It was the silly season and a Monday at that, and Kinsey Millhone was bogged down in a preliminary report on a fire claim. Something was nagging at her, but she couldn't pin it. The last thing she needed in the morning mail was a letter from her bank recording an erroneous $5,000 deposit in her account. Kinsey had never believed in Santa Claus and she wasn't about to change her mind now. Resigning herself to a morning of frustration, she phoned the...

She was a "Jane Doe," an unidentified white female whose decomposed body was discovered near a quarry off California's Highway 1. The case fell to the Santa Teresa County Sheriff's Department, but the detectives had little to go on. The woman was young, her hands were bound with a length of wire, there were multiple stab wounds, and her throat had been slashed. After months of investigation, the case remained unsolved. That was eighteen years ago....

Fearing that the assailant who had once tried to kill him--and had left him badly scarred and partially amnesiac--would again try to murder him, Bobby Callahan turns to Kinsey Millhone for help.

"Rise the dark. These were the last words written in Lauren Novak's notebook before she was murdered in a strange Florida village. They've never meant anything to the police or to her husband, investigator Markus Novak. Now the man he believes killed her, Gardland Webb, is out of prison and draws Markus to the scene he's avoided for so long: the lonely road where his wife was shot to death beneath the cypress trees and Spanish moss in a place called...

Lonnie Kingman is in a bind. He's smack in the middle of assembling a civil suit, and the private investigator who was doing his pretrial legwork has just dropped dead of a heart attack. In a matter of weeks the court's statute of limitations will put paid to his case. Five years ago David Barney walked when a jury acquitted him of the murder of his rich wife, Isabelle. Now Kingman, acting as attorney for the dead woman's ex-husband and their child...

Hired to find Jenna Angeline, an Afro-American cleaning woman accused of stealing confidential Statehouse documents, private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, find themselves in the middle of a raging gang war and a scandal extending from the ghetto to the highest levels of state government.

When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. At first, Mrs. Quine just thinks her husband has gone off by himself for a few days--as he has done before--and she wants Strike to find him and bring him home. But as Strike investigates, it becomes clear that there is more to Quine's disappearance than his wife realizes. The novelist has just completed a manuscript featuring poisonous pen-portraits of almost...

One morning at Styles Court, an Essex country manor, the elderly owner is found dead of strychnine poisoning. Arthur Hastings, a soldier staying there on sick leave from the Western Front, ventures out to the nearby village of Styles St. Mary to ask help from his friend Hercule Poirot, an eccentric Belgian inspector. Thus, in this classic whodunit, one of the most famous characters in detective fiction makes his debut on the world stage. With a half...

"Framed in the doorway of Hercule Poirot's bedroom stands an uninvited guest, coated from head to foot in dust. The man stares for a moment, then he sways and falls. Who is he? Is he suffering from shock or just exhaustion? Above all, what is the significance of the figure 4, scribbled over and over again on a sheet of paper? Poirot finds himself plunged into a world of international intrigue, risking his life--and that of his 'twin brother'--to uncover...

Spenser is hired by Lily Ellsworth to investigate her grandson's involvement in a school shooting.