Henry Carter Hull

The acclaimed author brings us crime at a country-house Christmas party in "one of her best and most baffling mysteries" (Daily Express). It's the Christmas season in 1972, and Agatha Troy is at a house party, enjoying the local holiday pageant and also painting the host's portrait. The painting's coming along fine, but the pageant goes a little pear-shaped when one of the players disappears. Could one of the eccentric guests have been involved?...

Something goes murderously wrong during the final scene of Macbeth when a giant Scottish battle sword is used for the fight scene.

It was a horrible death. Maurice Questing was lured into a pool of boiling mud and left there to die. Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn, far from home on a wartime quest for German agents, knows that any number of people could have killed him, the English exiles he'd hated, the New Zealanders he'd despised, the Maoris he'd insulted, or even the spies he'd thwarted—if he wasn't a spy himself.

"A Shakespearean actor shuffles off his mortal coil in this "skillfully wrought" country-house mystery ( The New York Times ). Sir Henry Ancred, a celebrated Shakespearean actor, has arranged to have his portrait painted by Agatha Troy, wife of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. But when Ancred is killed at his own birthday party, leaving behind a family full of suspects, Troy's work ends and Inspector Alleyn's begins... "It's time to start comparing Christie...

"A British police detective looks into sinister doings in the South of France in a crime thriller with "more than a little excitement" ( Kirkus Reviews ). Inspector Roderick Alleyn has decamped for the South of France on a family vacation-though for him, the vacation will involve some 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...

Folkways turn fatal in a very old-fashioned English village, in this witty mystery filled with "ingenious" detective work ( Kirkus Reviews , starred review). The village of South Mardian likes the old ways. The very old ways. This may be 1957, but South Mardian still features a blacksmith, a village idiot, and an elaborate fertility ritual performed at the winter solstice. There's squabbling, of course, and worse--like when one of the ritual's main...

For Member of Parliament Sir Derek O'Callaghan, a simple visit to the hospital proves fatal. But as Inspector Alleyn will discover, any number of people had reason to help the gentleman to his just reward, including a sour surgeon, a besotted nurse, a resentful wife, and a cabinet full of political rivals, in this classic of detection by the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master.

The unspeakably wealthy (and generally unspeakable) Jonathan Royal has decided to throw a party and, just for fun, has studded the guest list with people who loathe one another. When a blizzard imprisons them all in Royal's country house, murder ensues, and there are nearly as many suspects as there are potential victims. Eventually, Inspector Alleyn makes his way through the snow to put things right, in this classic whodunit by the Mystery Writers...

"Tainted wine sends a member of a religious sect to meet her maker in a witty mystery marked by "quiet, intelligent deduction" ( Kirkus Reviews ). Did lovely Cara Quoyne get a whiff of the bitter almonds as she raised the goblet to her lips? We'll never know: With a single sip of prussic acid she transported herself to the Hereafter. Now Inspector Alleyn must investigate a murder at the House of the Sacred Flame, a rather quirky little religious...

"A policeman in the audience sees an all-too-real death scene on a London stage: "Good enough to satisfy the most critical reader of detective stories." -- The New York Times Inspector Roderick Alleyn has been invited to an opening night, a new play in which two characters quarrel and then struggle for a gun, with predictably sad results. Even sadder, the gun was not, in fact, loaded with blanks. And when it comes to interviewing witnesses, actors...