Publisher: Golden Deer Classics
We sing praises of Bhagat Singh's courage and his devotion to his motherland. What we don't often get to hear about is the freedom fighter's belief that there is no afterlife of any kind. Bhagat Singh was an ATHEIST!
Dead Dames Don't Sing by John Harvey: Looking for a big payday but finding big trouble instead, ex-London-cop-turned-private-investigator Jack Kiley attempts to uncover the true origins of a controversial, pseudonymously written pulp novel. The Travelling Companion by Ian Rankin: A young Scotsman in Paris is drawn into a shocking mystery that resides within the pages of an unpublished manuscript allegedly penned by Robert Louis Stevenson. Mystery, Inc. by Joyce Carol Oates: When an obsessive collector of bookstores discovers a charming new shop, he decides he must have it at any cost—even if he has to commit murder. Remaindered by Peter Lovesey: For some nefarious reason, the widow and former associates of a slain gangster are determined to keep the Precious Finds Bookstore open following the unfortunate demise of the shop's owner. The Book Thing by Laura Lippman: Private investigator Tess Monaghan must help the irascible proprietor of a Baltimore children's bookstore keep her business afloat by unmasking an elusive and utterly ingenious book thief.Show book
Frederick Ignatius Cowles was born in 1900 in Cambridge, England. This unfamiliar name is one of the gems of English supernatural fiction as well as several other works of travelogues, history, folklore, and children's books. When his supernatural short stories, and some are very short indeed, were first published they were compared to the works of M R James and EF Benson, yet unlike those two authors he fell, unfairly, into obscurity. In all he wrote perhaps 60 short stories with weird and supernatural themes. Frederick Cowles died in 1948 although some accounts offer that it was 1949.Show book
Two Tales From H.P. Lovecraft includes the American horror writer's short stories, "The Cats of Ulthar," of how a law forbidding the killing of cats came to be in a town called Ulthar, and "The Terrible Old Man," notable as the first story to make use of Lovecraft's fictional New England town of Kingsport. Both were written in 1920.Show book
This collection brings together twenty short stories from eighteen of New Zealand's accomplished writers. They explore the dark and dangerous milieu of our comfortable existence. There is humour, tenderness, surprise, anger, sorrow and abject desperation in these stories from the four winds. The authors are Patricia Grace, Albert Wendt, Alice Tawhai, Briar Grace-Smith, Paula Morris, Tina Makereti, James George, Renée, Jacqui McRae, Eru Hart, Helen Waaka, Toni Pivac, K-t Harrison, Anya Ngawhare, Ann French, Piripi Evans, Mark Sweet and Terence Rissetto.Show book
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was the preeminent figure in late 19th-century detective fiction. A physician by profession, he soon found such popularity as a writer of detective stories that his writing was far more profitable than his medical practice. The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone is a Sherlock Holmes mystery in which Holmes is in pursuit of a stolen diamond. By the start of the story, he has already solved every aspect of the case except the one crucial point: the location of the missing jewel...and to establish this, he needs all his cunning to outwit the master criminal.Show book
Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924) was a British writer, clergyman and member of the landed gentry, having inherited an estate of 3,000 acres. While a young curate, he met and fell in love with a beautiful 16-year-old mill worker. He paid for her education and married her, and they subsequently had 15 children. Their relationship formed the inspiration for George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, which was turned into the musical My Fair Lady. Baring-Gould's strangest and most enduring works are those which are based on fantastical medieval myths and folklore. "A Dead Finger" is a strange vampire story about a parasitic dead human finger which feeds off living humans in an attempt to draw the life force out of them and thus regrow its body. "The Red-Haired Girl" is a ghost story about an eerie and ominous servant girl who stalks the house, watching its inhabitants malevolently. "The 9.30 Up Train" is a peculiar ghost story about a strange ghost which haunts both the road near the railway station and also a particular carriage of the train itself. "The Leaden Finger" is the tale of a young woman persistently and cruelly haunted by the sinister ghost of a previous admirer who committed suicide when she refused his marriage proposal. "Mustapha" is the strange story of a young Egyptian who takes a solemn vow to avoid alcohol, in order to win his beloved's hand in marriage. A British tourist finds it amusing to try to trick the locals into breaking their religious vows. When he fools Mustapha and gets him unwittingly to take a sip of brandy, Mustapha commits suicide. His ghost returns to exact a terrible revenge.Show book
