Mystery and Detective Ebooks and Paperbacks

Cassidy's Girl" offers a portrayal of lost people in forgotten streets of Philadelphia in the years following WW II. The characters in the story are tormented and fallen. They struggle with alcohol and with their own demons.  They say that a man needs a woman to go to hell with. Cassidy had two. One was Mildred, the wife who kept him chained with ties of fear and jealousy and paralyzing sexual need. The other was Doris, a frail angel with a 100-proof halo and a bottle instead of a harp. With those two, Cassidy found that the ride to hell could be twice as fast. Cassidy's Girl has all the traits that made its author a virtuoso of the hard-boiled: a fiercely compelling ploy; characters who self-destruct in spectacularly unpredictable ways; and an insider's knowledge of all the routes to the bottom.

This is a Cock Robin Mystery introducing Trygve Yamamura--judo expert, Samurai sword connoisseur and private detective--triple threat to San Francisco crime. These combined skills enable him to keep his own head attached while finding out who removed someone else's with honorable Japaneses weapon. This is a good old-fashioned detective story, a genuine whodunit, with a good deal of suspense thrown in.

American screenwriter, short story writer and novelist. Vance's The Lone Wolf books feature Michael Lanyard as a charming sort of rogue, a European jewel thief with a soft spot for damsels in distress, trained in the criminal arts by the mysterious Irishman, Bourke. This is the fifth volume in his Lone Wolf stories. The book begins: I love you, said Michael Lanyard. He spoke in French; and that simple phrase, covered by the surging song of strings and woodwinds, was inaudible to other ears. Only the woman with him heard and, hearing, roused from the reverie into which she too insensibly had lapsed, turning back from the prismatic pageantry of the dance eyes whose grave regard gave never a clue to the emotions his words inspired.

Starts out with a bang: As if I wasn't feeling bad enough it had to be one of those muggy New York City summer nights when your breath comes out melting. With my room on the ground floor and facing nothing, I lay in bed and sweated up the joint. The summer hadn't been too rough till the last few days, about the time my belly went on the rocks, when it became a Turkish bath. I stared up at the flaky ceiling and wished the 52 Grover Street Corporation would install air conditioning. Almost wished I was the house dick at a better hotel. No, I didn't wish that—I had a sweet deal at the Grover. With my police pension, the pocket money the hotel insisted was a salary, and my various side rackets, I was pulling down over two hundred dollars a week in this flea bag— all of it tax free. Turning over to reach a cool part of the sheet, this warm, queasy feeling bubbled through my gut. I belched and snapping on the table light took a mint. All I had on was shorts, but they were damp and as I started to change them, there was a knock on the door. When I said, “Yeah?” Barbara opened the door, fanning her face with a folded morning paper. She never slopped around in a kimono or just a slip. Barbara was always neat in a dress and underthings, and shoes, not slippers. Which was one reason I let her work the hotel steadily. Her simple face might have been cute—ten years ago. Now it held that washed-out look that comes with the wear and tear. But her legs were still cute, long and slim. She closed the door and leaned against it. “My—what a lump of man.”

If you're Toussaint Moore, a private investigator from New York City, and a Negro, framed in your own city for a white man's murder, you are going to find it tricky sledding in a small Ohio town, close to the Kentucky border. But the small town was where Moore felt he had to be, to try to find proof for the police that he was innocent of the killing. Moore's problems had started in New York, when the publicity woman from a television show called You-Detective! came to ask him to shadow a man. The idea of the show was that the viewers were given information about a wanted man, and the first viewer to find the man and report him to the police won a reward. In short, it was a combination adventure and give-away show. Ed Lacy has written his most unusual story-a very exciting one, and one which handles with exceptional insight a black man's experiences in a large northern city and a small, bordering-on-the-South town.

On the muddy verge of a shallow little pool the man lay prone and still, as still as those poor dead whose broken bodies rested all about him, where they had fallen, months or days, hours or weeks ago, in those grim contests which the quick were wont insensately to wage for a few charnel yards of that debatable ground.

This, the second Sherlock Holmes mystery, begins with Holmes himself in a cocaine-induced haze, interrupted by the arrival of a distressed and beautiful young lady. Each year following the strange disappearance of her father, Miss Morstan has received a rare and lustrous pearl. Now, on the day she is summoned to meet her anonymous benefactor, she comes to consult with Holmes and Watson.

Set in Algeria a hundred years ago, the story is full of the wonder and mystery of the desert. The action is dramatic and the descriptions are done with rare power. The story will bring a new type of Williamson novel to all those who love tales of mystery, romance, and adventure.

A murder is committed in Dark Hollow and the proprietor of a neighboring inn is convicted and hanged. Twelve years later events take a turn, and the judge who convicted the man confesses that he himself was the murderer. Meanwhile the man who was hanged was proved to have been a murderer before that time, and for a crowning touch his daughter and the son of the judge are happily united.

As a convivial group leaves a dance one night a young man rushes by muttering "Thank God, this night of horror is over"... and soon thereafter cries of "Murder!" alert the group that Agatha Webb has been stabbed to death!  A saintly woman is found stabbed, with her husband, a dementia victim, found asleep with blood on his sleeve; her housekeeper is dead, too. The reprobate son of the town's first citizen acts suspicious; his girlfriend is blackmailing him. Witnesses saw a strange, bearded old man.

A melodramatic mystery, in which a young lawyer is summoned to the house of a dying woman to draw up her will. In a search for her legitimate heirs, he encounters a beautiful woman with a mysterious scar. Events then take a very sinister turn…

Marty Donovan is a cop who happens to be in love with Lenore, his partner's wife. When the two cops can't crack a tough case, Lenore suggests a stakeout that's not approved by the department. Her husband is killed, and Marty begins a complicated cover-up as he tries to find the killer.

Richard Austin Freeman (11 April 1862 London - 28 September 1943 Gravesend) — known as R. Austin Freeman — was a British writer of detective stories, mostly featuring the medico-legal forensic investigator Dr Thorndyke. He claimed to have invented the inverted detective story (a crime fiction in which the commission of the crime is described at the beginning, usually including the identity of the perpetrator, with the story then describing the detective's attempt to solve the mystery) and used some of his early experiences as a colonial surgeon in his novels. A large proportion of the Dr Thorndyke stories involve genuine, but often quite arcane, points of scientific knowledge, from areas such as tropical medicine, metallurgy and toxicology.

Halsey returns a few days later, without his friend and without an explanation, but by then many other developments have occurred, to the chagrin of the residents.

Arsene Lupin vs Herlock Sholmes. A very thinly disguised Sherlock Holmes takes on Arsene Lupin in solving a mystery.

This Black Mask story introduces ''The Continental Op'', a character who would eventually appear in 28 stories and two novels.

The cost of Terry Grey's Japanese dagger had come high in battlefield blood. But though Terry brought it back to a hometown dime store, the second fee that sinister souvenir demanded was equally deadly dear. A classic short detective thriller.