A Gun for Sale

Sample

Ngaio Marsh

A Christmas pageant turns unholy. Holed up at Hilary Bill-Tasman's manor estate for Christmas, Troy Alleyn is to paint the man's portrait and, while she's there, view the Druid Christmas pageant. Along with a pack of eccentric guests, Troy enjoys the festivities-- until one of the pageant's players mysteriously disappears into the snowy night. Did the hired help-- each a paroled murderer from the nearby prison-- have a deadly hand in this Christmas conundrum? Inspector Roderick Alleyn arrives to join his wife in finding the lost man-- and unraveling the glaring truth from the glittering tinsel.

Sample

Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace

The grotesquely grinning corpse in the Devonshire shack was a man who died horribly -- with a dish of mushrooms at his side. His body contained enough death-dealing muscarine to kill 30 people. Why would an expert on fungi feast on a large quantity of this particularly poisonous species. A clue to the brilliant murderer, who had baffled the best minds in London, was hidden in a series of letters and documents that no one seemed to care about, except the dead man's son.

Sample

Sara Woods

Antony Maitland #23 Antony Maitland, barrister and very confidential detective, reluctantly journeys to a grey town in the English midlands to defend a young boy who is, on the face of it, guilty of murder and art theft. The boy is mysteriously unwilling to say anything on his own behalf. As long as the boy refused to speak there was no possible line of defense. In order to save his client from what, Maitland finally realizes, will be a gross miscarriage of justice, he has to piece together the boy's troubled past and in the process, stumbles across a web of criminal intent in which the boy is just one victim -- and Maitland is the other.

Sample

Elizabeth Ferrars

It was the first really nice day of the summer. The strawberries were ripe and Irene Cable was having a few friends over for cocktails in the garden. It happened so fast--the cry, the splash, the flailing of strong arms across the still water to what lay sprawled in the pool under the shade of the chestnuts--that Catherine Gifford afterwards was never certain what she had seen under those trees. It was Andie Manson who dived into the pool and emerged with the limp body of Douglas Cable. Douglas couldn't remember what had happened, and it appeared that he had been hit on the head before he fell into the pool. Attempted murder in this quiet country village? Unheard of. But, soon after, another body is found in the pool--very, very dead, and most definitely murdered.