The novel begins with a prologue in the voice of an old man, Charles de Cresseron, that is set in Chapelizod, Ireland, roughly a century after the events of the novel proper.
Collected here in one omnibus edition are four novels and ten short stories by the incomparable Agatha Christie; that's over nine hundred pages and three hundred thousand words of some of the greatest murder mysteries ever written.
In The Man in the Brown Suit Anne Beddingfield's chance witnessing of a man being killed in a subway station leads her to become involved in a world of diamond thieves, murderers, and political intrigue where she and mystery readers meet the incomparable Colonel Race for the first time.
When Inspector Holt is called in to investigate the mysterious death of Gordon Stuart he discovers that there have been a series of deaths involving wealthy men in London recently.
Edgar Huntly, a young man who lives with his uncle and sisters on a farm outside Philadelphia, begins the novel determined to learn who murdered his friend Waldegrave.
Crime and Punishment focuses on the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, an impoverished man who formulates and executes a plan to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker seemingly for her money, thereby solving his financial problems and at the same time, ridding the world of an evil parasite.
Collected here are ''Secret Adversary'' and ''The Mysterious Affair at Styles'', the books that introduced the world to Tommy and Tuppence and to Hercule Poirot.
Doyle, unsuccessful in his medical practice, in need of money and a more satisfying career, had already sold a number of magazine stories when he wrote the novella, "A Study in Scarlet," the first Sherlock Holmes story, which, after many rejections, was published in Beeton''s Christmas Annual for 1887.
Harold March, the rising reviewer and social critic, was walking vigorously across a great tableland of moors and commons, the horizon of which was fringed with the far-off woods of the famous estate of Torwood Park.
Ships at anchor reared their tall masts, here and there; and the broad stream was enlivened and colored by junks and boats of all sizes and vivid hues, propelled on the screw principle by a great scull at the stern, with projecting handles for the crew to work; and at times a gorgeous mandarin boat, with two great glaring eyes set in the bows, came flying, rowed with forty paddles by an armed crew, whose shields hung on the gunwale and flashed fire in the sunbeams; the mandarin, in conical and buttoned hat, sitting on the top of his cabin calmly smoking Paradise, alias opium, while his gong boomed and his boat flew fourteen miles an hour, and all things scuttled out of his celestial way.
She was the largest, fastest, and latest thing in seagoing destroyers, and though the specifications called for but thirty-six knots' speed, she had made thirty-eight on her trial trip, and later, under careful nursing by her engineers, she had increased this to forty knots an hour-five knots faster than any craft afloat-and, with a clean bottom, this speed could be depended upon at any time it was needed.
