To catch a thief, a detective has himself committed to a high-class asylumThe orderlies do not need a straitjacket for Bill Crane. He is not violent, although he does have a bad habit of making embarrassing deductions about the doctors. This sarcastic, hard-drinking man has deluded himself into thinking he is Edgar Allan Poe's great detective, C. Auguste Dupin. For this, he has been put away in a stately mental hospital on the Hudson. But Crane is not as delusional ...

On a mad mission in the African jungle, a photographer loses his wayLew Cable is an impulsive man, lazy and violent, especially when he has been drinking. He is a rotten choice to lead a scientific expedition, but his wife's money convinces the exploration committee that he is the man for the job. Jay Nichols sees right through Cable's bravado, but for the chance to photograph African gorillas in their natural habitat, he is more than willing to sacrifice his pride...

A reporter becomes his own story when he wakes up next to a corpseSam Clay wakes with a dry mouth, a hammering headache, and only the faintest memory of what he did the night before. He remembers dancing, jazz, taxi rides, and a brandy-fueled ride on a roller coaster, but he has no idea how he got home, and he is lost as to the identity of the straw-haired beauty beside him. He is just about to introduce himself when he notices the blood on the sheets, the wounds o...

The job was supposed to be simple, but in this shady midwestern town, nothing is as it seemsHard-living private detective Karl Craven didn't ask for trouble when he arrived in Paulton, Missouri—but trouble found him anyway. First it was his partner, Oke Johnson, shot in the head by a silenced rifle. Then it was the femme fatale Ginger Bolton, who took him for a wild ride his first night in town. But it's Penelope Grayson—the sultry blonde whose uncle hired Craven t...

In Hollywood, a screenwriter gets involved in an impossible murderIn a steamy tropical jungle, a sinister American woman pushes the natives too far and gets exactly what she deserves: a rusty knife buried deep in her back. At least, that is the way the movie is supposed to end. But when the loathsome starlet Caresse Garnet learns her character is about to be killed off, she refuses to die, forcing the studio to rewrite the ending the night before the scenes are to b...

A vanished corpse leads a hard-drinking PI on a madcap chaseMore than forty corpses fill the cold Chicago basement, but no crime has been committed here. After all, there are supposed to be bodies in the city morgue. Tonight, one is attracting particular attention: a beautiful young woman whose apparent suicide captured the imagination of every newspaper editor in town. Learning how and why she died is too great a task for any cub reporter. Only Detective Bill Crane...

In sun-soaked Florida, Crane pursues a kidnapper in between drinksIt does not take much to lure Bill Crane to Florida in the wintertime. The weather would be temptation enough, but the fact that there is money to be made and gin to be drunk makes a trip to Key Largo irresistible. His ever-soused companion, Doc Williams, at his side, Crane sets out south to find out who has been threatening millionaire playboy Penn Essex with blackmail notes, first on his pillow, the...

In an eerie country house, a cruel old man is decapitatedWhen Peter Coffin's mysterious great-uncle Tobias summons the family to his manor in the wilds of Michigan, his aunt warns him to stay away. Peter goes anyway, arriving at the edge of the sprawling estate well after midnight. Wading through the muck in the darkness, he passes a fearsome figure on the road, and when he arrives at the front door, he is greeted by cousins bearing shotguns. An ax-murdering madman ...

Just days from meeting the reaper, a convicted murderer hires Chicago's most hard-boiled PI to save his neck—before the executioner can claim itRobert Westland's death is just around the corner when he finally decides to fight the murder rap that's sending him to the electric chair. Fingered for his wife's grisly demise, Westland is in a bind, and his last hope is Bill Crane, a booze-soaked detective who's as ruthless with a quip as he is when trawling the streets f...

In Liège, the city of Georges Simenon’s youth, a foreigner is found dead, and two young boys are accused of his murder, in this installment in the Inspector Maigret series.Somewhere in Liège, Jean Chabot and René Delfrosse hide out in the cellar of a seedy bar. Their plan to rob the establishment goes awry when, by the light of a match, they see the dead body of a man whom they had seen only hours before. They flee in horror.When the two boys are accused of...

What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic ...

Published under a pseudonym, J. K. Rowling's brilliant debut mystery introduces Detective Cormoran Strike as he investigates a supermodel's suicide in "one of the best books of the year" (USA Today), the first novel in the brilliant series that inspired the acclaimed HBO Max series C.B. Strike.After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, creditors...