Showing titles in Traditional Detectives

Set in Oxford in the 1660s – a time and place of great intellectual, scientific, religious and political ferment – this remarkable novel centres around a young woman, Sarah Blundy, who stands accused of the murder of Robert Grove, a fellow of New College. Four witnesses describe the events surrounding his death: Marco da Cola, a Venetian Catholic intent on claiming credit for the invention of blood transfusion;

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the comic masterpiece of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who trained as a river-boat pilot (from which experience he took his pen-name, Mark Twain). His most famous book describes a boy's journey down the Mississippi aboard a raft with the runaway black slave Jim.

The year is 2021. No child has been born for twenty-five years. The human race faces extinction. Under the despotic rule of Xan Lyppiat, the Warden of England, the old are despairing and the young cruel. Theo Faren, a cousin of the Warden, lives a solitary life in this ominous atmosphere. That is, until a chance encounter with a young woman leads him into contact with a group of dissenters. Suddenly his life is changed irrevocably as he faces agonising choices which could affect the future of mankind.

The wild and passionate tale of Cathy and Heathcliff's impossible love for each other and its phenomenal setting on the blasted Yorkshire moors has to be one of the best-known love affairs in literature.

Originally with the Met, he transferred to rural Yorkshire where he never quite managed to fit in. His latest case takes him from the windswept moors to the deceptively calm waters of the Norfolk Broads. This is finally somewhere he wants to call home. A human skeleton is unearthed in a forgotten World War 2 bunker on a remote Yorkshire farm. Detective Geldard welcomes the distraction. His wife is away on a solo trip to America, and he’s starting to tire of ready meals and wondering what she’s getting up to.

Read by Kenneth Branagh A new recording of the most widely read mystery of all time, performed by Kenneth Branagh. Now a major motion picture from Twentieth Century Fox, releasing November 10, 2017 and directed by Kenneth Branagh. “The murderer is with us - on the train now...” Just after...

As the early years of detective fiction gave way to two separate golden ages - of hard-boiled tales in America and intricately-plotted, so-called “cozy” murders in Britain - the legacy of Sherlock Holmes, with his fierce devotion to science and logic, gave way to street smarts on the one hand and social insight on the other, but even though these new sub-genres went their own ways, their detectives still required intelligence and clear-sightedness as characterized the earliest works of detective fiction: the trademarks of Sherlock Holmes, and of all the detectives featured here.

Read by David Suchet Now a major motion picture directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh alongside Gal Gadot. Beloved detective Hercule Poirot embarks on a journey to Egypt in one of Agatha Christie’s most famous mysteries. The tranquility of a luxury cruise along the Nile was shattered by the...

Read by Hugh Fraser Robbery and brutal murder aboard a luxury transport ensnares the ever-attentive Hercule Poirot in The Mystery of the Blue Train, from Queen of Mystery Agatha Christie When the luxurious Blue Train arrives at Nice, a guard attempts to wake serene Ruth Kettering from her...

First-year detective Kathleen Doyle is a plucky Irish redhead of humble origins and modest means. Chief Inspector Michael Acton is her antithesis: a British lord turned cop. He's tall, handsome, and enigmatic - to a fault. He also has a knack for solving London's most high-profile crimes. Acton selects Doyle out of the newbie squad to partner with him on a series of investigations because she always knows when someone is lying - a trait that comes in handy when interviewing suspects and witnesses.

The story follows Holmes as he investigates the mysterious circumstances surrounding Violet Smith, whose life and that of her mother have changed following her father's death and the arrival of two men claiming ties to her deceased uncle in South Africa.

The streets are frozen, the days are short, and Constable Tyler Neish is entirely out of his depth. Fresh out of training, Tyler is desperate to make a good impression. He wants to seem capable, commanding, and professional. Unfortunately, he’s mostly known for falling over in the snow and being terrified of his own shadow. But when sixteen-year-old Laura Wilder goes missing, the job suddenly gets personal. To the weary brass at Burnett Road Police Station, Laura is just a low-risk repeat runaway who’ll be home by dinner time.

Despite the dismal Broadway season, Gunplay continues to draw crowds. A gangland spectacle, it's packed to the gills with action, explosions, and gunfire. In fact, Gunplay is so loud that no one notices the killing of Monte Field. In a sold-out theater, Field is found dead partway through the second act, surrounded by empty seats. The police hold the crowd and call for the one man who can untangle this daring murder: Inspector Richard Queen.

Spring, 1909, and Lady Hardcastle, amateur sleuth and all-round eccentric, is enjoying a well-deserved rest. But a week after a trip to the cattle market, Spencer Caradine, a local farmer, turns up dead in the pub, face-down in his beef and mushroom pie. Once again, it is up to Lady Hardcastle and her maid, Florence, to solve the case. Armed with wit and whimsy, not to mention Florence’s mean right hook, the pair set out to discover what really happened and why. Was it poison or just ill luck?

It’s 1929 and an aging Dr. John Watson, conscious of his imminent demise, finally sits down to write a fresh chronicle disclosing the true events behind his published accounts of Sherlock Holmes’s exploits. In these pages, Sherlock Holmes and his stalwart companion encounter reanimated corpses in Highgate Cemetery; a very different, though ever elusive, Irene Adler; tales of madness and murder in the frozen wastes of the north; grotesque organic machines; and much more. 

R. Austin Freeman presents eight cases for his ingenious Edwardian "scientific investigator", Dr. John Thorndyke, including: a classic locked-room murder mystery; a race to find a disappeared child; a dead woman discovered on a train; the story of the vengeful ghost of a murdered Chinese mandarin; and the enigmatic Moabite Cypher. As ever, Dr. Thorndyke meticulously collects the evidence of footprints, dust, hairs, and fibres, and even a single blue sequin, to unravel the mystery and see that justice is done.

Brought to you by Penguin. Jackson Brodie has relocated to a quiet seaside village in North Yorkshire, in the occasional company of his recalcitrant teenage son Nathan and ageing Labrador Dido, both at the discretion of his former partner Julia. It's a picturesque setting, but there's something...

"The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" is a collection of twelve detective stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous literary creation, Sherlock Holmes. Contained within this collection are the following tales: A Scandal in Bohemia, The Red-headed League, A Case of Identity, The Boscombe Valley Mystery, The Five Orange Pips, The Man with the Twisted Lip, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, The Adventure of the Speckled Band, The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb, The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor, The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet, and The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.

Hunter and Clewe are back in the third Hunter and Clewe mystery, from acclaimed author Victoria Gilbert, when a closed case is reopened after another member of a prominent family is murdered. Cameron Clewe and Jane Hunter, lovers of all things bookish, are slowly cataloguing Cam’s private...

'The Adventure of the Silver Blaze' is one of 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. Holmes and Watson travel to Dartmoor to get to the bottom of a peculiar case that involves the dissapearance of Silver Blaze - a great racehorse - and the murder of his trainer.