Just as Amy Leatheran is about to return to England, she is hired by celebrated archaeologist Dr Leidner to work as a nurse/companion for his wife, who is subject to fits of nervous terrors. As they travel to an ancient site in the Iraqi desert, Amy finds herself in a situation stranger than she could ever have imagined, whilst Mrs...

Anton Lesser stars as a Berlin detective who stumbles upon the 20th century's most terrifying secret in this BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Robert Harris's bestselling novel. The year is 1964, and it's a week before Hitler's 75th birthday. Nazi Germany won the Second World War, Churchill is living in exile in Canada, Joseph Kennedy is President of the...

It's 1948; three years after the Soviets liberated a tiny nation from German occupation. But the ideals of the revolution have dissipated - the Red Army still patrols the rubble-strewn streets of the Capital; everyone is careful to address one another as Comrade. Lawlessness and corruption are the rules of the City. The young homicide inspector Emil Brod, fresh from...

The Moonstone is one of the first true works of detective fiction, in which Wilkie Collins established the groundwork for the genre itself. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction by Sandra Kemp. The Moonstone, a priceless yellow diamond, is looted from an Indian temple and maliciously bequeathed to Rachel Verinder. On her eighteenth birthday, her friend and...

A classic Rendellian loner, Mix Cellini is superstitious about the number 13. Living in a decaying house in Notting Hill, Mix is obsessed with 10 Rillington Place, where the notorious John Christie committed a series of foul murders. He is also infatuated with a beautiful model who lives nearby - a woman who would not look at him twice. Mix's...

Within the walls of Echo Terrace, the world... Farro Fescu is the concierge of Echo Terrace, an apartment block in New York City. Passing through his lobby at all hours of the night and day is an exotic cross-section of the world's population: An Egyptian born plastic surgeon who lives on the fifth floor and specialises in gender reassignment; a...

August Penrose created the stained glass 'Lady Window' to adorn the chapel of the university he founded for the daughters of the women who worked in his factory, the Rose Glass Works. Depicting his wife, Eugenie, as the Lady of Shallot, it's a mesmerising portrait that has come to embody the spirit of the school itself. But now, eighty years...

When student Meg Hands is found drowned in a Manchester canal, the authorities are only too anxious to classify her death as yet another sad result of alcoholic overindulgence. Her mother, Ruth, an internationally celebrated charity worker, is not so willing to accept this verdict. Frustrated in her attempts to interest the police, she turns to Dave Cunane, Manchester's last...

Kenny Mancuso shot his childhood buddy Moogey Bues and then jumped bail. Now bounty hunter Stephanie Plum is on the case to track Kenny down. Then someone finished Moogey off, Kenny can't be found, twenty-four coffins are missing, and there's some ex-army heavy artillery roaming the streets. And Joe Morelli - the cop with more than a professional interest in...

A witty, intricately-plotted exploration of a sudden fall from grace, the Penguin Classics edition of Wilkie Collins's No Name is edited with an introduction and notes by Mark Ford. Magdalen and her sister Norah, beloved daughters of Mr and Mrs Vanstone, find themselves the victims of a catastrophic oversight. Their father has neglected to change his will, and when the...

Peter Lime is trained to hunt down his prey and catch them on film. But now he is the one being hunted. Whose prey has he become? And what is it that he has that these people will kill to get? Lime is a Danish paparazzo, living in Madrid. For more than 20 years he has stalked and captured the...

Igi Heitmann is being stalked. In the suburb of Oslo where she lives with her cross-dressing husband and their daughter, someone is spray-painting the walls of the houses. HEITMANN = CHILD KILLER, the graffiti says. Who would think this, and how do they know where she lives? On a bitter winter's evening, Igi attends the opening of the exhibition of...

In Chicago, a pregnant cafeteria worker suffering nothing more malevolent than flu like symptoms begins haemorrhaging from every part of her body. In Boston, a brilliant musician, her face disfigured by an unknown disease, rapidly descends into lethal paranoia. In West Virginia, a miner suddenly goes berserk, causing a cave-in that kills two of his co-workers. Finding the link between...

As a dense yellow fog swirls through the streets of London, a deep melancholy has descended on Sherlock Holmes, who sits in a cocaine-induced haze at 221B Baker Street. His mood is only lifted by a visit from a beautiful but distressed young woman - Mary Morstan, whose father vanished ten years before. Four years later she began to receive...

When Miss Hazelstone of Jacaranda Park kills her Zulu cook in a sensational crime passionel, the gallant members of the South African police force are soon on the scene: Kommandant van Heerden, whose secret longing for the heart of an English gentleman leads to the most memorable transplant operation yet recorded; Luitenant Verkramp of the Security Branch, ever active in...