Though Christmas is a time of peace and joy, there can be a dark side to holiday cheer -- murder and mayhem may lurk within the merriment. This tempting collection serves up Christmas crime stories from some of the best mystery writers of the past 150 years: Agatha Christie, Ellis Peters, Arthur Conan Doyle, H.C. Bailey, and Thomas Hardy.
Nineteen-year-old Frank Friedmaier lives in a country under occupation. Most people struggle to get by; Frank takes it easy in his mother's whorehouse, which caters to members of the occupying forces. But Frank is restless. He is a pimp, a thug, a petty thief, and, as Dirty Snow opens, he has just killed his first man. Through the unrelenting darkness and cold of an endless winter, Frank will pursue abjection until at last there is nowhere to go. Hans Koning has described Dirty Snow<?i> as "one of the very few novels to come out of German-occupied France that gets it exactly right." In a study of the criminal mind that is comparable to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me , Simenon maps a no man's land of the spirit in which human nature is driven to destruction—and redemption, perhaps, as well—by forces beyond its control.
Singular, capital, wonderfully enjoyable, this is the biggest collection of new Sherlock Holmes stories published since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle laid down his pen - nearly 200,000 words of superb fiction featuring the Great Detective by masters of historical crime. Almost all the stories are specially written for the collection and the cases are presented in the order in which Holmes solved them. The result is a life of Sherlock Holmes, with a continuous narrative alongside the stories which identities the gaps in the canon and places the new and hitherto unrecorded cases in their correct sequence - plus there is an invaluable, complete Holmes chronology.
An anthology of short stories by famous authors who have given freely their talents for the National AIDS Trust charity.Foreward - HRH Diana, Princess of WalesIntroduction - Auberon WaughThe Inspiration - Jason CheritonA La Carte and fifteen other stories:A La Carte - Jeffrey ArcherLucky Dip - Deborah MoggachA Dog in the Dark - Richard AdamsTail - Bill JamesA Safe Place - Anna ReynoldsThe Case of the Parr Children - Antonia FraserRomance 1988 - Doris LessingThe Bunting Affirms - H.R.F. KeatingOld Flame - William TrevorThe Village - George Mackay BrownSound Proof - Angela KeysThe Nice Boys - Isabel ColegateRecipe for Victory - Maeve BinchyThe Flowers that Bloom in the Spring - Julian SymonsVampire - Hilary NewmanPaperwork - Ruth RendellPostscript - Sir John Gielgud