Showing titles in Amateur Sleuths

What begins as a routine journey on the luxurious Orient Express soon unfurls into Agatha Christie's most famous murder mystery. This all-star production features lead performances from Tom Conti ( The Dark Knight Rises, Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence) as Hercule Poirot, Sophie Okonedo ( After Earth, Hotel Rwanda and Ace Ventura) and Eddie Marsan ( Sherlock Holmes, V for Vendetta and Hancock) plus a full supporting cast.

Dora Winslow is having a hard day. Not only does she stumble upon a money laundering scheme, but the next thing she knows her boss is dead. As the prime suspect for his murder, she goes to Brian, a police officer she trusts. She soon learns things aren't adding up because Brian's got a mysterious scheme of his own.

As ever, Charles Paris is his own worst enemy, a louche lush who can resist anything except temptation, especially in the form of women and alcohol. His intentions may be good, but somehow the results always go wrong. What makes Charles different from other seedy, middle-aged, down-at-heel actors is that he can't avoid finding himself near trouble, that trouble being murder. He may be an amateur sleuth, but he's patently no Poirot.

Wealthy businessman Rex Fortescue is found dead with rye grain in his pocket. His death is followed in quick succession by a woman dying while eating bread and honey, and a maid in her garden. Inspector Neele, in charge of investigating the spate of murders, consults with Miss Marple, who has...

August 1911. Emily Hardcastle and her inimitable lady’s maid Florence Armstrong are enjoying a fine summer until Harry, Lady H’s brother, turns up out of the blue with a mystery for them to solve. A routine parachute test at a local aeroplane factory has gone horribly wrong - with pilot Dickie Dupree plummeting to his death. Harry is certain there is more to this ‘tragic accident’ than meets the eye, having discovered that someone at the airfield is leaking top secret intelligence to foreign rivals.

Republished for the first time in nearly 95 years, a classic winter country house mystery by the founder of the Detection Club, with a twist that even Agatha Christie couldn’t solve! Stephen Munro, a demobbed army officer, reconciles himself to taking a job as a footman to make ends meet...

Late revenge on Louise! The cook at the "Black Feather" inherits five painted portraits and is faced with a mystery: all the portraits show Dr Desmond van Gelder - a criminal she put behind bars as a young agent. Louise is horrified when she realises that van Gelder is now free - and that he has taken a hostage! She has just ten days to decipher the riddles hidden in the portraits and save the young woman he is holding captive... In the middle of it all: the "Black Feather".

Private investigator Dan Armstrong can't believe his luck when he's invited to the luxury villa of none other than Alice Graceland, movie legend and queen of the silver screen. Alice isn't looking to bankroll Dan's writing, but instead she wants him to play host at a murder mystery evening with a glamorous (but suspiciously tense) collection of Hollywood royalty. It should be a meeting of old friends - but just how friendly are they? As the murder mystery evening takes a sinister turn, Dan and Oscar find themselves navigating more than the city's canals to find the truth.

**The Sunday Times Top 5 bestseller** Longlisted for the CWA New Blood Award Four friends. One luxury getaway. The perfect murder. ‘Pure adrenaline’ ERIN KELLY ‘An intense thriller’ HEAT ‘Agatha Christie meets the glamour of après-ski’ SUNDAY TIMES French Alps, 1998 Two young men...

It's the end of a long day at the Dogs Need Nice Homes charity shop. Fiona, Daisy, and Partial Sue, the three retired ladies who volunteer there, are ready to lock up for the night. The ladies watch aghast as a clapped-out ice-cream van lurches up to their door—with Daisy's daughter Bella behind the wheel! Newly divorced Bella has only just gotten rid of her rotten husband. Now, she's bought herself a van—and a whole world of trouble.

Fuelled by anger and decision-impaired by gin, Patricia boards the world’s finest luxury cruise ship for a three-month tour of the world … and awakes to find herself embroiled in a thirty-year-old priceless jewel theft. Less than twenty-four hours after setting sail, she’s accused of murder and confined to her cabin. Thankfully, she is staying in the royal suite and that means she has a butler to help her. When he recruits his gym instructor BFF, Barbie, the trio turn detective to find the real killer.

Many others in the village have said that they would like to see the colonel dead, but a number of people have a more specific interest in his death: the colonel’s young wife, Anne; her lover, the artist Lawrence Redding; Archer, a local man given a harsh sentence by the colonel for poaching. Even the colonel’s daughter, Lettice, desperate for money, says, “If only father would be decent and die, I’d be all right.” These complexities lead to any number of dead ends for investigators. The only one able to see through the blinds and obscurities is Miss Marple, an elderly but sharp-eyed spinster.

Olivia Greer is counting the days until her date with Michael Bellemare, when her sister, Sage, calls in a panic. As the principal of Lily Rock Music Academy, she meticulously planned the parent orientation weekend. Then, an academic tutor is found dead.

Murder is a dish best served ice cold... In the idyllic, small town of Dewstow, Margery and Clementine are eagerly awaiting retirement from their work on the front-line serving meals to the students at Summerview secondary school. Their peaceful life is shattered when their kitchen manager is found dead in the school’s walk-in freezer. The police are adamant that it’s an open-and-shut case of accidental death. But Margery and Clementine are convinced that something more sinister is afoot and take it upon themselves to investigate.

January 1910. A journalist has been killed in a suspicious blaze. Everything points to a group of suffragettes, but the apparent culprit insists she is innocent. When Lady Hardcastle receives a letter from a suffragette requesting her urgent help, the retired spy turned sleuth knows only she stands between an accused young woman and the gallows. Evidence at the scene makes Lizzie Worrel’s innocence difficult to believe, and with the police treating it as an open-and-shut case of arson, Lady Hardcastle faces a barrage of resistance as she tries to dig out the truth.

The tiny Caribbean island of St Honoré is a tropical paradise. But for Miss Marple, enjoying a well-earned rest from her busy life in the village of St. Mary Mead, it is a place where nothing ever seems to happen. Then old Major Palgrave tells her the strange story of a suspected double...

When a well-known British TV historian, Marmaduke Godolphin, is found murdered in the canals of Venice during carnival, stabbed by a stiletto blade, the Venetian police are eager to have the case solved and cleared up within a day—murder is bad for tourism! The police recruit the help of retired archivist, Arnold Clover. Godolphin had hired his services on arriving in Venice to help sort through some historical papers of note. These dusty documents may contain previously unknown information about the assassination of the murderer, Lorenzino de' Medici, 500 years previously.

Henry Bins has a rare sleep disorder where he's only awake for sixty minutes a day, from 3:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. His meticulously regimented life—three minutes to shower, five minutes to eat, seventeen minutes of school, four minutes to play Zelda—is turned upside down when his dad leaves for a week-long cruise.

Lady Emily Hardcastle is an eccentric widow with a secret past. Florence Armstrong, her maid and confidante, is an expert in martial arts. The year is 1908 and they've just moved from London to the country, hoping for a quiet life. But it is not long before Lady Hardcastle is forced out of her self-imposed retirement. There's a dead body in the woods, and the police are on the wrong scent. Lady Hardcastle makes some enquiries of her own, and it seems she knows a surprising amount about crime investigation...

With his black hat, huge umbrella, unworldly simplicity and 'beaming but breathless geniality', Father Brown is one of fiction's best-loved amateur detectives. Short and tatty, but with the wisdom and insight to unravel the most wayward of criminal minds, he has entertained generations. In this collection of 13 full-cast dramatisations, the high priest of detection becomes involved in seven intriguing cases that will tax even his mental powers to the limit.