The Trouble With Goats and Sheep

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Max Brand

Police detective Angus Campbell, a dour and methodical Scottish American policeman, cordially disliked his partner, the ebullient and overweight Irish cop Patrick O'Rourke. And the feeling was cordially reciprocated by O'Rourke. Both were annoyed - but not really concerned - about orders to guard the frantic millionaire John Cobb on a late-night journey on the New York-Chicago train. After locking Cobb in his compartment, they would look forward to the pleasure of antagonizing each other in the club car. That is, until Cobb turned up missing. Whoever was responsible - and there were several possibilities among the passengers, including an incomparably strong and handsome man, a breathtakingly beautiful woman, and an improbably villainous stranger - had perhaps discounted each detective individually, and perhaps justly so. But what the malefactor could not know was the insight of their superior, Inspector Corrigan: "Separate they're not much, but, when they're together, they hate each other so much that they grind one another sharp as razors." Seven Faces originally appeared as six installments in Detective Fiction Weekly during October and November 1936. This edition - the first to collect the installments in book form, uncut and as the author intended - introduces today's readers to a most memorable detective duo.

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Margaret Murphy

When Megan Ward goes missing, suspicion falls on the stalker seen outside her house. The police would love it to be so simple, but the closer they look the more mysterious Megan herself becomes. They find no photos, no passport, no family or friends from an earlier life, only the corrupted computer files in Megan's strangely impersonal room. Meanwhile Patrick Doran, owner of Safe Hands Security, is living his own nightmare. A hacker has breached his computer network, where he thought he had safely buried his past. Then Megan's landlady is murdered - and the shadowy Megan re-emerges. The woman who doesn't exist becomes very real, very elusive and very dangerous.

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Kinky Friedman

"Alone in his New York loft, the private detective Kinky Friedman, reflects on friendship and why all his friends are out of town. With time on his hands and feeling a little melancholy his mind turns to Stephanie DuPont - very hot but pretty much resistant to all his advances. The phone rings and Kinky's old contact Hoover from Honolulu is on the blower to report that Kinky's great friend Mike McGovern has disappeared while in the process of researching and writing his cookbook Eat, Drink and Be Kinky. He was last seen heading for the beach. Our hero flies to Hawaii, and in a series of farcical wild goose chases, that includes identifying a faceless corpse in the morgue and trying to ensnare what turn out to be hoax kidnappers, Kinky ends up visiting the local museum on the island and in a room full of ancient relics he stumbles upon a full size, sculpted wooden head that is a dead ringer for McGovern." -- Back cover.

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Martin Edwards

The magnificent Dungeon House and gardens overlook Cumbria's remote western coast with its mix of beaches, dunes, and fells, Roman ruins, and nuclear plant. Twenty years ago the wealthy Whiteleys called it home. But not a happy one. Malcolm Whiteley had begun to disintegrate under financial and emotional pressures. He suspected various men in their social circle of being his wife's lover.