On a fine autumn weekend Lord Aveling hosts a hunting party at his country house, Bragley Court. Among the guests are an actress, a journalist, an artist and a mystery novelist. The unlucky 13th is John Foss, injured at the local train station and brought to the house to recuperate - but John is nursing a secret of his own. Soon events take a sinister turn when a painting is mutilated, a dog stabbed and a man strangled. 

Amateur thief Ted Lyte has chosen an isolated house by the coast for his first robbery. But Haven House is no ordinary country home. While hunting for silverware to steal, Ted stumbles upon a locked room containing seven dead bodies. Detective Inspector Kendall takes on the case with the help of passing yachtsman Thomas Hazeldean. The search for the house's absent owners takes Hazeldean across the Channel to Boulogne, where he finds more than one motive to stay and investigate.

This new volume in the Bodies from the Library series features the work of 16 prolific authors who, like Christie and Crofts, saw their popularity soar during the golden age. Aside from novels, they all wrote short fiction - stories, serials and plays - and although most of them have been collected in books over the last 100 years, here are the ones that got away.

For the most part, the dead man received public sympathy. A decent, hardworking chap, with not an enemy anywhere. People were surprised that anybody should want to kill Jim. But Jim has been drowned in the Dumb River, near Ely, miles from his Yorkshire home. His body has been discovered before the killer intended – disturbed by a torrential flood. It's up to Superintendent Littlejohn of Scotland Yard to trace the mystery of the murder to its source, leaving waves of scandal and sensation in his wake.

The stories in this collection will dredge up delight in crime fiction fans, as watery graves claim unsuspecting victims on the sands of an estuary and disembodied whispers penetrate the sleeping quarters of a ship's captain. This British Library anthology collects the best mysteries set on choppy seas, along snaking rivers and even in the supposed safety of a swimming pool, including stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, C. S. Forester, Phyllis Bentley and R. Austin Freeman.

Richard Temperley arrives at Euston station early on a fogbound London morning. He takes refuge in a nearby hotel, along with a disagreeable fellow passenger who had snored his way through the train journey. But within minutes the other man has snored for the last time - he has been shot dead while sleeping in an armchair. When the police arrive, Detective Inspector James discovers a token at the crime scene: 'a small piece of enamelled metal. Its colour was crimson, and it was in the shape of the letter Z'.

When Dr Raymond Ferens moves to a practice at Milham in the Moor in north Devon, he and his wife are enchanted with the beautiful hilltop village lying so close to moor and sky. At first they see only its charm, but soon they begin to uncover its secrets - envy, hatred and malice. Everyone says that Sister Monica, warden of a children's home, is a saint - but is she? A few months after the Ferens' arrival her body is found drowned in the mill-race. Chief Inspector Macdonald faces one of his most difficult cases in a village determined not to betray its dark secrets to a stranger.

First published in 1944, Fell Murder sees E.C.R. Lorac at the height of her considerable powers as a purveyor of well-made and traditional detective fiction. The book presents a fascinating 'return of the prodigal' mystery set in the later stages of the Second World War, amidst the close-knit farmerfolk community of Lancashire's lovely Lune valley. The Garths had farmed their fertile acres for generations.  

It’s a busy time of the year for Lord James Harrington and his wife, Beth - there’s the Michaelmas Fair in the village to enjoy. But matters take a sinister turn when the body of the founder of the Jolly Madrigals singing group is discovered after the Fair. James’ friend DCI George Lane is in charge of the investigation, but as further murders occur, he grows increasingly baffled. James and George are convinced that a single killer is responsible for these deaths. 

Hercule Poirot's quiet supper in a London coffee house is interrupted when a young woman confides to him that she is about to be murdered. She is terrified, but begs Poirot not to find and punish her killer. Once she is dead, she insists, justice will have been done. Later that night, Poirot learns that three guests at a fashionable London hotel have been murdered, and a cufflink has been placed in each one's mouth. Could there be a connection with the frightened woman?

England, 1920. Eleanor Swift has spent the last few years travelling the world: taking tea in China, tasting alligators in Peru, escaping bandits in Persia and she has just arrived in England after a chaotic 45-day flight from South Africa. Chipstone is about the sleepiest town you could have the misfortune to meet. But then, from the edge of a quarry, through the driving rain, Eleanor is shocked to see a man shot and killed in the distance. Before she can climb down to the spot, the villain is gone and the body has vanished.

Strange things happen in the picture-postcard English village of Lindsay Carfax. When a young man falls into a quarry, it takes nine days to find the body. When rowdy hippies descend on the village, they're given nine days to leave. When an outspoken schoolmaster is kidnapped for nine days, he stays eerily quiet after his release. Now Albert Campion has come to town - and he means to investigate all this strangeness. But whoever is behind the unusual goings - on quickly makes it very clear that his nosing around is not welcome. 

Sussex, England, 1929. Mydworth is a sleepy English market town just 50 miles from London. But things are about to liven up there, when young and handsome Sir Harry Mortimer returns home from his diplomatic posting in Cairo, with his beautiful and unconventional American wife, Kat. No sooner have the two arrived, when a jewel robbery occurs at Harry's aunt's home - Mydworth Manor. The police are baffled and overwhelmed with the case. But Harry and Kat have an edge in the hunt for the dangerous culprit.

The Floating Admiral was the first of the Detection Club's collaborative novels, in which 12 of its members wrote a single novel. Eighty-five years later, 14 members of the club have once again collaborated to produce The Sinking Admiral. The Admiral is a pub in the Suffolk seaside village of Crabwell, the Admiral Byng. The Admiral is also the nickname of its landlord, Geoffrey Horatio Fitzsimmons, as well as the name of the landlord's dinghy.

September, 1940. The sun is shining, and in the midst of the good weather Londoners could be mistaken for forgetting their country was at war - until the familiar wail of the air-raid sirens heralds an enemy attack. The Blitz has started, and normal life has abruptly ended - but crime has not. That night a man's body is discovered in an unmarked van in the back streets of West Ham. When Detective Inspector John Jago is called to the scene, he recognises the victim: local justice of the peace Charles Villiers. The death looks suspicious, but then a German bomb obliterates all evidence.