Mystery Stories

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Ruth Rendell

A stranger lures a child into his car with the promise of sweets. A young man spots his fianc??s double in a public park of ill repute. An executive visits the secluded home of a former employee whose intentions are frightfully unclear. A modest soul weds the woman he rescues from suicide--only to fall victim to an unfathomable form of possessiveness?. In the eleven tales gathered in The Fallen Curtain, Ruth Rendell lays bare the twisted inner workings of the unbalanced mind.From the Trade Paperback edition.

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John Williams

Collected here are John Williams' short stories and novels, set in a Cardiff where buildings are demolished, prostitutes roam the streets and bars, men embrace their midlife crises from the bottom of a bottle and romance is tainted.

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Ruth Rendell

Murder, perversion, corruption, blackmail, secret terrors that lead to unspeakable acts, hidden fears that erupt in irrational violence…All these, of course, are part of someone else’s world. They happen out there, far from the ordinary streets and ordinary people who live in your neighbourhood, your town. They have nothing to do with the everyday lives of people like you. Or do they? The New Girlfriend and Other Stories – an extraordinary collection of sleek and sinister stories from the writer described by Scott Turow as ‘one of the greatest novelists currently at work in our language’.

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edited and with an introduction by Otto Penzler

"Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler's new anthology brings together the most cunning, resourceful, and brilliant female sleuths in mystery fiction ... For the first time ever, Otto Penzler gathers the most iconic women of the detective canon over the past 150 years, captivating and surprising readers in equal measure. The 74 handpicked stories in this collection introduce us to the most determined of gumshoe gals, from debutant detectives like Anna Katharine Green's Violet Strange to spinster sleuths like Mary Roberts Rinehart's Hilda Adams, from groundbreaking female cops like Baroness Orczy's Lady Molly to contemporary crime-fighting P.I.s like Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone, and include indelible tales from Agatha Christie, Carolyn Wells, Edgar Wallace, L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace, Sara Paretsky, Nevada Barr, Linda Barnes, Laura Lippman, and many more. Meet determined law-enforcing ladies and captivating criminal masterminds of all kinds, including a brilliant scientist who solves a murder using a single tea leaf ; a master thief who leaves a calling card at the scene of the crime lest the servants be wrongly accused ; a powerful woman who oversees a rogue band of vigilantes ; a nosy detective best known for her outrageous hats who solves a murder using tropical fish ; an X-rated sleuth who gets shanghaied by an unsavory character ; a puritanical villainess hell-bent on avenging a perceived wrong ; and, last but not least, a crime-solving nun who unravels a complicated poisoning plot" --