Bøger udgivet af Felony & Mayhem

Gentlemanly Robert Forsythe and his longtime PA "Sandy" Sanderson are sleuthing up a storm, investigating innocent victims who maybe weren’t so innocent after all…No, Katherine St. Croix was not a hoofer, but she also wasn’t the pathetic, angelic starveling that the wealthy Dancer clan imagined. In fact, she was a talented con artist, selling her sob story while helping herself to the family jewels and silver. But what she is now is dead, her mutilated body found on the Dancer estate. It’s clear that one of the Dancers is similarly sitting on some sinister secrets, and Forsythe has been asked to poke around. He’s happy to do the favor, especially if he can stay alive while doing it.And who would kill the village sawbones, nice Dr. Foster, not to mention his pretty wife? To answer that question, Sandy goes undercover, only to discover an embarrassment of suspects: it seems that half the folks in town had reason to loathe the doctor, not to mention his pretty wife. Can Sandy sift through them all? Sure...but she’ll risk her own life to do it.

Sarah Deane has her traveling shoes on again and we all know a sleuth never gets a peaceful vacation.It’s holidays at a swanky Arizona resort for English professor Sarah Deane, her fiance, and her feisty Aunt Julia, but somebody’s notion of Yuletide appears to include increasingly unpleasant pranks...which turn from nasty to deadly on Christmas morning. In a tip of the hat to Golden Age mysteries, the police are clueless, but Sarah is unhappily certain the killer—the Dude?—is one of the hotel’s guests, someone with whom she’d been singing carols only hours earlier.In The Bridled Groom, Sarah and Alex are once again vacationing with Aunt Julia, this time in horse country, where the two young'uns are planning their wedding. Aunt J would love to join in but keeps getting distracted by weird threats delivered with the morning paper—and by the possibility that those threats are connected to a series of sinister accidents. Will this ugliness derail the nuptials, or does Sarah have the horse sense required to catch the culprit? You know the answer, but it’s heaps of fun getting there.

The second mystery in this series set in the Kelantan province of Malaysia and featuring Mak Chik (Auntie) Maryam as the sleuth. Here, one of Maryam's market-trading friends dies shortly after an exorcism ceremony, and while the village generally believes she was killed by sorcery, Mak Chik Maryam decides to look into the matter herself.

Inspector Alleyn has decamped for the South of France for a family vacation. Well, that and a little official poking around. Unfortunately, the object of his poking--the cultish denizens of a sinister and luxurious chateau--are not fond of being poked, and they have a particularly unpleasant way of getting their point across. More a thriller than a whodunit, this is a fresh take for Marsh, while retaining the cleverness and vivid characterizations that her fans demand.

Julian Kestrel, gentleman sleuth and dandy, becomes fascinated with the unsolved case of the murder of a Milanese aristocrat and the disappearance of his protégé, a brilliant young English opera singer. What has become of the singer's fiancée and the aristocrat's notoriously surly manservant? Could the murder be tied to Italy's tumultuous politics? Furthermore, the murdered marquis left a widow whose beauty makes Kestrel's heart skip faster.

Henry Gamadge investigates the death of a state trooper and the poisoning of three children by nightshade, proving that the murders are all related and, in the process, unearthing a few scandals as well.

Ah, the London Debutante Season: Giggles and tea-dances, white dresses and inappropriate romances. And much too much champagne. And, apparently, a blackmailer, which is where Inspector Roderick Alleyn comes in. The social whirl is decidedly not Alleyn's environment, so he brings in an assistant in the form of Lord "Bunchy" Gospell, everybody's favorite uncle. Bunchy is more than loveable; he's also got some serious sleuthing skills. But before he can unmask the blackmailer, a murder is announced. And everyone suddenly stops giggling.

Colour Scheme is set during World War II at a mud-baths resort in New Zealand run by Colonel Claire. His business is on the brink of being taken over by a local blowhard who may be a Nazi spy. Inspector Alleyn has been sent to the resort to sort things out. But he's in disguise, and even the canniest readers will have trouble picking him out from the resort's motley cast of characters.

