A Show of Violence

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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.

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Graham Greene

Raven is an ugly man dedicated to ugly deeds. His cold-blooded killing of a European Minister of War is an act of violence with chilling repercussions, not just for Raven himself but for the nation as a whole. The money he receives in payment for the murder is made up of stolen notes and when the first of these is traced, Raven becomes a man on the run. As he tracks down the agent who has been double-crossing him and attempts to elude the police, he becomes both hunter and hunted: an unwitting weapon of a strange kind of social justice. In doing so, he sets the stage for Greene’s next novel, Brighton Rock.

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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.

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(by) Sara Woods

>The trial of Ellen Gray for murder comes early in the story, She is defended by Antony Maitland Q.C. and the jury's verdict surprises both Ellen and Antony >This murder has been committed in 1965. But it is evident to Antony that its motivation derives from a bizarre double-murder in 1946, when a woman and her lover had been shot dead by a jealous husband returning from the war; at least, that was the historical record. >Antony began to doubt the whole history. He began to think it odd that two murderers should have been found among the same small group, even if the crimes were nearly twenty years apart. So it is on this small group. the tight-knit clique who were friends in the forties, that his attention increasingly falls. >Then Antony Maitland moves from the role of barrister to that of detective, as he has done before. Supported by his wife Jenny, aided by his friend Roger Farrell (and as always derided by his formidable uncle. Sir Nicholas Harding Q.C.), he seeks solutions to the murders quite different from past convictions and police thinking. And at last, in a surprising and convincing denouement, he finds an answer.