"The offices of foreign literature publisher and renowned stamp collector Donald Kirk are often host to strange activities, but the most recent occurrence the murder of an unknown caller, found dead in an empty waiting room is unlike any that has come before. Nobody, it seems, entered or exited the room, and yet the crime scene clearly has been manipulated, leaving everything in the room turned backwards and upside down. Stuck through the back of...

"An all-around skeptic when it comes to the supernatural, literature professor William Porter gives no credence to claims that Twin Towers, the seaside manor he's just inherited, might be haunted. He finds nothing mysterious about the conditions in which his Uncle Horace died, leaving the property behind; it was a simple case of cardiac arrest, nothing more. So, though his wife, more attuned to spiritual disturbance, refuses to occupy the main house,...

"Helen Kendal's woes begin when she receives a phone call from her vanished uncle Franklin, long presumed dead, who urges her to make contact with criminal defense attorney Perry Mason; soon after, she finds herself the main suspect in the murder of an unfamiliar man. Her kitten has just survived a poisoning attempt, as has her aunt Matilda, the woman who always maintained that Franklin was alive in spite of his disappearance. Lucky that Helen took...

"At the hand of an outrageous prankster, top hats are going missing all over London, snatched from the heads of some of the city's most powerful people. But is the hat thief the same as the person responsible for stealing the lost story by Edgar Allan Poe, purloined from a private collection, which Dr. Gideon Fell has just been hired to retrieve? Unlike the manuscript, the hats don't stay stolen for long; each one reappears in unexpected and conspicuous...

"When Nurse Keate arrives at the Thatcher estate to care for a man with a bullet in his shoulder, she's told that he shot himself accidentally--but when the convalescing man is murdered soon thereafter, it becomes clear that the only "accident" was his not being fully killed the first time around. A murderer stalks the manor and yet the rest of the family isn't the slightest bit alarmed; instead, they seem intent on concealing the crime and adding...

The note discovered beside Rosaleen Wright's hanged body is full of reasons justifying her suicide--but it lacks her trademark vitality and wit, and, most importantly, her signature. So the note alone is far from enough to convince her best friend Jane that Rosaleen was her own murderer, even if the police quickly accept the possibility as fact. Instead, Jane suspects Rosaleen's boss, New York theater impresario Luther Grandison. To the world at large,...

Ellery Queen takes refuge from a wildfire at a remote mountain house -- and arrives just before the owner is murdered... Trapped by a raging forest fire during a mountain drive, Ellery Queen and his father end up at an isolated manor, inhabited by a secretive surgeon and his guests. The following morning the doctor is discovered dead, apparently shot down while playing solitaire the night before. The only clue is a torn six of spades. The suspects...

"A down-on-his luck American airman...a beautiful international adventuress...a mysterious Chinese courier...a scrap of paper worth many lives and the peace of the entire world...and a jigsaw pattern of treachery and sudden death that had been expertly designed to deceive and destroy. Enter the inimitable Mr. Moto, the only one who could hope to decipher and defuse the situation. Casey Lee, the airman, would never forget this extraordinary figure...

After their niece calls for help, Rachel Murdock and her sister Jennifer set out to see her and become involved in a murder investigation involving their niece and their cat, Samantha.

Sailor, a small-time crook, arrives in Sante Fe, New Mexico, determined to blackmail Senator McIntyre.