Showing results by narrator "Scott Graham" in All Categories

Sally Meredith is in deadly danger after her mercurial uncle Fritzi, the genius chemist and inventor M. Frederic Lasalle, disappears into the night. He leaves her as the only person who knows how to open the Chinese puzzle box in which he has concealed the formula for his latest invention: a new gas, sudden, swift, and deadly beyond anything ever before devised. Soon, Sally is in the clutches of sinister foreign agents, and her former fiancé Bill Armitage, of the War Office, with the aid of a Scotland Yard detective, desperately searches for her …

A landmark short story collection that put the more character-based New Wave science fiction on the map, Dangerous Visions won several prestigious awards and was nominated for many others. This now-classic anthology includes thirty-three stories by thirty-two award-winning authors, over half of whom have won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards.

H. G. Wells examines the origins of the Earth, and the development of life upon the planet, as it was understood in his era, and then explores the history of human civilization from its earliest beginnings, through the various empires of world history, up to the aftermath of the First World War, and the League of Nations. 

The plot follows the usual trajectory of a young girl falling in love and the relationship becoming compromised by unforeseen circumstances. In this case, Austen’s heroine is a naïve country girl, Catherine Morland, who has an addiction to reading the Gothic horror novels which were so popular in the Regency period. When she is invited to stay at the family seat of her love interest and discovers it to be a vast and ancient castle, her romantic imagination runs riot. What secrets lie hidden in this vast pile over which the widowed head of the house exercises an iron control?

At the fashionable French resort of Aix-les-Bains a murder is discovered: wealthy but naïve Mme Dauvray is found strangled in the salon of her villa, apparently for her famously expensive jewels. Her young English companion, Celia Harland, is missing, and her maid is bound and chloroformed upstairs. A young English inventor who has been courting Miss Harland adamantly protests her innocence, and begs the famous Sûreté detective Inspector Hanaud to investigate.

Hard-up dressmakers’ assistant Chloe Dane yearns for a new life. But when her mysterious relative Mitchell Dane dies, leaving her the ancestral home of her family, and the secret combination to the safe hidden behind the Chinese black lacquer cabinet in the drawing room, she finds herself locked in a struggle with unscrupulous opponents who will stop at nothing to get possession of the safe’s sinister contents …

When irascible clergyman Amos Monkhouse, visiting from the North, finds the condition of his invalid brother Harold so much worse than he had expected, he calls in a specialist. But when Harold then suddenly dies an investigation reveals that he was poisoned with arsenic. The police can make nothing of the conflicting evidence beyond the certainty that only someone in the dead man's immediate domestic circle could be responsible. A childhood friend of Harold's wife, young barrister Rupert Mayfield, convinced that there must be another explanation, enlists the help of Dr John Thorndyke to lift the shadow that hangs over his friends.

Twelve early stories from the comic master, including the romantic truth behind the odd success of a Soho restaurant; the mysterious ways of a lucky black cat; a tale of three exiled baseball fans; a private detective in love with an actress in a touring company; a policeman in love with a parlor maid in the Battersea Park Road; Mr. Henry Wallace Mills of the two left feet; and the first appearance of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, as Bertie is sent to New York to rescue his cousin from the clutches of a Vaudeville starlet...

While Sûreté inspector Gabriel Hanaud visits the London home of his friend Mr. Ricardo, they receive a visit from Carradine, a young socialite with a disturbing story. A beautiful young woman he met at a costume party has appealed to him for help. Obsessed with a rich American woman’s pearls, this young woman went to steal them from the American’s hotel room … only to find a gang of thieves, who overpowered her. She woke up hours later, alone in the room except for a dead body. Can Hanaud prove her innocence, and bring the real murderers to justice?

Enjoying his last day of holiday before entering upon the duties of his first professional appointment, newly qualified Dr. Stephen Gray discovers the body of Julius D'Arblay, beneath the surface of a shallow woodland pond. He befriends the dead man's daughter, and to help her seeks the aid of his old teacher the great forensic investigator Dr. John Thorndyke—who soon discovers that Mr. D'Arblay was the victim of a very calculated murder. And the murderer is now threatening both Miss D'Arblay and young Dr. Grey himself.

