Simon Vance

Trent's Last Case (1913) is a detective novel by E.C. Bentley. Adapted three times for the cinema-including a 1952 feature film starring Michael Wilding, Orson Welles, and Margaret Lockwood-Trent's Last Case, which was titled The Woman in Black in the U.S., earned the acclaim of such writers as Dorothy L. Sayers, and was followed by a sequel and a collection of short stories involving its main character. When Sigsbee Manderson, a prominent American...

The 28th twisting installment in the DCI Alan Banks mystery series that Stephen King calls "the best now on the market."  In November 1980, Nick Hartley returns home from a university lecture to find his house crawling with police. His ex-girlfriend, Alice Poole, has been found murdered, and her new boyfriend Mark Woodcroft is missing. Nick is the prime suspect. The case quickly goes cold, but Nick cannot let it go. He embarks on a career in investigative...

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...

This is an updated edition of a book written by Missionary and evangelist Roy Hession in 1950 in which he profiles the nature of religious revival and lays out the prerequisites and consequences of the activity of God in the heart of the hungry seeker. Roy Hession (1908-1992) was a British evangelist and author. Hession was born in London in 1908. He was educated at Aldenham School where his introduction to religion led him to expect "anything but...

Searching for truffles in a wood, a man and his dog unearth something less savoury-a human hand. The body, as Chief Inspector Wexford is informed later, has lain buried for ten years or so, wrapped in a purple cotton shroud. The post mortem cannot reveal the precise cause of death. The only clue is a crack in one of the dead man's ribs. Although the police database covers a relatively short period of time, it stores a long list of Missing Persons....

"Being a typewriter is not as easy as it looks. Surrounded by books (notorious attention hogs) and recently replaced by a computer, Olivetti has been forgotten by the Brindle family-the family he's lived with for years. The Brindles are busy humans, apart from 12-year-old Ernest, who would rather be left alone with his collection of Oxford English Dictionaries. The least they could do was remember Olivetti once in a while, since he remembers every...

When property developer Connor Clive Blaydon is found dead, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks and his Yorkshire team dive into the investigation. As luck would have it, someone had installed a cache of spy-cams all around his luxurious home. The team hope that they'll find answers, and the culprit, among the video recordings. Instead of discovering Connor's murderer, however, the grainy and blurred footage reveals another crime: a brutal rape....

Thomas Hardy's first masterpiece, The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with a scene of such heartlessness and cruelty that it still shocks readers today. A poor workman named Michael Henchard, in a fit of drunken rage, sells his wife and baby daughter to a stranger at a country fair. Stricken with remorse, Henchard forswears alcohol and works hard to become a prosperous businessman and the respected mayor of Casterbridge. But he cannot erase his past....

In the notorious mental hospital known as Bedlam, Dr. Thomas Silkstone seeks out a patient with whom he is on intimate terms. But he is unprepared for the state in which he finds Lady Lydia Farrell. Shocked into action, Thomas vows to help free Lydia by appealing to the custodian of her affairs, Mr. Nicholas Lupton. But when Silkstone arrives at the Boughton Estate to speak to Lupton, he finds that another form of madness has taken over the village....

"In a vividly drawn India of the late 19th century, orphan Kimball O'Hara is on the cusp of manhood. Living as a beggar, it isn't until Kim befriends an aged Tibetan Lama that his life transforms: the old man is on a quest to find the legendary River of the Arrow and achieve Enlightenment, and together they embark on an adventure through this impoverished, beautiful, chaotic nation in the grip of the Great Game, the conflict during which the British...