Showing results for "Old" in Historical

Rare-book dealer Ashlyn Greer’s affinity for books extends beyond the intoxicating scent of old paper, ink, and leather. She can feel the echoes of the books’ previous owners—an emotional fingerprint only she can read. When Ashlyn discovers a pair of beautifully bound volumes that appear to have never been published, her gift quickly becomes an obsession. Not only is each inscribed with a startling incrimination, but the authors, Hemi and Belle, tell conflicting sides of a tragic romance.

Steeped in the mystery and history of nineteenth-century St. Paul, these interlocking detective stories feature the characters—and the local character—that have made the Shadwell Rafferty series irresistible. Spellbinding as ever, these stories also afford the curious pleasure of watching Rafferty find his footing on his way to becoming the consummate detective whose exploits have delighted readers again and again.

Poppy Denby, Arts and Entertainment Editor at The Daily Globe, covers an exhibition of Russian Art, hosted by White Russian refugees, including members of the surviving exiled Romanov Royal family. There is an armed robbery, a guard is shot, and the largest Faberge Egg in the collection is...

The mind that brought us the intrepid Shadwell Rafferty now introduces three unlikely but talented new detectives—in-laws Sophia Westerly and Annie Nichols, and the incomparable Oscar Wilde—who are thrown into murder investigations amid flour milling, literary culture, and labor organizing in the burgeoning city. Shining light on the colorful characters and curious corners of Twin Cities history, Mysterious Tales of Old Minneapolis brings the nineteenth-century city to vibrant life (and dastardly death) in the spellbinding style that Larry Millett’s legion of loyal listeners has come to love.

Highly acclaimed crime writer Ann Granger takes us on another thrilling adventure in her ninth Victorian murder mystery featuring Scotland Yard's Inspector Ben Ross and his wife Lizzie. It is the summer of 1871 when Scotland Yard's Inspector Ben Ross pays a visit to Jacob Jacobus, the old rogue...

In April 1956, at the height of the cold war, Khrushchev and Bulganin leaders of the Soviet Union are in Britain on an official visit. Chief Inspector Troy of Scotland Yard is assigned to be the official bodyguard and to spy on the Soviets. Soon after, a Royal Navy diver is found dead in a mutilated state in Portsmouth Harbour. Troy embarks on an investigation that takes him to the rotten heart of MI6, to the distant days of his childhood and into the dangerous arms of an old flame.

Though best known for The Scarlet Pimpernel, the Hungarian novelist Baroness Orczy was a prolific and versatile writer who could turn her pen to other genres. So, in the social and literary context of the huge success of Sherlock Holmes, she developed a memorable, but nameless character with remarkable powers of detection. The first stories appeared in The Royal Magazine in 1901, and other series followed. The first collection appeared in book form in 1905. 

London, 1928. Mystery writer and amateur detective Marius Quin is reeling from his friend’s murder in his own home. Forced to stay away from the case, he’s in urgent need of distraction when fate points him towards Felicity Mortimer, a woman imprisoned for poisoning her husband fifteen years earlier. Marius soon becomes convinced of Felicity’s innocence, and when he discovers a key witness with his throat cut, it’s clear that the real killer is still on the loose.

April 1943: four boys playing in Hagley Woods, Worcestershire, make a gruesome discovery. Inside an enormous elm tree there is the body of a woman, her mouth stuffed with a length of cloth. As the case goes cold, mysterious graffiti starts going up across the Midlands: 'Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?' To Ross Spooner, a police officer working undercover for spiritualist magazine Two Worlds, the messages hold a sinister meaning.

A trio of vicious World War One veterans descend on the farm in the Adirondack mountains where one of them grew up and his father now lives alone. They embark on, happily wreaking drunken havoc at the old man's place and in the nearby town. But when a naïve, mail-order bride arrives, she ignites a tinderbox of resentment, lust, and betrayal among the men that explodes in brutal depravity, bloody violence, and shocking death. This hard-boiled, literary masterpiece includes a new introduction by Jack Mearns, author of John Sanford: An Annotated Bibliography.

November, 1923. Olive’s school chum, Gigi, invites Olive to London because Gigi’s dotty grandmother fears for her life—or so she’s said to Gigi. However Olive is surprised to find that the dowager is far from muddled. The sharp and imperious matriarch refuses to admit to her worries and sends Olive on her way. Without a client or case, Olive is swept into the glittering lifestyle of the “fast set,” and their decadent excess. But then among the cocktails and champagne, a murderer strikes during a frivolous party game, and Olive realizes the dowager’s fears were well-founded.

