Fascinating, frightening or just plain frustrating? These eight gripping stories show detective work as it really is - and sometimes truth can be stranger than fiction. Hear about the ghostly dream that helped to solve a baffling murder mystery, some clever detectives' tricks that led to the conviction of the 'Laurel and Hardy' jewel thieves, and the crafty blackmailer who nearly got away with the perfect crime.

Listeners can discover all the foul facts about the vicious Vikings, including Viking Gods in wedding dresses, corpses on trial and Death by booby-trapped statues. Now in audio format, this bestselling book is sure to be a huge hit with yet another generation of Terry Deary fans.

In ‘The Pirate Lord’, Tom is a cabin boy for Captain Francis Drake, on a mission to defeat the Spanish galleons and steal their plundered gold. ‘The Pirate Queen’ tells of Cassia O’Malley, the terror of the Irish sea. Her gang of sea-robbers rule the waves - until she is captured…. ‘The Pirate Prisoner’ is the story of Red-legs Greaves, who has been a slave, a pirate and a rich sugar planter.

What makes people want to solve a mystery? Listen to these seven stories and you might decide there are some things that can never be explained. Find out how one woman checked into a Parisian hotel - and then disappeared; why Flight 19 never returned, with no sign of wreckage or survivors; and if the ghosts of Borley rectory can ever rest in peace. With gripping accounts and dramatic fact files, uncover some mysterious events from real life and decide what you think really happened.

A girl murders her own father and mother in cold blood. A whole village of people disappears without trace, and all anyone saw were strange lights in the sky. An Egyptian mummy, disturbed after thousands of years, leaves a trail of horrible disasters. Incredible? Impossible? Too awful to imagine? But someone, somewhere has sworn that each of these sinister stories is true...

Listeners can discover all the foul facts about the Woeful Second World War on audio, including why the blitzed Brits ate chicken-fruit, sinkers and nutty, what really happened in Dad's Army and how to make a rude noise with a gas mask. These bestselling titles are sure to be a huge hit with yet another generation of Terry Deary fans.

What would you do if disaster struck? Would you be a hero...or a coward? These are the true stories of people involved in many different kinds of disaster, and how they behaved in life-or-death situations. Hear about a single act of revenge that sacrificed hundreds of lives; how a tragic disaster at sea turned one man into a hero; the train crash that should never have happened and other real-life dramas.

It's 1940 and war is underway. In Sheffield, England, a brother and sister set out to solve a mystery, brazenly believing that the air-raid signals are only false alarms. In Dachau, Germany, two boys come up with a bold plan to bring an end to the war and help a Polish prisoner escape. But when the bombs falling on Sheffield become a reality, and the German boys’ plan hurls them unwittingly into the midst of the action, the children’s adventures swiftly become a terrifying fight to survive...

When a thin, pale boy called Lambert claims he’s the rightful heir to the throne, King Henry VII is furious in 'The Prince, The Cook and the Cunning King'.

"The Sea Monsters" features a dangerous race between two giant steam ships, the Sirius and the Great Western. Which steam-driven sea monster will get to New York first? In "The Twisted Tunnels", the building of the London Underground Railway comes at a terrible cost for Jenny and her grandfather. In "Terror on the Train", Charles Dickens is involved in a train crash, and fights heroically to save lives and rescue the handwritten manuscript of Our Mutual Friend.

In "The Plot on the Pyramid", the workers building the Great Pyramid are blamed when their supervisor disappears. Only Dafia knows the truth - can she clear the men's names? "The Magic and the Mummy" features Neria, who helps her father make mummies. But when she is asked to mummify the Pharaoh's cat, she is too squeamish to kill it.... "The Phantom and the Fisherman" sees apprentice scribe Menes agreeing to write a prayer to rid Maiarch of his family ghost. But what if the ghost is more human than supernatural?

Learn all about the Savage Stone Age, with all the nasty bits left in. You probably thought that Stone Age people spent all their time standing stones up on one end and rubbing sticks together to make fires.

Listeners can discover all the foul facts about the Groovy Greeks, including why girls ran about naked pretending to be bears, who had the world's first flushing toilet and why dedicated doctors tasted their patients' ear wax!

Listeners can discover all the foul facts about the Stormin Normans, including why Norman knights slept with a dolly, which pirate hung up his eye-patch and became a saint and why Crusader ships were defended with barrels of pee. Now in audio format, this bestselling book is sure to be a huge hit with yet another generation of Terry Deary fans.

Incredible? Impossible? Too awful to imagine? But someone, somewhere at some time has sworn that each of these strange stories is true... A newspaper reports of a monster man, whose fiery breath scorched the faces of his victims; an American swears to his dying day he was kidnapped by a family of Bigfoot or ape men; and centuries old records tell of a beached sea monster so huge, a man could have drowned inside it.