In Historic Doubts of the Life and Reign of King Richard III, Walpole defends Richard III against the common belief that he murdered the Princes in the Tower, and many of the other crimes laid at his door by the Tudor dynasty which followed Richard’s defeat at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. In this he has been followed by a number of other writers, including Josephine Tey in her classic 1951 mystery novel The Daughter of Time.

Four more full-length adventures of R. Austen Freeman's great 'scientific investigator', Dr John Thorndyke: First, young Helen Vardon marries a man she detests in order to save her father from imprisonment; but her selfless act only precipitates a still greater disaster, and puts her under suspicion of murder. Then, in The Cat's Eye, Thorndyke unravels both an apparent robbery gone wrong and the still more complex mystery of Miss Blake's family inheritance and the cat's eye pendant. 

The eclectic surgeon-detective Mr. Reggie Fortune solves a fourth collection of Golden Age mysteries, including: the sudden disappearance of a husband; a skillful but oddly undiscriminating cat burglar; a jewel theft at a society party; a cryptic inscription on an ancient oak chest; a fatal poisoning and a troubled woman; and the whimsical theft of a Persian kitten—which leads Mr. Fortune to a far more chilling and sinister crime.

Oliver Twist is the well-loved tale of an orphan, who starts life in a workhouse and finds himself embroiled in London's criminal underworld, before being saved by a kind gentleman who knows something of his surprising family history. A satire and social commentary as well as a page-turning yarn, full of grit, wit, and some of the most memorable characters in English Literature. The second published serialised novel by Charles Dickens, The British Library remarks that "it has proven to be one of the best-loved novels in the history of literature".

Nine more cases of theft and murder for the great "scientific investigator" Dr. John Thorndyke. Including a woman harassed over a Japanese casket of dubious artistic merit; an allegation of murder where the victim has already been cremated; a Suffragist accused of theft and murder; a man found drowned in a ditch, and a woman found with her throat cut; the grizzly contents of a salesman's sample box; a mysterious death and a missing ornament; and a man blown to pieces in an explosion.

Persuasion was the last novel completed by Jane Austen and was first published posthumously in December, 1817. The story represents an interesting configuration of Austen’s characteristic narrative patterns. The heroine, Anne Eliot, is something of an old maid—she is twenty-seven years old, still single and is considered by family and friends to have lost her youthful beauty. Several years earlier, her engagement to Captain Frederick Wentworth had been broken off, due to the insistence of her family that the Captain lacked the wealth and status needed for a suitable husband.

Wealthy widow Mrs. Harlowe has died at her house in Dijon, apparently of natural causes. But then her brother-in-law accuses her niece Betty of poisoning the old woman; Jim Frobisher, junior partner in the office of Betty’s English solicitors, is dispatched to France to provide legal advice and support. In France, as Jim seeks to discover the truth and clear Betty, he enters into an uneasy alliance with the enigmatic and mercurial Sûreté detective, Inspector Hanaud.

As METAtropolis: Green Space moves into the 22nd Century, human social evolution is heading in new directions after the Green Crash and the subsequent Green Renaissance. Nearly everyone who cares to participate in the wired world has become part of the "Internet of things", a virtual environment mapped across all aspects of the natural experience. At the same time, the serious back-to-the-land types have embraced a full-on paleo lifestyle, including genetically engineering themselves and their offspring.

The melodramatic romance by Goethe The Sorrows of the Young Werther, the story of a troubled aesthete who kills himself for love, was first published in 1774 and has since become one of the staples of German literature. Such extravagant productions lend themselves readily to parody and naturally attracted the attention of skilled satirists like Thomas Love Peacock. 

Initially published in 1863, Five Weeks in a Balloon was the first novel in what would become the author's Extraordinary Voyages series. It tells the tale of a 4,000-mile balloon trip over the mysterious continent of Africa, a trip that wouldn't actually take place until well into the next century. Fusing adventure, comedy, and science fiction, Five Weeks has all the key ingredients of classic Verne: sly humor and cheeky characters, an innovative scientific invention, a tangled plot that's full of suspense and surprise, and visions of an unknown realm.