Alafair Tucker is a strong woman and the core of her family’s life on a farm in Oklahoma where backbreaking work and the daily logistics of caring for her husband and their nine children, and of being a good neighbor, requires determination and a clear head. She’s also a woman of strong opinions, and it is her opinion that her neighbor, Harley Day, is a drunkard and a reprobate. So, when Harley’s body is discovered frozen in a snowdrift one January day in 1912, she isn’t surprised that his long-suffering family isn’t particularly broken up. When Alafair helps Harley’s wife prepare the body for burial, she discovers that Harley’s demise was anything but natural.

It’s early spring of 1947 in idyllic King’s Cove, and the Hughes ladies, mère et filles, are gardening and sorting through the jars of food that have been put up for the winter. But while cleaning up after the roof of their root cellar has caved in slightly, they are horrified to discover a small skeletal hand embedded in the mess. Panicked, they call Lane Winslow, the ex-British secret service agent, and, not without some misgivings about the state of their tense relationship, Lane calls Inspector Darling.

A sweltering July in Chicago, 1923. Edna Ferber, now a famous short-story writer, is supposed to be researching the novel that will become So Big, her Pulitzer-Prize winner. With her mother, Julia, she spends the week visiting her mother's old childhood friend, Esther Newmann, who lives with her family on the edge of the bustling Maxwell Street Jewish marketplace. But the awful specter of a scandalous murder 15 years before suddenly haunts Edna.

Nora Kelly, a young curator at the Santa Fe Institute of Archaeology, is approached by historian Clive Benton with a once-in-a-lifetime proposal: to lead a team in search of the so-called "Lost Camp" of the tragic Donner Party. This was a group of pioneers who earned a terrible place in American history when they became snow-bound in the California mountains in 1847, their fate unknown until the first skeletonized survivors stumbled out of the wilderness, raving about starvation, murder-and cannibalism. Benton tells Kelly he has stumbled upon an amazing find: the diary of one of the victims.

In 1890, the first Japanese diplomatic delegation arrives in London to open an embassy. Cyrus Barker, private enquiry agent and occasional agent for the Foreign Service Office, is enlisted to display his personal Japanese garden to the visiting dignitaries. Later that night, Ambassador Toda is shot and killed in his office and Cyrus Barker is discovered across the street, watching the very same office, in possession of a revolver with one spent cartridge.

A dark and unsettling Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place delves into secrets buried beneath aristocratic respectability. When Dr. Watson notices strange changes in the behavior of Sir Robert Norberton and the eerie isolation of his ancestral estate, Holmes is drawn into a case steeped in deception, madness, and hidden crimes. Locked rooms, suppressed truths, and a sinister family secret transform a quiet English manor into a place of dread.

Andy Adams (1859-1935) was born to pioneer parents in Indiana, worked in Texas for a decade driving cattle, and settled in Colorado Springs, where he penned his cowboy narratives. The Log of a Cowboy chronicles a five-month drive of three thousand head of cattle from Brownsville, Texas, to the Blackfoot Indian Reservation in Montana. This classical work of fiction provides fascinating insights of everyday life on the Great Western Cattle Trail with a team of 12 cowhands, a cook, a horse wrangler and a foreman.

Card-player-extraordinaire Poker Alice knows when hold 'em, when to fold 'em, and when to team up with master gunman Newt "Widowmaker" Jones. She's betting on Jones to protect her - and her money - on a treasure hunt in the California desert. Legend has it that a shipwreck is buried in the Salton sands. Some say it's a Spanish galleon that got stuck when the sea ran dry. Other says it's a Chinese junk full of pearls or a Viking ship filled with Aztec treasure. Either way, a lot of very mean and dangerously violent folks would kill to find it. 

Benedict Cumberbatch plays the young, feisty, devastatingly acute Horace Rumpole in this collection of cracking cases, also starring Timothy West as the older Rumpole. Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders: It is the '50s, and two war heroes have been shot dead. Defending the suspect is deemed hopeless, so the case is handed to a novice. But the novice's superiors didn't count on the tenacity and wit of the young and hungry Horace Rumpole.