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Fans of Emmy Tibbett, have we got the book for you! Vacationing with friends in the Caribbean, Emmy and Henry meet a sprightly and delightful spinster who spins a yarn about a young woman lost at sea and then (perhaps) found again. The yarn gets yet more fascinating when the spinster herself disappears, and Henry--wry, unflappable Henry Tibbett of Scotland Yard--responds in a most uncharacteristic fashion. It's up to Emmy to untangle the clues, contending with drug smugglers on the one hand and an addled husband on the other. And did we mention the hurricanes? Emmy, of course, has resources to spare, so much so that we wish we could bring her back for a series of her very own.

An award-winning mystery novel whose pleasure lies largely in the intricate relationships between the characters, Mother Love has Karl Alberg, the series protagonist, working on a case that seems to hinge on the questions of why a placid housewife abandoned her family for seven years, and what prompted her to return.

No one could doubt that Mr. Percival Pyke Period was genuinely distraught to hear that his neighbor, Harry Cartell, had turned up dead in a ditch. But how is it that Mr. Percival Pyke came to write the letter of condolence before the body was found? And how did Mr. Cartell inspire such violence? Yes he was boring and stuffy, but who would kill a man for the crime of being a bad conversationalist?

The Death Chamber, set in both the past and the present, takes us to Calvary Gaol, a former prison where a TV crew has turned up for a shoot. But the ghosts of the prison's gruesome past have a way of reaching into the present.

World War II rages on, and Inspector Alleyn continues as the Special Branch's eyes and ears in New Zealand. While his primary brief is spy-catching, he's also happy to help with old-fashioned policing. Flossie Rubrick, an influential Member of Parliament and the wife of a sheep farmer, is murdered. Had she made political enemies? Had a mysterious legacy prompted her death? Or could the shadowy world of international espionage have intruded on this quiet farm?

It's murder in the little English village, but the two local spinsters, Miss Campanula, the victim, and Miss Prentice, her friend who may have been the intended victim, are not exactly the beloved little old ladies of song and story. They were (and are) waspish, gossiping snobs, passionate only about their own narrowly defined religion....and, perhaps, about the local vicar. But could they have been sufficiently unpleasant to provoke a murderer?

Inspector Roderick Alleyn has to date confined his investigations to England, but Vintage Murder finds him journeying to New Zealand (Ngaio Marsh's homeland). Traveling with Alleyn are the members of the Carolyn Dacres English Comedy Company. The actors' operatic intrigues offer an amusing diversion until, unexpectedly, they turn deadly. And Alleyn learns - not for the last time - that while he may be able to leave his badge back in Blighty, he's still a policeman, even on the other side of the world.

Lord Pastern and Baggot is a classic English eccentric, given to passionate, peculiar enthusiasms. His latest? Drumming in a jazz band. His wife is not amused, and even less so when her daughter falls hard for Carlos Rivera, the band's sleazy piano player. Aside from the young woman, nobody likes Rivera very much, so there's a wealth of suspects when he is shot in during a performance. Happily, Inspector Alleyn is in the audience.

It's true that Denton and Henry James are both American writers now living in London, but they have little else in common: James has the gravitas (and perhaps the pomposity) of a living legend, master of the literary kingdom, while Denton...well, he's scruffy and often covered in dog hair. But he does have this knack for sorting out problems, and James has just such a problem. There was a box, you see, and now it's gone missing, and in the box were certain letters that, if made public, could be most embarrassing. Most embarrassing indeed.

Professor of botany Andrew Basnett is looking forward to retirement and to settling into the little village where he's borrowed a cottage while his flat in town is renovated. It sounds bucolic, even if the village murderess lives right up the road. But the case never came to trial, says Basnett's nephew, lender of the cottage: She had the perfect alibi. Not entirely comforted, Basnett is more unnerved when a blizzard knocks out the power and provides a dark, snowy night just like the one six years ago when someone shot Charles Hewison through the head. It doesn't help that there's been another murder and that Pauline Hewison, once again, has motive to spare.

Photo Finish's dead diva, the soprano Isabella Sommita, was so widely loathed that the problem is less a lack of plausible suspects than an embarrassment of options. Though the grand country-house - and with it, the country-house murder - was history by 1980, when Photo Finish was originally published, Dame Ngaio got around the problem by setting the story on a lavish island estate, cut off from the mainland by a sudden storm. Happily, Inspector Alleyn is among the guests, and can take charge in the coppers' absence. The penultimate book in the series, Photo Finish is also one of only four books set in Marsh's native New Zealand.

The shabby Vulcan theater is not where Martyn Tarne hoped to work when she moved from New Zealand to London to pursue an acting career. But Martyn takes a job as dresser to the Vulcan's leading lady. This provides her with a ringside seat to the backstage circus: the aging alcoholic actor, the waspish playwright, the surprisingly gracious grande dame. There is, of course, a murder, so--enter Inspector Alleyn.

Daniel Valentine, a gay bartender, and his straight friend Clarisse Lovelace, a real estate agent, are the investigative duo of this set of four light mysteries set in Boston in the 1980s, all named after a color. In the first of these, Vermillion, the two investigate the murder of a 19-year old gay male hustler.

Daniel and Clarisse are summering in Provincetown (he is tending bar and she working at a gift shop) when Clarisse discovers Jeff's body on a beach. Cobalt is the color of Jeff's arresting eyes, and those eyes have made him both a lot of friends and quite a few enemies. Which of these killed him?

"Virginia and Felix ferret out the links between two apparently unconnected murders, revealing some unpleasant secrets about their neighbors"--

"Ex-odd-couple Virginia and Felix agree to be witnesses at a wedding that turns into an investigation when the groom's father is murdered"--

Of all the books in the Alleyn series, Scales of Justice is most powerfully reminiscent of Agatha Christie, with its setting in an almost unspeakably charming little English village, and its cast of inbred aristocrats. When one of the aristos turns up dead next to the local trout-stream--with a trout at his side--everyone is dreadfully upset, but really, just a tad irritated as well: Murder is so awfully messy. Thank gawd that nice Inspector Alleyn is on hand to clear things up.

Julian Kestrel is the walking definition of a Regency-era dandy. He cares about little beyond the perfection of his tailoring, he lives for the bon mot, and his life has the specific gravity and the fleeting charm of a soap-bubble. At least that's what he'd like you to think. In fact, it rather suits Kestrel to be perpetually underestimated, particularly when as in this instance his weekend at a glamorous country estate is spoiled by a dead girl's body being found in his bed.