Colorado Parks & Wildlife Research Library

Agatha Raisin, is feeling miserable and rejected by the world. She has recently lost her husband, not to another woman, but to God. At this very moment, James Lacey is in France, training to take holy orders at a monastery. To escape the dreariness of her Cotswold cottage, Agatha takes a plane to a remote island in the South Pacific. There she observes a couple - a bearded man and a blond girl - but senses something is wrong, and the girl later turns...

Short tales about deadly books, by top mystery authors. An ancient scroll draws a bookseller into a chilling mystery Monty Danforth finds the tin buried beneath a shipment of leather-bound classics. Inside is a millennia-old vellum manuscript written in an unfamiliar but unmistakably ancient language. Danforth tries to photocopy and photograph it, but he ends up with blank images, as though the ink were made of something impervious to modern technology....

London's Slough House is where disgraced MI5 spies go to while away what's left of their washed-up careers. Maybe they messed up an op badly and can't be trusted anymore. Maybe they got in the way of an ambitious colleague and had the rug yanked out from under them. Maybe they just got too dependent on the bottle--not unusual in this line of work. But they have one thing in common: they all want to be back in the action. And they'll do anything to...

St. Michael's College, Cambridge, is prestigious, stately, and in frightful disrepair. To replenish the college's dwindling coffers, the Master holds a fundraising weekend for wealthy alums. But all goes awry when Lexy Laurant is found viciously strangled to death. Gorgeous and successful, Lexy inspired jealousy, envy, and spite in everyone. There's a lengthy list of likely suspects: Lexy's debt-ridden Latino lover, her novelist ex-husband who jilted...

-- The Silkworm is the second in J. K. Rowling's highly acclaimed series featuring Cormoran Strike and his determined young assistant, Robin Ellacott.

Mr. Hilton Cubitt of Ridling Thorpe Manor in Derbyshire visits Sherlock Holmes and gives him a piece of paper with this mysterious sequence of stick figures. The little dancing men are at the heart of a mystery which seems to be driving his young wife Elsie Patrick to distraction. He married her about 3 years ago, and until recently, everything was well. She is American, and before the wedding, she asked her husband-to-be to promise her never to ask...

When a mock murder game staged for charity threatens to turn into the real thing, the intrepid Hercule Poirot is called in to take part in this Dead Man’s Folly, a classic from the queen of suspense, Agatha Christie.Sir George and Lady Stubbs, the hosts of a village fete, hit upon the novel idea of staging a mock murder mystery. In good faith, Ariadne Oliver, the well-known crime writer, agrees to organize their murder hunt.Despite weeks of meticulous...

"Hearts are broken," Lillian Dyson underlined in a book. "Sweet relationships are dead." But now Lillian is dead in Clara Morrow's garden in Three Pines, shattering the celebrations of Clara's solo show at the famed Musee d'Art Contemporain in Montreal. Chief Inspector Gamache, the head of homicide at the Surete du Quebec, is called to the tiny Quebec village and there he finds a world of shading and nuance, shadow and light. And even when facts are...

-- AudioFile Magazine In what promises to be a breakout in Charles Finch's bestselling series, Charles Lenox travels to the New York and Newport of the dawning Gilded Age to investigate the death of a beautiful socialite. London, 1878. With faith in Scotland Yard shattered after a damning corruption investigation, Charles Lenox's detective agency is rapidly expanding. The gentleman sleuth has all the work he can handle, two children, and an intriguing...

"The morning of Agatha Raisin's long-awaited marriage to her attractive and elusive neighbor, James Lacey, dawns bright and clear. But the storm clouds of the day before would have been more appropriate. A new anti-wrinkle cream turns Agatha's face into one large red rash, James refuses to discuss his feelings for her, and then Agatha's first husband, Jimmy Raisin, reappears just in time to keep her from committing bigamy. The ensuing brouhaha - Agatha...