Collection: Mystery (Academy Use Only)

'My name is Peter Grant and until January I was just a probationary constable in the Metropolitan Police Service. Then one night, in pursuance of a murder inquiry, I tried to take a witness statement from someone who was dead and that brought me to the attention of Inspector Nightingale, the last...

When George Abbershaw is invited to Black Dudley Manor for the weekend, he has only one thing on his mind - proposing to Maggie Oliphant. Unfortunately for George, things don't quite go according to plan. A harmless game turns decidedly deadly and suspicions of murder take precedence over matrimony.

John Sebastian Lafcadio, one of the greatest painters of the Edwardian period, left 12 pictures to be exhibited, one every year, after his death. But there is an unexpected event at the unveilling of the 8th painting - murder.

The Gyrth family had guarded the Chalice for hundreds of years. It was held by them for the Crown. Its antiquity, its beauty, the legends that were connected with it, all combined to make it unique. It was irreplaceable. No thief could hope to dispose of it in the ordinary way. And indeed no ordi...

After the screen of a run-down drive-in movie theatre collapses and kills four people, the daughter of one of the victims asks private investigator Cal Weaver to look into a recent break-in at her father's house. Cal discovers a hidden basement room where it's clear that salacious activities have...

At Prickwillow Place, Disgraceful Mary Jane, Smooth Kitty and their fellow students are keeping a deadly secret. When the headmistress of Saint Etheldreda's School for Young Ladies drops dead at Sunday dinner, her seven pupils agree on a clever scheme: to bury their teacher in the vegetable garde...

Monsieur Pamplemousse makes his directorial debut, complete with a walk-on part for his faithful bloodhound, Pommes Frites. Everything rests on the special guest star, acclaimed critic Jay Corby, whose good opinion can change fortunes overnight. But disaster strikes when a trapdoor malfunction ca...

Private investigator Jasmine Sharp's father was murdered before she was born, and her mother went to self-sacrificing lengths in order to shield her from the world in which he moved. Since her mother's death, all she has been able to learn is his first name - and that only through a strange bond ...

Their eyes met across a crowded room. He is an art-thief par excellence and she is a connoisseur of crooks. Her job is to hunt him to extinction, his is to avoid being caught and he also has a secret agenda more valuable than anything he might steal.

The Big Sleep, Chandler’s first novel, introduces Philip Marlowe, a private detective inhabiting the seamy side of Los Angeles in the 1930s, as he takes on a case involving a paralysed California millionaire, two psychotic daughters, blackmail and murder. In Farewell, My Lovely, Marlowe deals wi...