Alex Doyle is a tough man on a tough assignment in Ramona Beach, Florida - the kind of place that doesn't trust strangers and is policed by a sheriff who echoes the locals' sentiments with a billy club.
On New Year's Eve, solicitor Rosa Epton spends a pleasant evening talking to a man who seems to be finding the date he has brought with him less than satisfactory company.
Relating Sherlock Holmes's part in real-life crimes of the day, Donald Thomas brings the Great Detective to life once again in six narratives that display Holmes at his most determined, inventive and downright devious.
For more than two decades, Sherlock Holmes played a vital, though secret, role in solving the major crimes and scandals of his day - some too damaging to the monarchy, the government or the security of the nation to be fully revealed at the time.
Two petrol bombs thrown on the Cakewalk promenade, a sports reporter and his bike rammed off a cliff, a policeman thrown through a plate-glass display window in the city centre and left to die.
The sensational events of the summer of 1907 - the disappearance of the Ascot Gold Cup from the Royal Enclosure, and the even more astonishing theft of the Irish Crown Jewels from a locked and guarded strongroom in Dublin Castle - remain mysterious but apparently random events.
It is 1936 - the year of the Abdication Crisis - and gangland capo Sonny Tarrant's money-laundering operation is being threatened by three small-time thieves thinking big.
Robert Louis Stevenson's strange and sinister tale of the gentle Dr Jekyll and the sadistic Mr Hyde is filled with oddities suggesting a dark reality behind a classic fiction.
In the slum alleys of Lambeth in 1891 a sinister silk-hatted figure lurks in the shadows - but trade is there for the taking and a girl must make a living.
The man the world knew as Lewis Carroll, author of the adventures of Alice, was known to his colleagues in the Christ Church Common Room as the Reverend C.
Sergeant Verity's adversaries in the underworld are as busy as ever, this time taking advantage of the Brighton Races to dupe the populace, and, more seriously, to steal the beautiful Shah Jehan clasp.
William Clarence Verity, Sergeant in 'A' Division of the Metropolitan Police, has seen most of the horrors of the nineteenth century, from the stews of Seven Dials to the prisons of the maharajahs.
In his sixth adventure, Sergeant Verity returns to London's 1860s underworld of alleys and brothels, peopled with sneak thieves, dancing girls, thugs, murderers and pimps.
When Detective Tom Lepski shot down the runaway killer on his beat in Paradise City, he unleashed a chain of events that would involve two sets of criminals and a honeymoon couple in one of the most exciting nights any of them had seen for a long time.
Jerry Stevens, an out-of-work bit-part movie actor, is offered a job at a thousand dollars a day to impersonate John Merrill Ferguson, one of the richest and most powerful men in the world.
When Claude Kendrick, owner of a shadily run art gallery in Paradise City, is approached by Ed Haddon, the King of art thieves, to find a buyer for a priceless icon of Catherine the Great, he believes his dreams have come true.
The only clue that could lead to the arrest of a homicidal killer is a golf ball button, torn from the jacket the killer was wearing, and found next to the horrifyingly mutilated body of a young hooker.
Kidnapping has become a national pastime in Italy - but is there another reason why billionaire Carlo Grandi has put his beautiful daughter behind an electric fence, guarded by killer dogs and two fast-shooting guards?
Joey Luck and his daughter Cindy are small-time criminals going nowhere fast, until they join forces with Vin Pinna, a hardened criminal on the run from Miami.
From the moment Helga Rolfe, the elegant wife of one of the richest tycoons, picks up a gum-chewing boy young enough to be her son, events jump back and skid through a series of 180-degree turns.
A brilliant but sadistic safe-breaker; a beautiful seductress; an expert young hunter and an ace pilot with a shady past - this is the team that undercover operator Armo Shalik assembles to steal the priceless Borgia ring from millionaire Max Kahlenberg's closely guarded fortress in the remote and deadly African bush.
