The tranquility of a luxury cruise along the Nile was shattered by the discovery that Linnet Ridgeway had been shot through the head. She was young, stylish, and beautiful. A girl who had everything...until she lost her life. Hercule Poirot recalled an earlier outburst by a fellow passenger: "I'd like to put my dear little pistol against her head and just press the trigger." Yet under the searing heat of the Egyptian sun, nothing is ever quite what...

The need for love-obsessive, self-destructive, unpredictable-takes us to forbidden places, as in the chilling world of Give Me Your Heart, a new collection of stories by the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates. In the suspenseful "Strip Poker," a reckless adolescent girl must find a way of turning the tables on a gathering of increasingly threatening young men-can she "outplay" them? In "Smother!" a young woman's nightmare memory of childhood brings trouble...

In this exploration of murder in the nineteenth century, Judith Flanders explores some of the most gripping cases that fascinated the Victorians and gave rise to the first detective fiction. She retells the gruesome stories of many different types of murder--both famous and obscure--from the crimes (and myths) of Sweeney Todd and Jack the Ripper to the tragedies of the murdered Marr family in London's East End; Burke and Hare and their bodysnatching...

Examined in this study of mystery writers are Anthony Berkeley / Francis Iles, G.K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Wilkie Collins, Freeman Wills Crofts, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, R. Austin Freeman, Edgar Allan Poe, Melville Davisson Post, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Dorothy L. Sayers, S.S. Van Dine and Edgar Wallace. Each profile includes biographical information, critical extracts and a bibliography.