Hamilton Cleek is a consulting detective and also known as "the man of the forty faces" for his incredible skill at disguise. Cleek is himself a reformed criminal and now helps Inspector Narkom of Scotland Yard in solving crimes in Clarges Street, London. The Cleek mysteries were originally published as individual short stories but were later compiled into separate books. Content: Cleek, the Master Detective; or The Man of the Forty Faces Cleek of Scotland Yard Cleek's Government Cases The Riddle of the Night The Riddle of the Purple Emperor The Riddle of the Frozen Flame The Riddle of the Mysterious Light The Riddle of the Spinning Wheel "For of a sudden, through a break in the traffic, a scudding figure had sprung into sight. It was the figure of a man in a gray frock-coat and a shining 'topper,' a well-groomed, well-set-up man, with a small, turned-up moustache and hair of a peculiar reddish shade. As he swung into sight, the distant whistle shrilled again; far off in the distance voices sent up cries of 'Head him off!' 'Stop that man!' . . ." (Excerpt) Thomas W. Hanshew (1857-1914) was an American author best known for his Hamilton Cleek Detective Series, written in collaboration with his wife, Mary E. Hanshew (1852-1927).

This is based on the original book, we had to make up a chapter for an English assignment.The Description is, Travis married Jane, and began being abusive to her, and in this short story Travis has tied Jane to the stove with his belt for trying to escape. Jane manages to get free and Travis wants to get her back at any cost.Little Jinny Blistov is a second tier gangster who arrives in the US in the unheated hold of an Aeroflot cargo plane. He meets, make enemies of, then friends with, the aristocratic Gwenny and Roger June of Charleston, South Carolina, America's most beautiful town. It isn't long before he convinces them to steal artifacts from warehouses of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia. They get huge shipping containers of the stuff back home, at which point Stirg, a Russian billionaire and old adversary of theirs, objects. The two parties meet one evening out on the waters of Charleston harbor, and it isn't pretty.

Dr. Blair Vaughn’s alcoholic binges have gone too far this time. His indiscretions have landed him in the middle of a blood-soaked double homicide, and he can’t remember how he got there, what part he had in the murders, or why the murders occurred in the first place. And as he stumbles along trying to make sense of it all, the body count continues to rise.Blair Vaughn is a homeless dentist who witnesses the murder of a friend, Dr. Cynthia Maxwell, during an alcoholic blackout. The details of that night are sketchy for him, and he can only remember the events which had transpired in random bits. It seems that everywhere he goes, the body count rises, so it becomes imperative that he piece together the facts quickly before he ends up dead, too.Eventually Blair recognizes the man who killed Cynthia. His name is Quentin Latrice, a gem cutter, who not only has a passion for derby hats, but also for priceless gems and bloodshed. What terrifies Blair even more than remembering what Latrice had done, is discovering that this lapidary is a good friend of Detective Mikel Smith, the man in charge of Cynthia’s murder investigation.Through a series of flashbacks, Blair taxes his brain to remember vital details about Cynthia’s murder. Blair’s only hope of staying alive is to recall everything and then try and figure out who is behind it all. A vital clue is a note that he stumbles on which reads, “Lab Case #21: Pigeon Blood.” Lab cases are how dental offices label the bins of patients who require laboratory work to complete their treatments. So there must be something in bin number twenty-one at the dental office where Cynthia had been working. And being a rock and mineral enthusiast, Blair knows that the term ‘pigeon blood’ describes the color of the most valuable rubies in the world.Join Blair as he dodges killers, thugs, and police officers through the rough and unforgiving streets of Detroit, all while toting millions of dollars worth of gemstones in his frayed and fuzz-lined pockets. God and Detective Rein Connery, the one police officer in the city who can be trusted, are the only individuals who can help him now.

Some Amish communities aren't so cozy. Whispers From The Dead is the powerful and thrilling sequel to Lamb to the Slaughter in the Amish mystery series, Serenity’s Plain Secrets. Sheriff Serenity Adams and Daniel Bachman are once again partnered up in a criminal investigation, when they travel to a northern Amish settlement that has been riddled by arsons for the past two decades. Serenity quickly discovers that there is a lot more going on than just barns being set on fire in the touristy community of Poplar Springs. And this group of Amish has their own secrets to hide. Serenity begins to unravel an extensive criminal underworld that threatens to destroy everything that the simple people of Poplar Springs hold dear, and once again puts her own life in jeopardy. And even though Serenity tries desperately to avoid it, things begin heating up between her and Daniel, making her wonder if true love and happiness are really within her grasp. *Some language and romantic sexual content.

Translated into English at last, Fiasco joins its companion volumes Fatelessness and Kaddish for an Unborn Child in telling an epic story of the author's return from the Nazi death camps, only to find his country taken over by another totalitarian government. * * Fiasco as Imre Kertesz himself has said, "is fiction founded on reality"—a Kafka-like account that is surprisingly funny in its unrelentingly pessimistic clarity, of the Communist takeover of his homeland. Forced into the army and assigned to escort military prisoners, the protagonist decides to feign insanity to be released from duty. But meanwhile, life under the new regime is portrayed almost as an uninterrupted continuation of life in the Nazi concentration camps-which, in turn, is depicted as a continuation of the patriarchal dictatorship of joyless childhood. It is, in short, a searing extension of Kertesz' fundamental theme: the totalitarian experience seen as trauma not only for an individual but for the whole civilization—ours—that made Auschwitz possible. From the Trade Paperback edition.

