotel, whose body is identified...

The villagers of Chipping Cleghorn are agog with curiosity when the Gazette advertises “A murder is announced and will take place on Friday, October 29th, at Little Paddocks at 6.30 p.m.” A childish practical joke? Or a spiteful hoax? Unable to resist the mysterious invitation, the locals arrive at Little Paddocks at the appointed time when, without warning, the lights go out and a gun is fired. When they come back on, a gruesome scene is revealed....

Miss Marple, enjoying a well-earned rest on the Caribbean Island of St. Honore, far from her busy life in the village of St. Mary Mead, meets Major Palgrave. He tells her the strange story of a suspected double murderer. Just as Major Palgrave is about to show the murderer's picture to her, he looks over her shoulder, appears startled, and changes the subject. The next morning, a servant finds him dead in his room. As rumors begin to circulate, Miss...

When a Member of Parliament shows up at New Scotland Yard requesting an investigation into the suicide of the son of one of his constituents in the beautiful town of Ludlow, the Assistant Commissioner sees two opportunities in this request. The first is to have an MP owing him a favor, and the second is to get rid of Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, whose career at the Met has been hanging by a thread for quite some time. So he assigns Havers to...

On compassionate leave after the murder of his wife, Thomas Lynley is called back to Scotland yard when the body of a woman is found stabbed and abandoned in an isolated London cemetery. His former team doesn't trust the leadership of their new department chief, Isabelle Ardery, whose management style seems to rub everyone the wrong way.

"Ann Cleeves--New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of the Vera and Shetland series, both of which are hit TV shows--returns with the extraordinary follow-up to The Long Call, in the Two Rivers series, soon to be a major TV series too. North Devon is enjoying a rare hot summer with tourists flocking to its coastline. Detective Matthew Venn is called out to a rural crime scene at the home of a group of artists. What he finds is an elaborately...

The superlatives keep piling up for mystery fiction's most acclaimed revival: "Erudite, fascinating - by all means the most successful recreation of the famous inhabitant of 221B Baker Street," applauded the Houston Chronicle, and the Denver Post agreed: "We bow to a writer who can take a literary icon of this magnitude and make him fresh and real." Now the spellbinding series that "has the power to charm the most grizzled Baker Street Irregular"...

Fierce winds, dark secrets, deadly intentions. When Jem Rosco--sailor, adventurer, and legend--blows into town in the middle of an autumn gale, the residents of Greystone, Devon, are delighted to have a celebrity in their midst. But just as abruptly as he arrived, Rosco disappears again, and soon his lifeless body is discovered in a dinghy, anchored off Scully Cove, a place with legends of its own. This is an uncomfortable case for Detective Inspector...

Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers is at a loss: The daughter of her friend Taymullah Azhar has been taken by her mother and Barbara can't really help-Azhar never married Angelina, and his name isn't on Hadiyyah's birth certivicate. The trail a private detective follows goes cold. Then Angelina reappears with shocking news: Hadiyyah has been kidnapped in Italy. The Italian police are investigating, and the Yard won't get involved, until Barbara takes...

Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye,Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie,When the pie was opened the birds began to sing,Oh wasn't that a dainty dish to set before the king?Rex Fortesque was not so fortunate. He wasn't presented with a pie--he was murdered! The only clue is the rye found in his trousers pocket. When two more murders ensue only Jane Marple is able to see a pattern: a childhood rhyme with a link to the victims' past. Murder...