It's tough to be a preacher's kid, and for Leo Stanhope it may be harder than for most. He was born Charlotte, and in the Reverend Pritchard's home-as in all of Victoria's England-there is little room for persons unwilling to know their place and stick to it. And things are about to get harder: There's a gentleman who knows the secret that could get Leo locked up for life, and this so-called gentleman is not above a spot of blackmail. There is a bright spot, though, in the form of two little kids who are teaching Leo's heart to open again, after a wretched year. In warming to them, he realizes how much more he has to learn. Leo knows how to be a man. Now he must learn to be a father.

In this, his third adventure, Professor Andrew Basnett takes a brief break from his usual stomping grounds in the Little English Village, opting to spend Christmas in a Small Australian City instead. He¿s visiting Tony, an old colleague with a newish wife, and he¿s barely had a post-flight snack before he¿s made aware of a cloud hanging over the marriage. Jan, Tony¿s bride, is widely believed to have bashed her first husband over the head, and though she was acquitted of the murder, Tony himself is starting to have uncomfortable second thoughts. Things don¿t get any more comfortable when, at a family dinner, one of the guests is done in, killed with a chunk of the same crystal that put paid to Jan¿s first husband. And Jan herself? She¿s disappeared. Only the Professor, it would seem, can banish the clouds of distrust and reveal the truth, clear as crystal.

Andrew Basnett may be retired from academia, but that doesn¿t seem to have stopped his former colleagues from dumping problems in his lap. This time around it¿s the peppery Constance Camm, whose neighbors keep disappearing. Miss Camm and her sister, Mollie, might be tempted to shrug things off, were it not for a frightening letter. ¿I know where you buried the body,¿ says the letter, but¿to which disappeared neighbor does the letter refer? And why was it sent to Mollie, who hasn¿t been burying anything? Spurred by a desire to help a friend (and—admit it!—by his own curiosity), Professor Basnett starts poking around. But his efforts uncover more than one village skeleton, and they may call up more than anyone has bargained for.

The killingly aristocratic Lamprey family exemplifies charm, wit, and a chronic lack of funds. Their only source of hope is the wealthy but unpleasant Lord Wutherwood, and the Lampreys may perhaps be forgiven for doing a little jig when his Lordship is killed and the resulting inheritance saves their bacon. Inspector Roderick Alleyn wouldn't dream of judging the Lampreys' joy. But he would like to figure out whether they murdered their benefactor.

Sarah Deane is an English teacher by profession, but with these first two adventures she discovers that sleuthingâEUR"of the strictly amateur varietyâEUR"may be where her truest passions lie. The first book takes Sarah, still a grad student at this point, out of her natural New England habitat and into the wilds of Texas, where her maybe-boyfriend is keen on a spot of birdwatching. But birds are not all that she spies through her binoculars, and so the adventures begin. In Down East, Sarah is glad to be back on home ground, but somebody, it appears, is not happy in any way at all, and Sarah is forced (and secretly thrilled) to put her newfound detecting skills to use again.

"Sixteen-year-old Mariah Ebinger's idyllic suburban life is upended by a man whose obsession reveals a tragedy in her past"--

Gracie Allen breaks the Philo Phormula in a number of ways. First is its title: this is the only book in the series to modify ¿Murder Case¿ with more than one word, much less with the name of a character. And then there¿s that character: Gracie Allen was a very real, much-loved comedienne in the 1930s, famous for her double act with George Burns, and in fact the plot revolves around her. Gracie¿s centrality is no accident: Van Dine wrote the story as a vehicle for Allen, and actually created the novel only after the film had come out. So do all these departures pay off? We¿d be lying if we said that Gracie hits every single mark, but Van Dine does a surprisingly entertaining job of translating Ms. Allen¿s delicious Ditzy Blonde persona to the page, and she makes a charming foil for Philös evergreen erudition.

Like The Gracie Allen Murder Case before it, Winter was first written as a screenplay, in this case a vehicle for the figure skater Sonja Henie. However, while Allen¿s scatterbrained persona made a charming foil for Philös stuffed-shirt pretensions, Ms. Henie provided no such inspiration. Van Dine did not live long enough to see her outed as a Nazi supporter, but her ice-princess act offered less for Philo to play against. It should be noted that Winter was published posthumously to close out the series, and though it went to press without Van Dine¿s usual repeated revisions, it is true vintage Philo—utterly distinctive in style and its own very genuine kind of pleasure.