Kirsten Wever
The Doctor's Wife
This is one of the Victorian “Sensationist” Mary Elizabeth Braddon's many novels (best known among them: “Lady Audley’s Secret”). It is extr…
Whose Body? (Version 2)
Whose Body? is the first of Dorothy Sayers’s famous Lord Peter Wimsey novels, introducing that nobleman, as well as his manservant and fello…
Miss Mackenzie
The thirty-five year-old (hence utterly over-the-hill) Miss Margaret Mackenzie, having devoted her life to others, suddenly finds herself wi…
The Awful German Language (version 2)
This long essay is a work of mock philology, one of several appendices to Twain’s travel novel, A Tramp Abroad. In it, Twain explains, compl…
The Belton Estate
Clara Amedroz is the virtuous, intelligent, and quick-witted heroine of this novel. Like all women of her time, she has few options other th…
Trent's Last Case (Version 2)
This is one of a series of EC Bentley novels featuring the highly erudite artist qua reporter / detective, Philip Trent.In it, Trent is sent…
The Charing Cross Mystery
Here's another intriguing mystery by J. S. Fletcher, centering on why a former high-level police official was murdered, and on whether - and…
The Lifted Veil (Version 2)
George Eliot’s 1859 novella, The Lifted Veil, departs radically from the grounded realism of her longer and better known works, such as Midd…
A Passage to India
E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) is widely acclaimed as one of the hundred best literary works of 20th century. Time magazine rates…
The Green Rust (Version 2)
Edgar Wallace, perhaps best known for creating King Kong, wrote dozens of novels. The Green Rust, his twelfth crime novel, is one of three b…
Martin Hewitt, Investigator
Here are seven mystery stories featuring Martin Hewitt, Detective, and narrated (of course) by his (nameless) sidekick. Arthur Morrison cert…
The Incredulity of Father Brown (Version 2)
These eight Father Brown mysteries depart from Chesterton’s two earlier Father Brown collections – The Innocence of Father Brown, and The Wi…
The Bartlett Mystery
This is a fast-paced mystery, set in New York City, has two or three really interesting ("round") characters, a solid plot, no che…
Clouds of Witness
While Lord Peter Wimsey is on holiday in the wilds of Corsica, his brother Gerald, Duke of Denver, is charged with the murder of their siste…
The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories
George Gissing was a prolific English writer of novels and short stories. Among his best known novels is The Odd Women, which was influenced…
Unnatural Death
This is the third book in the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery series.* As the story opens, a country doctor is telling Lord Peter Wimsey about the…
The Secret of Father Brown
This is the fourth collection of mysteries featuring the very smart and even more devout catholic priest, Father Brown. (It follows The Inno…
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
The author’s fourth Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, set shortly after the Great War, begins with the discovery of old general Fentiman’s body sea…
The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley
At the country estate of Mortimer Fenley, artist John Trenholme works at an oil painting of Sylvia, the financier’s beautiful ward. She has …
The Benson Murder Case - A Philo Vance Story
The Benson Murder Case – A Philo Vance Story is the first of a series of twelve popular mysteries set in New York during the Jazz Age. S. S.…