It’s the summer of 1933, and Oxford don Clive Staples Lewis, better known to his friends as Jack, is on a walking holiday with his brother Warnie and young friend Tom Morris. When Jack’s wallet is accidentally destroyed, they visit a bank to replenish their funds – and walk straight into the scene of an impossible murder.The victim is in the vault of the bank alone, cut off by brick and steel from the rest of the world. Yet he has been stabbed from behind and the murder weapon has ...

It's a Thursday evening in 1936. Clive Staples Lewis (known to all his friends as "Jack") is hosting a gathering of that well-known literary group, The Inklings.Among the regulars are his brother Warnie, J. R. R. Tolkien, Neville Coghill, Hugo Dyson and Adam Fox.Two visitors are also attending - Jack's old pupil Tom Morris and an undergraduate named Auberon Willesden. The following morning Willesden is found murdered in his room in Magdalen, though both the...

Are you seeing your mates this arvo because it's been yonks? Do you shout ''ave a go, ya mug' to your football team from the stands? Or tell your mate his team has got Buckley's chance of winning the AFL Grand Final? Do you mutter 'stone the crows' when surprised? Perhaps you've got your wobbly boots on? Aussie English may be the most inventive and creative language in the world. This larrikin lexicography by Kel Richards tells the stories behind almost a thousand Aussie words and phrases....

The year is 1935. Clive Staples Lewis (known to his friends as ‘Jack’) and his brother Warren (‘Warnie’) are visiting their young friend Tom Morris at Nesfield Cathedral School. Jack is to be the guest speaker at the school’s speech night.They become eyewitnesses to a murder, an impossible murder.A man is stabbed to death by an unseen assailant, and Tom and Jack see his body fall from the rooftop . . . but the body doesn’t hit the ground until the following day!An e...

Dear Jack, I think I'm about to be arrested and charged with murder.' Tom Morris, busy cataloguing the library of Plumwood Hall, is in a fix. Three days before, a member of the family had keeled over at afternoon tea after eating a slice of fruit cake laced with poison. And Tom has been fingered by the weasel-like Inspector Hyde as chief suspect. The young scholar turns to the only person who can help: his old Oxford tutor, C. S. ('Jack') Lewis. As they investigate, mystery piles on myster...

The astonishing story of James Hardy Vaux, writer of Australia's first dictionary and first true-crime memoirIf you wear 'togs', tell a 'yarn', call someone 'sly', or refuse to 'snitch' on a friend then you are talking like a convict.These words, and hundreds of others, once left colonial magistrates baffled and police confused. So comprehensible to us today, the flash language of criminals and convicts had marine officer Watkin Tench complaining about the ...

The only collection of Ngaio Marsh short stories, first published in 1995 to celebrate her centenary, now with two additional stories.A man dies with his hand on a radio dial. A disguised aristocrat finds murder at the opening night of a play. A cryptogram produces death in an English churchyard. These are the short cases of Scotland Yard’s Inspector Roderick Alleyn who, with his lovely wife Agatha Troy, charmed his way through more than thirty novels. The book concludes with a scr...

"DELIGHTFUL."--The Wall Street JournalIn short mysteries so brilliantly plotted they'll confound the cleverest of souls, Inspector Morse remains as patient as a cat at a mouse hole in the face of even the most resourceful evildoers. Muldoon, for instance, the one-legged bomber with one fatal weakness . . . the quartet of lovers whose bizarre entanglements Morse deciphers only after a beautiful woman is murdered . . . and those artful dodgers who catch the cunning and very res...

On a damp July morning in 1946, two schoolboys find a woman"s body in a bomb site in north London. In this gripping murder story, Sian Busby gradually peels away the veneer of stoicism and respectability to reveal the dark truths at the heart of postwar austerity Britain.

The debut novel from no.1 bestseller Val McDermid, now with a new cover design and introduction from the author: Introducing lesbian journalist Lindsay Gordon who finds herself solving a murder after a musician is killed at a concertMoments before she was due to appear on stage at school fundraising gala, star cellist Lorna Smith is found dead, garrotted with her own cello string.Freelance journalist Lindsay Gordon was only covering the gala to make some quick cash, but whe...

Commemorating 75 years since the Empress of Crime’s first book, the first volume in a set of omnibus editions presenting the complete run of 32 Inspector Alleyn mysteries.A MAN LAY DEADSir Hubert Handesley's extravagant weekend house-parties are deservedly famous for his exciting Murder Game. But when the lights go up this time, there is a real corpse with a real dagger in the back. All seven suspects have skilful alibis – so Chief Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn has to ...

The third instalment in an occasional series of short stories covering the elapsed time between the books in The Falconer Files series. An insanely gripping village detective series with a delightful slice of humour. Perfect for fans of Agatha Christie, Lillian Jackson Braun and ***M***idsomer Murders._____________This story covers events th...