'Paul Halter is France's answer to John Dickson Carr' Martin EdwardsThe ultimate locked-room mystery.In Paul Halter's The Fourth Door, the impossible becomes reality. A haunted room. An unbroken seal. A murder victim whose very identity is an enigma. And then, a second death in a house surrounded by untrodden snow. Both crimes defy reason – but master detective Dr. Alan Twist reveals that even the most baffling mysteries have ratio...

It's dark...You're tired. Not thinking straight. It's the worst time of all for you to make decisions, and maybe that's why you take a… WRONG TURN.In this new anthology offered by Blunder Woman Productions, you'll take a trip down twisty roads into forests, back alleys, and even across the border between life and death. Together these tales are funny, creepy, weird, contemplative, traditional, and speculative. This is a perfect collection for dark ...

Meet the snoligoster, who feeds on the shadows of its victims. The whirling whimpus, who once laid low an entire Boy Scout troop. And the hoop snake, who can chase prey at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour and then, with one sting of its venomous tail, cause it to turn purple, swell up, and—alas—die.These and 17 other fearsome creatures are among the most fantastical beasts in American folklore. Their stories, as narrated by one of the last surviving cryptozoologists, are best enjoy...

As bodies continue to fall and the past bleeds into the present, Dr Alan Twist must confront a killer no one can see and a crime that defies logic.Three young ladies are thrown into raging waters, seemingly pushed by an invisible hand. Six years later, when a famous actor is flung from his window, eye witnesses agree: it was as if he was shoved from behind by an unseen murderer, imitating the inexplicable death of a young lady in the same house over fifty years ear...

In the respectable seaside town of Flaxborough, the equally respectable councillor Harold Carobleat is laid to rest. Cause of death: pneumonia.But he is scarcely cold in his coffin before Detective Inspector Purbright, affable and annoyingly polite, must turn out again to examine the death of Carobleat's neighbour, Marcus Gwill, former prop. of the local rag, the Citizen. This time it looks like foul play, unless a surfeit of marshmallows ...

In The Betrayal of Trust, she has written the most chilling and unputdownable book yet. Freak weather and flash floods have hit southern England. The small cathedral town of Lafferton is underwater, and a landslip on the moor has closed the roads. As the rain slowly drains away, a shallow grave†“†“and a skeleton†“†“are exposed; twenty years on, the remains of missing teenager Joanne Lowther have finally been uncovered. The case is reopened and Simon Serrailler is called in as Senior Invest...

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTUREStephen Fry's charmingly misanthropic send-up of the English mystery features an unlikely but necessary hero: Ted Wallace, AKA the Hippopotamus, a failed and disolute poet, recently fired theater critic, and muckraker of modern irrationality, whose war against the unreasonable finds sudden purpose investigating a series of supposed miracles at a mansion in the country."I’ve suffered for my art, now it’s your turn.”...

A must-read collection of stories by Scottish crime writer Val McDermid, "one of the bright lights of the mystery field" ( The Washington Post ).Val McDermid's novels have won the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year Award and the Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger and Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for outstanding achievement. Enjoyed by millions of fans worldwide, her intelligent, incisive crime fiction showc...

A gripping novella from the New York Times–bestselling author of the Inspector Banks Mysteries and a "master of the art" ( The Boston Globe).Retired Cambridge professor Donald Aitcheson loves scouring antiquarian bookshops for secondhand treasures—as much as he loathes the scribbled marginalia from their previous owners. But when he comes upon an inscription in a volume of Robert Browning's poetry, he's less irritated than disturbed. This...

"An electrifying Victorian ghost story" from the International Horror Guild Award-winning author of The Asylum ( The Seattle Times)."Sell the Hall unseen; burn it to the ground and plow the earth with salt, if you will; but never live there . . ." Constance Langton grows up in a household marked by death, her father distant, her mother in perpetual mourning for Constance's sister, the child she lost. Desperate to coax h...

An elderly sex-pest is at large in DI Purbright’s home town.Leaping out from behind bushes at unsuspecting females, making lewd suggestions and, when challenged, scuttling away with odd off-balance leaps, he soon earns the nickname of the ‘Flaxborough crab’. No one can identify him, and it turns out that quite a few older gentlemen have begun exhibiting over-familiar behavior around the opposite sex.Suave Dr Meadow knows more than he is letting on, yet how ...

When a middle-aged alcoholic is found brutally battered to death on a roadside in West London, the case is assigned to a nameless detective sergeant, a tough-talking cynic and fearless loner from the Department of Unexplained Deaths at the Factory police station. Working from cassette tapes left behind in the dead man?s property, our narrator must piece together the history of his blighted existence and discover the agents of its cruel end. What he doesn't expect is that digging for the tr...