Flamboyant divorcee Mary Alice, better known as "Sister, " decides to buy her favorite hang-out, the Skoot 'n' Boot bar despite the disapproval of her respectable sister Patricia Anne, but the disagreement does not keep the women from teaming up to solve a crime when a dead body is found in the pub's wishing well.

"The British Secret Service, working to uncover a large-scale blackmail ring and catch its mastermind 'The Spider,' find themselves at the country residence Feltham Abbey, where a fancy-dress ball is in full swing. In the chaos of celebration, Sir Ralph Feltham is discovered dead and Tony, a bewildered yet curious guest, sets out to make sense of the night's activities as well as the motives of the other benevolent-appearing partygoers. This classic...

Shares the stories behind the creations of many of the mystery genre's most popular characters, revealing the inspirations for such examples as Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch and Alexander McCall Smith's Precious Ramotswe.

Joyce Carol Oates pulls out all the stops in this chilling female-centric noir collection featuring brand-new writing from Margaret Atwood, Aimee Bender, Edwidge Danticat, and more. The particular strength of the female noir vision isn't a recognizable style but rather a defiantly female, indeed feminist, perspective. In this collection of stories and poems, bad men are not always the victims but they get their due often enough to satisfy readers...

A collection of seventeen short urban fantasy stories by various authors featuring vampires, werewolves, witches, zombies, and other creatures of the night.

P. D. James -- one of the most widely admired writers of detective fiction at work today -- gives us a personal, lively exploration of the human appetite for mystery and mayhem, and of those writers who have satisfied it. She examines the genre from top to bottom, beginning with the mysteries at the hearts of such novels as Charles Dickens's Bleak House, and bringing us into the present with such writers as Colin Dexter and Sara Paretsky. She compares...

In a cruel twist of irony, Texas-born Patricia Highsmith is only now, six years after her death, being recognized for her inestimable genius in her native land. With the savage humor of Evelyn Waugh and the macabre sensibility of Edgar Allan Poe, she brought a distinct twentieth-century acuity to her prolific body of noir fiction. Called "the poet of apprehension" by Graham Greene, Highsmith was unrivaled in capturing the ways in which our seemingly...