As Dr Helen Wilkinson stands over the body of her husband Edward it is just as she had imagined it so many times before. He looks calm, asleep almost... And yet something isn't right: in her fantasies there was never so much blood. How can she convince the police she didn't murder her husband - when she doesn't know herself...? Read More...

John Sebastian Lafcadio's one-picture exhibition became very fashionable, and so it was that one spring afternoon when the eighth picture was being exhibited for the first time, at the Lafcadio, a number of well-known people were gathered. It was when the lights failed for a few minutes that one amongst them stabbed young Tommy Dacre. Read More...

The secret diaries of a twenty-three-year-old White Russian princess who worked in the German Foreign Office from 1940 to 1944 and then as a nurse, these pages give us a unique picture of wartime life in that sector of German society from which the 20th of July Plot -- the conspiracy to kill Hitler -- was born. Read More...

This treatise on bees and bee-keeping can hardly be faulted in its scientific accuracy. It is essentially the work of a poet continually glancing at analogies to the human condition... Read More...

The gruesome discovery of an unidentified, decomposed corpse sealed in a railway wagon on a disused siding marks the beginning of Inspector Aurelio Zen's most difficult and dangerous case, set against the backdrop of the three-thousand-year-old city of Catania. Read More...

Carl Carson has a prosperous business, a dotty wife, and a fictitious son. When financial ruin threatens, he puts all these resources to use by staging an elaborate 'kidnapping' and liquidating his assets to pay the ransom. It might have worked, if Sir John Appleby hadn't been his neighbour. Read More...

'It was the smell that Mrs Powell noticed first. Slightly sweet. Slightly unpleasant ... It shocked her badly to find a dead man in the corner, his head slumped on his knees.' Who was Billy Blake, other than a homeless alcoholic who wandered the streets? Read More...

Twelve hours after a woman's broken body is washed up on a deserted shore on the south coast of England, her traumatized three-year-old daughter is discovered twenty miles away walking the streets of Poole, alone and apparently abandoned ... Read More...

Nathaniel Hawthorne was the first author to write versions of the Greek myths especially for a younger audience. The six tales here include 'The Gorgon’s Head' and 'The Golden Touch', beautifully illustrated by Walter Crane. Read More...

A woman found shot dead in a flat in provincial Holland leaves behind her a daughter of doubtful parentage and a dull soldier husband. Van der Valk discovers strange links with Dien Bien Phu. Read More...