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Harry Dresden, Chicago's only professional wizard, is about to have a very bad day… Because as Winter Knight to the Queen of Air and Darkness, Harry never knows what the scheming Mab might want him to do. Usually, it’s something awful. He doesn’t know the half of it… Mab has just traded Harry’s skills to pay off one of her debts. And now he must help a group of supernatural villains—led by one of Harry’s most dreaded and despised enemies, Nicodemus Archleone—to break into the highest-security vault in town, so that they can then access the highest-security vault in the Nevernever. It's a smash and grab job to recover the literal Holy Grail from the vaults of the greatest treasure hoard in the supernatural world—which belongs to the one and only Hades, Lord of the freaking Underworld and generally unpleasant character. Worse, Dresden suspects that there is another game afoot that no one is talking about. And he's dead certain that Nicodemus has no intention of allowing any of his crew to survive the experience. Especially Harry. Dresden's always been tricky, but he's going to have to up his backstabbing game to survive this mess—assuming his own allies don’t end up killing him before his enemies get the chance…

When a disfigured corpse is discovered in a country parish, the local rector pleads with Lord Peter to take on what will become one of his most brilliant and complicated cases.

In deep retirement in the English countryside, an eighty-nine-year-old man, vaguely recollected by locals as a once-famous detective, is more concerned with his beekeeping than with his fellow man. Into his life wanders Linus Steinman, nine years old and mute, who has escaped from Nazi Germany with his sole companion: an African gray parrot. What is the meaning of the mysterious string of German numbers the bird spews out - a top secret SS code? The keys to a series of Swiss bank accounts perhaps? Or something more sinister? Is the solution to this last case - the real explanation of the mysterious boy and his parrot - beyond even the reach of the once-famed sleuth? A short, suspenseful tale of compassion and wit that reimagines the classic nineteenth-century detective story.

When I was a little girl, Daddy told me never to fear the dark. “We exist because of the darkness,” he told me. “All of you are daughters of darkness.” Beloved bestselling author V.C. Andrews’s passion for vampires comes to spellbinding life in a long-awaited novel of dark desires as all-consuming—and forbidden—as in Flowers in the Attic. One night, with the sound of a young man’s scream, high school senior Lorelei discovers that her stern but loving father, who adopted Lorelei and her sisters as infants, is no ordinary man. He has raised his beautiful girls for one purpose: to lure young men into their world of shadows. Like her sisters, Lorelei has been trained in the art of seduction and warned never to fall in love. But when she meets a handsome and charming classmate, she boldly defies her family and follows her heart—even if love is a poison. . . .Dangerously enticing and deliriously intoxicating, V.C. Andrews’s Daughter of Darkness will leave readers thirsting for more.

Three never-before-collected short stories from #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael ConnellyIn "Cahoots," a backroom poker game turns deadly when a cheater is exposed. In "Mulholland Dive," a man who deciphers the hidden codes of accident scenes investigates a fatality off L.A.'s most fabled roadway. In "Two-Bagger," an obsessed cop tails an ex-con he believes is about to carry out a contract killing.Together these gripping, unforgettable stories show that Michael Connelly "knows the workings of the LAPD and the streets of the City of Angels like he knows his own name" (Boston Globe).

1950s Los Angeles: The City of Angels has become the city of the Angel of Death. Communist witch-hunts and insanely violent killings are terrorising the community. Three men are plunged into a maelstrom of violence and deceit when their lives become inextricably linked as each one confronts his own personal darkness. Told with Ellroy's characteristically forceful and relentless style, The Big Nowhere is the link between the Black Dahlia and LA Confidential in his masterwork, The LA Quartet. It is as powerful and thrilling as crime fiction gets.

A spiderweb of dangerous relationships lies at the heart. A woman with a murky past jumps off a bridge, or was she thrown? A spoiled kid awash in gambling debt thinks he can beat the system. A lovely woman whose marriage is about to splinter into a thousand fragments. A professional shoplifting ring working for the Mob, racks up millions from stolen goods. A wandering husband is rich and ruthless. A dirty cop is so entrenched on the force he is immune to exposure. A sinister gangster is conscienceless and brutal. A lonely widower mourns the death of his lover, desperate for answers, which may be worse than the pain of his loss. Private detective, Kinsey Millhone's thirty-eighth-birthday gift is a punch in the face that leaves her with two black eyes and a busted nose. And an elegant and powerful businessman whose dealings are definitely outside the law: the magus at the center of the web. V: Victim. Violence. Vengeance.

Stephen Hunter has chosen the backdrop of the chaotic and cruel Spanish Civil War to weave a classic tale of espionage and counterespionage. Julian Raines was one of the first Englishmen to volunteer for the international brigade in Spain. The British Secret Service suspect that the flamboyant Raines was recruited for the KGB by the Bolsheviks during his student days at Oxford and send Robert Florry, a struggling young writer to Spain after Raines with orders to eliminate him. Florry was an old school chum to Raines and had every reason to hate him. The British are not alone on Raines' trail. The ruthless Communist leader in Barcelona believes that the identity of the double agent conceals a powerful and profitable secret. It is a novel that constantly surprises. From the Paperback edition.

Mildred A. Wirt was an American author. She is best known for her work on the early Nancy Drew series.