A diamond dealer and his entire family have mysteriously disappeared from their sprawling Las Angeles manor, leaving the estate undisturbed and their valuables untouched. Investigating detective Decker is stumped--faced with a perplexing case riddled with dead ends. Then a second dealer is found murdered in Manhattan, catapulting Decker and his wife, Rina, into a heart stopping maze of murder and intrigue that spans the globe...only to touch down...

"The Club of Queer Trades" is a collection of stories by Gilbert Keith Chesterton first published in 1905. Each story in the collection is centred on a person who is making his living by some novel and extraordinary means (a "queer trade", using the word "queer" in the sense of "peculiar"). To gain admittance one must have invented a unique means of earning a living and the subsequent trade being the main source of income.

"One of the most original American writers, Edgar Allan Poe shaped the development of both the detective story and the science-fiction story. Some of his poems--"The Raven," "The Bells," "Annabel Lee"--Remain among the most popular in American literature. Poe's tales of the macabre still thrill readers of all ages. Here are familiar favorites like "The Purloined Letter." "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," together...

Davis (More Deadly Than the Male, editor) makes a welcome addition to early English detective fiction anthologies. Unlike scholars who date the birth of the genre to Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Davis starts with an earlier short story, "The Secret Cell" by Poe's nemesis, William Evans Burton. That tale remains enjoyable today, with its dramatic account of the search for a missing 17-year-old servant, who stood to inherit a fortune from...

The need for love-obsessive, self-destructive, unpredictable-takes us to forbidden places, as in the chilling world of Give Me Your Heart, a new collection of stories by the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates. In the suspenseful "Strip Poker," a reckless adolescent girl must find a way of turning the tables on a gathering of increasingly threatening young men-can she "outplay" them? In "Smother!" a young woman's nightmare memory of childhood brings trouble...