Fiction

The place wasn’t far – a couple of hours drive. I wrapped some cheese sandwiches in foil, took a flask of coffee and was on my way. I got there in two hours and found the room easily.

Jason, an alcoholic, having lost everything except his life, seeks support from AA. Staying sober is still a daily struggle.

The Abandoned Room, published in 1917, is a classic mystery novel written by Charles Wadsworth Camp. The book starts out with the mysterious death of Bobby Blackburn's grandfather.

The Beetle: A Mystery By Richard Marsh The Beetle (or The Beetle: A Mystery) is an 1897 horror novel by the British writer Richard Marsh, in which a polymorphous Ancient Egyptian entity seeks revenge on a British Member of Parliament. It initially out-sold Bram Stoker's similar horror story Dracula, which appeared the same year. The story is told from four points of view, which generally flow from each other with limited scene repetition. In order, the four narrators are Robert Holt, Sydney Atherton, Marjorie Lindon, and Augustus Champnell.

Catherine is a vigorous satire on the Newgate novel, a genre fashionable in the early Victorian period. It is here printed with Cox's Diary, a brief satire on the equally voguish and improbable rags-to-riches stories that also attracted great popular following for a while.

The whole circumstances Of the Stretton Street Affair were so complicated and so amazing from start to finish that, had the facts been related to me, I confess I Should never have for a moment given them credence.

"Really, it's the most extraordinary story of London life that I've ever heard," Phrida Shand declared, leaning forward in her chair, clasping her small white hands as, with her elbows upon the table-à-deux, she looked at me with her wondrous dark eyes across the bowl of red tulips between us.

A timeless whodunit about the unusual murder of one of London’s elite and the twisting and treacherous investigation to find the true killer 

"There was a mysterious affair last night, signore.""Oh!" I exclaimed. "Anything that interests us?""Yes, signore," replied the tall, thin Italian Consular-clerk, speaking with a strong accent.

"And he died mysteriously?" "The doctors certified that he died from natural causes-heart failure." "That is what the world believes, of course.

Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder by author William Hope Hodgson is a collection of occult detective short stories considered to be a fine example of the genre.

“There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road—there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments.”

Introduction and Notes by David Blair, Rutherford College, University of Kent The Moonstone, a priceless Indian diamond which had been brought to England as spoils of war, is given to Rachel Verrinder on her eighteenth birthday.

When a condemned woman asks the local Minister to take her daughter home, the childless man is touched and finds himself unable to refuse. Yet the prisoner is unrepentant of the murder of her husband.

Despite the grave misgivings of both their families, Valeria Brinton and Eustace Woodville are married. But before long the new bride begins to suspect a dark secret in her husband's past and when she discovers that he has been living under a false name, she determines to find out why he is concealing his true identity from her.

Lewis Romayne is a recluse, forced from his life of academic research by the dying call of an aunt in Paris.

Condemned by Victorian critics as immoral, but regarded today as a novel of outstanding social insight, No Name shows William Wilkie Collins at the height of his literary powers. It is the story of two sisters, Magdalen and Norah, who discover after the deaths of their dearly beloved parents that their parents were not married at the time of their births. Disinherited and ousted from their estate, they must fend for themselves and either resign themselves to their fate or determine to recover their wealth by whatever means.

Basil (1852) is the second novel written by British author Wilkie Collins, after Antonina. Basil, son of a father who values the family pedigree and who would not let him marry below his station, falls in love at first sight with a girl he sees on a bus. He follows her and discovers she is Margaret Sherwin, only daughter of a linen draper. He persuades her father to let him marry her secretly.

When the elderly Allan Armadale makes a terrible confession on his death-bed, he has little idea of the repercussions to come, for the secret he reveals involves the mysterious Lydia Gwilt: flame-haired temptress, bigamist, laudanum addict and husband-poisoner. Her malicious intrigues fuel the plot of this gripping melodrama: a tale of confused identities, inherited curses, romantic rivalries, espionage, money—and murder. The character of Lydia Gwilt horrified contemporary critics, with one reviewer describing her as "One of the most hardened female villains whose devices and desires have ever blackened fiction." She remains among the most enigmatic and fascinating women in nineteenth-century literature and the dark heart of this most sensational of Victorian "sensation novels."

Sax Rohmer was a 20th century British novelist best known for detective/mystery books involving the master criminal Fu Manchu.