Three British Mystery Novels: detective, thriller, and (mild) horror set in Britain by British authors. Three great reads, for those who like to wrap their minds round unusual plots, presented as an e-book bundle.An ideal gift for mystery lovers.A Taste for Blood, set in and around London, by the late Sherlock Holmes expert David Stuart Davies.Ellipsis, set in London, a psychological thriller by Nikki Dudley....

'Nothing is so improbable as what is true'Of all the writers of ghost and horror stories, Ambrose Bierce is perhaps the most colourful. He was a dark, cynical and pessimistic soul who had a grim vision of fate and the unfairness of life, which he channelled into his fiction. And in his death, or rather his disappearance, he created a mystery as strange and unresolved as any that he penned himself. But more of that later.Ambrose Gwinett Bierce was born in a log cabin on 21st...

A grey cloud formed on the summit of the altar, diminishing, thickening and turning into a Shape, a shape of evil and fear. The silent group by the fire once more broke forth into wild gesticulations and cries, Stella prostrated herself, the Form on the altar grew clearer and with a cry of horror Mr Fowke turned away and rushed madly across the moor’.Amyas Northcote’s In Ghostly Company is a rare and splendid collection of strange and disturbing tales from the golden age of ghost s...

‘And behind him, like a misshapen black frog, bounded the Thing, its redtongue lolling out of its gash of a mouth, its diminutive blubbery lipsdrawn back in a murderous snarl…’Let Henry S. Whitehead take you into the mysterious and macabre world ofvoodoo where beasts invade the mind of man and where lives of theliving are racked by the spirits of the dead. In this collection of rareand out of print stories you will encounter the curses of the...

‘His body was pressed against the wall at the head of the bed, and the face was a mask of agonised horror and fruitless entreaty. But the eyes were already glazed in death, and before Francis could reach the bed the body had toppled over and lay inert and lifeless. Even as he looked, he heard a limping step go down the passage outside.’E. F. Benson was a master of the ghost story and now all his rich, imaginative, spine-tingling and beautifully written tales are presented together ...

‘We shall have no other course to pursue but to fulfil our promise. You will die at Eight in the Evening – The Four Just Men’Criminals and malefactors beware! There is no escape from the sword of justice wielded by The Four Just Men. Here are the complete adventures of Edgar Wallace’s daring and ingenious vigilantes. This fascinating bumper collection contains all six volumes of the Just Men saga: The Four Just Men, The Council of Justice, The Just Men of Cordova,...

Selected and Edited with an Introduction and Notes by David Blair, University of Kent at Canterbury.Late in the eighteenth century authors began to write ‘Gothic’ stories as a way of putting literature back in touch with the irrational, the supernatural and the bizarre, which had been neglected in the ‘Age of Reason’.This superb new collection brings together stories from the earliest decades of Gothic writing with later 19th and early 20th century tales fr...

Max Carrados is one of the most unusual detectives in all fiction. He is blind – and yet he has developed his other faculties to such an amazing degree that they more than compensate for his lack of sight.‘Lose one sense and the others, touch, taste, smell, hearing improve…with a little dedicated training.’ Carrados can read a newspaper headline with the touch of his fingers, detect a man wearing a false moustache because ‘he carries a five yard aura of spirit gum’ and shoot a villain by a...

Edited and with an Introduction by David Stuart Davies.‘Have you ever heard of the fascination of terror?’This is a unique collection of strange stories from the cunning pen of Wilkie Collins, author of The Woman in White and The Moonstone. The star attraction is the novella The Haunted Hotel, a clever combination of detective and ghost story set in Venice, a city of grim waterways, dark shadows and death. The action takes place i...

Selected and with an Introduction by David Stuart Davies.This gripping set of tales by the master storyteller Arthur Conan Doyle is bound to thrill and unnerve you. In these twilight excursions, Doyle's vivid imagination for the strange, the grotesque and the frightening is given full rein.We move from the mysteries of Egypt and the strange powers granted by The Ring of Thoth to the isolated ghostlands of the Arctic in The Captain of the Polest...

**“An extraordinary recovery of a lost world.”—Peter Brown, author of The World of Late AntiquityFrom the world-leading expert on the Maya, a monumental history of a flourishing civilization across three millennia**The Four Heavens brings to life the cultural and visual splendor of the ancient Maya, drawing on the oldest indigenous texts of the Americas and the latest archaeological discoveries to present an entirely new history of this spectacular civiliz...

‘How on earth did you piece together all this?’ he asked in wonder. Mr Reeder shook his head sadly. ‘I have that perversion,’ he said. ‘It is a terrible misfortune. I see evil in everything. I have the mind of a criminal.’Let us introduce you to the enigmatic J. G. Reeder, a timid, gentle middle-aged man who carries a furled up umbrella and wears an old-fashioned flat-topped bowler hat. He is one of the great unsung sleuths of mystery fiction, created by the prolific Edgar Wallace,...