Other books that might interest you

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  The Hermit of Eyton Forest

  Ellis Peters

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  Shortly after he inherits the powerful position of Lord of Eaton, 10-year-old Richard Ludel disappears from Shrewsbury Abbey, where he had been a student. Did he run away or was he kidnapped? Brother Cadfael suspects the hermit of Eyton Forest, a mysterious man rumored to have holy powers, knows the answer.

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  Innocents Of Fr Brown - Produced...

  GK Chesterton

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  The Innocence of Father Brown is the first of five collections of mystery stories featuring Chesterton's canny priest. It's probably the best collection and it introduces the holy detective—as well as his sometime opponent, sometime collaborator, Flambeau. But each collection offers some great stories. 
  I'm very fond of Father Brown—despite several potential obstacles. 
  For one thing, the plots of these stories are implausible. They are part of the tradition of British murder mysteries that the later American hardboiled school revolted against. Murders are carried out in ridiculously complicated fashions, as no crimes are committed in the real world. 
  Father Brown is the prototype of the intuitive amateur sleuth (like Agatha Christie's Miss Marple and TV's Jessica Fletcher on Murder, She Wrote), who runs into murders everywhere he goes and manages to solve the crimes with only one or two clues where thorough, professional investigators are stumped. 
  The mysteries are extremely clever on the most superficial level, with several innovations on the classic locked-door mystery and other more novel situations. But on top of that, they involve an understanding of human nature—or at least of how human nature operates in society. 
  Typically, Father Brown solves crimes by sharing the perpetrators' own insights into human perception, which allow them to commit the deeds and him to uncover them. He sees what others, including the readers, do not, even when it is right before our eyes. 
  Not always though. In about a third of the stories I did see the solution coming from a long way off. I suspect though this is because these stories, like the mysteries of Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allen Poe, have become embedded in our culture. The surprise has worn off because the tricks have been replayed so many times in stories, movies and television shows since they were invented by these masters.

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  Gesturing - A Selection from the...

  John Updike

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  The extraordinarily evocative stories depict the generation born in a small-town America during the Depression and growing up in a world where the old sexual morality was turned around and material comforts were easily had. Yet, as these stories reflect so accurately, life was still unsettling, and Updike chronicles telling moments both joyful and painful. The texts are taken from his recent omnibus, The Early Stories, 1953-1975. 
  In describing how he wrote these stories in a small, rented, smoke-filled office in Ipswitch, Massachusetts, he says, ""I felt that I was packaging something as delicately pervasive as smoke, one box after another, in that room, where my only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me -- to give the mundane its beautiful due.""

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  The Beast with Five Fingers

  William Harvey

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  Evil, made flesh and bone, in a human hand, unceasingly torments one man.

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  Top 10 Short Stories The - The...

  Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy,...

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  Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart.  A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere. 
   
  In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?  
   
  The theme itself will form the boundaries for our stories which range from well-known classics, newly told, to stories that modern times have overlooked but perfectly exemplify the theme.  Throughout the volume our authors whether of instant recognition or new to you are all leviathans of literature. 
   
  Some you may disagree with but they will get you thinking; about our choices and about those you would have made.  If this volume takes you on a path to discover more of these miniature masterpieces then we have all gained something. 
   
  A decade of exuberance as the world became a plaything of the Western Imperial powers to exploit for their own ends.  Whole cultures were sequestrated and suspended and another overplanted in its place. 
   
  But short story authors created some of literature’s brightest jewels as they explored genres and styles in ambitious claims to be the chronicler of the age. 
   
  01 - The Top 10 - The 1880's - An Introduction 
  02 - A Horseman In The Sky by Ambrose Bierce 
  03 - The Bet by Anton Chekhov 
  04 - The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant 
  05 - The Withered Arm by Thomas Hardy 
  06 - A White Heron by Sarah Orne Jewett 
  07 - The Man Who Would Be King 
  08 - Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  09 - The Lady, or the Tiger by Frank Stockton 
  10 - How Much Land Does A Man Need by Leo Tolstoy 
  11 - The Nightingale and the Rose by Oscar Wilde

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  The Wrong Box

  Robert Louis Stevenson, Lloyd...

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  “The Wrong Box” is a wonderful, farcical black comedy co written by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne (Stevenson’s stepson) in 1889. 
  The story is built around that mainstay of many a farce, a family squabbling over money. In this case it is the proceeds of a Tontine, a once popular investment scheme. 
   A cast of colourful characters, worthy of Dickens, are thrown together, either in the pursuit of money, or in the disposal of a mysterious corpse which makes surprising and gruesome appearances throughout the story. 
  Head Stories Audio presents "The Wrong Box" by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne. Narrated by Simon Hester

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