Murder, They Wrote

Murder in Mesopotamia by Agatha Christie

Dr. Leidner is a Swedish American archaeologist on a dig in Iraq, then a British protectorate. His wife was previously married to a Frederick Bosner, a young man who worked for the U.S. State Department but was actually a spy for Germany during the Great War. He was caught, tried and sentenced to death. He managed to escape while he was being transported, but it was to no apparent...

The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe

The story surrounds the baffling double murder of Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter in the Rue Morgue, a fictional street in Paris. Newspaper accounts of the murder reveal that the mother's throat is so badly cut that her head is barely attached and the daughter, after being strangled, has been stuffed into the chimney. The murder occurs in an inaccessible room on the fourth floor...

Blue Smoke and Murder by Elizabeth Lowell

Jill Breck was just doing her job as a river guide when she saved the life of Lane Faroe, son of two of St. Kilda Consulting's premier operators. But when a string of ominous events - including a mysterious fire that kills her great-aunt and a furor in the Western art world raised by a dozen Breck family paintings - culminates in a threat to her life, Jill reluctantly calls in a...

Murder on the Cape Fear by Ellen Elizabeth Hunter

Ashley Wilkes, historic preservationist, is restoring a former blockade runner's home. Captain Pettigrew ran the blockade successfully before he and his ship disappeared during the final days of the Civil War. Letters found in the captain's house narrate his adventures in his own words. As Ashley's sister Melanie hosts a real estate investors weekend, Ashley stumbles over a corpse at...

Decline of the English Murder by George Orwell

The essay is not essentially about murders, but about British habits; his essays in The Lion and the Unicorn epitomise much of what he felt. Orwell identified several common features to the perfect murder: middle class criminals; sex or respectability as motive; mostly poisoning; deaths slow to be seen as due to crime; a dramatic coincidence or unbelievable occurrence; domestic victims.

A Murder of Quality by John le Carré

A bloody and apparently senseless murder had been committed at Carne School, one of the oldest and most glittering ornaments in the British public school system. George Smiley, whose connections with Carne were complicated by sentiment, had had a curious forewarning of the crime and, in a private capacity, pursued its investigation. Without his espionage-trained insight into the...

Murder in the Place of Anubis by Lynda Robinson

Who has dared to desecrate the sacred place of embalming with a murdererd corpse? Pharaoh Tutankhamun orders Lord Meren, his chief investigator, to find out quickly, before power-mad priests use the incident to undermine his royal authority.

Enter a Murderer by Ngaio Marsh

Taking its title from a line of stage direction in Macbeth, and the plot concerns a murder committed during the run of a play in London.

The Murdered House by Pierre Magnan

At the turn of the century, in a remote inn in Upper Provence, a family is violently massacred. The sole survivor of the tragedy is a three-week-old baby. In 1920, the orphaned survivor, Seraphin Monge, returns home to avenge his family's killers. But for each murder he plots, another hand silently executes it in his place. He wins the hearts of both Marie and Rose, and romantic...

Murder In Chinatown by Victoria Thompson

In Chinatown to deliver a baby, midwife Sarah Brandt learns that the mother's mixed-race niece is missing, and she enlists Sergeant Malloy's help. But after they find the girl dead in an alley, there are ample suspects - from both sides of Canal Street.