Simon Vance

The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908) is a novel by French writer Gaston Leroux. Originally serialized in L'Illustration from September to November 1907, The Mystery of the Yellow Room marked the first appearance of popular character Joseph Rouletabille, a reporter and part-time sleuth who features in several of Leroux's novels. Originally a journalist, Leroux turned to fiction after reading the works of Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe. Often...

For 120 years, an ideal society has flourished on a Pacific island where drug use and open sex are encouraged, and children are not at the mercy of one set of parents. Inevitably, this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world. A conspiracy is underway to take over Pala and events begin to move when an agent of the conspirators, a newspaperman named Faranby, is shipwrecked there. What Faranby doesn't expect is how his time...

The third in Trollope's six-volume Palliser series, The Eustace Diamonds boasts an extraordinary heroine in Lizzie Eustace, a lying schemer in the mould of Thackeray's Becky Sharp. A pompous Under-Secretary of State, an exploitative and acquisitive American and her unhappy "niece," a shady radical peer, and a brutal aristocrat are only some of the characters in this, one of Trollope's most engaging novels: part sensation fiction, part detective story,...

"Paris, November 1945. John Russell is walking home along the banks of the Seine on a cold and misty evening when Soviet agent Yevgeny Shchepkin falls into step alongside him. Shchepkin tells Russell that the American intelligence will soon be asking him to undertake some low grade espionage on their behalf--assessing the strains between different sections of the German Communist Party--and that Shchepkin's own bosses in Moscow want him to accept...

Accompanied by an eccentric, human-sized rat, Liza embarks on a perilous quest through an underground realm to save her brother Patrick, whose soul has been stolen by the evilest of creatures--the spider-like spindlers.

Newly released from the notorious asylum known as Bedlam, Lady Lydia Farrell finds herself in an equally terrifying position--as a murder suspect--when she stumbles upon the mutilated body of Sir Montagu Malthus in his study at Boughton Hall. Meanwhile Dr. Thomas Silkstone has been injured in a duel with a man who may or may not have committed the grisly deed of which Lydia is accused. Despite his injury, Thomas hopes to clear his beloved's good name...

The adventures of five brothers and sisters growing up in rural England in the late nineteenth century.

"At a guest house in the beautiful Franschhoek wine valley, a famous English mathematician is kidnapped and his two bodyguards are killed. It's clearly a professional hit, and the spent shell cases offer a chilling clue: Each is engraved with the head of a spitting cobra. Meanwhile, in Cape Town, a skilled young thief is using his talents to put his sister through college. Then one day he picks the wrong pocket, grabbing the wallet of a young American...

The Riddle of the Sands is a 1903 novel by Erskine Childers. The book, which enjoyed immense popularity in the years before World War I, is an early example of the espionage novel and was extremely influential in the genre of spy fiction. It has been made into feature-length films for both cinema and television. The novel "owes a lot to the wonderful adventure novels of writers like Rider Haggard, that were a staple of Victorian Britain". It was a...

Based on the author's own vivid experiences, The Cruel Sea is the nail-biting story of the crew of HMS Compass Rose, a corvette assigned to protect convoys during World War II. Darting back and forth across the icy North Atlantic, Compass Rose played a deadly cat-and-mouse game with packs of German U-boats lying in wait beneath the ocean waves. Packed with tension and vivid descriptions of agonizing U-boat hunts, this tale of the most bitter and chilling...