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Death Comes as the End

In this startling historical mystery, unique in the author's canon, Agatha Christie investigates a deadly mystery at the heart of a dissonant family in ancient Egypt. Imhotep, wealthy landowner and priest of Thebes, has outraged his sons and daughters by bringing a beautiful concubine into their fold. And the manipulative Nofret has already set about a plan to usurp her rivals' rightful legacies. When her lifeless body is discovered at the foot of a cliff, Imhotep's own flesh and blood become the apparent conspirators in her shocking murder. But vengeance and greed may not be the only motives...
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Endless Night

When penniless Michael Rogers discovers the beautiful house at Gypsy’s Acre and then meets the heiress Ellie, it seems that all his dreams have come true at once. But he ignores an old woman’s warning of an ancient curse, and evil begins to stir in paradise. As Michael soon learns: Gypsy’s Acre is the place where fatal “accidents” happen.
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Poirot's Early Cases: 18 Hercule Poirot Mysteries

The unabridged tales in this Mystery Masters audiobook include all the ones in the print book first published in 1974. With each case, Poirot further proves his reputation as the greatest mind in detective fiction. In "The Plymouth Express," the body of the daughter of a wealthy American industrialist is found stuffed under a train seat. "Problem at Sea" finds a disliked rich woman murdered in a locked room on a ship. "The King of Clubs" involves a prince, his dancer fiancée, and a fiendish bit of blackmail. These gems are alternately read by David Suchet and Hugh Fraser, whose roles as, respectively, Poirot and his sidekick, Captain Hugh Hastings, in PBS's Mystery! series and the Arts and Entertainment's Poirot series are considered definitive. This collection contains the following stories: "The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly," "The Adventure of the Clapham Cook," "The Affair of the Victory Ball," "The Chocolate Box," "The Cornish Mystery," "The Double Clue," "Double Sin," "How Does Your Garden Grow?," "The King of Clubs," "The Lemesurier Inheritance," "Lost Mine," "Market Basing Mystery," "The Plymouth Express," "Problem at Sea," "The Submarine Plans," "The Third-Floor Flat," "The Veiled Lady," and "Wasps' Nest."
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Murder Is Easy

An elderly lady is on her way to Scotland Yard to report several murders in her village. "It is very easy to kill, so long as no one suspects you," she tells the man she meets on the London train, retired policeman Luke Fitzwilliam. He ascribes it all to a vivid imagination and hopes they'll let the old dear down lightly. That is, until he learns about two more suspicious deaths - one of which is the old lady's.
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65 Short Stories

65 Short Stories (Complete and Unabridged)
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I'll Never Be Young Again

'The iron of the bridge felt hot under my hand. The sun had been upon it all day. Gripping hard with my hands I lifted myself on to the bar and gazed down steadily on the water passing under... I thought of places I would never see, and women I should never love. A white sea breaking on a beach, the slow rustle of a shivering tree, the hot scent of grass... I breathed deeply and I felt as though the waiting water rose up in front of me and would not let me go' As far as his father, an accomplished poet, is concerned, Richard will never amount to anything, and so he decides to take his fate into his own hands in a moment of crisis. But at the last moment, he is saved by a passing stranger, Jake, who appeals to Richard not to waste his life. The two men, both at turning points, and on a whim set out for adventure, jumping aboard the first ship they see, cementing a passionate friendship. Their journeys take them to Norway and across Europe, become firm friends. But it is in bohemian Paris, where Richard meets Hesta, a captivating music student, who enables him to fulfil his own artistic promise.
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Other Voices, Other Rooms

Truman Capote’s first novel is a story of almost supernatural intensity and inventiveness, an audacious foray into the mind of a sensitive boy as he seeks out the grown-up enigmas of love and death in the ghostly landscape of the deep South. At the age of twelve, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully’s Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face—and heart—of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.
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Death Before Bedtime

In Death Before Bedtime, dashing P.R. man Peter Sargent is invited to the home of a venerable senator to help strategize his imminent run for president.  On the night before he’s to announce, though, the senator is murdered in his bed.  No longer needed as a political publicist, Sargent finds himself helping the police find the killer.  He deftly navigates an eccentric cast of characters, all of whom are suspects: the rebellious daughter; the sycophantic aide; the grieving widow; and the power-hungry governor with his eye on the senator’s job.  Somehow, between charming the senator’s daughter and glad-handing Washington’s elite, Sargent still manages to methodically put the pieces into place and sees that politics truly is a cut-throat business. From the Trade Paperback edition.
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A Clean Well Lighted Place

"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" is a short story by American author Ernest Hemingway, first published in Scribner's Magazine in 1933; it was also included in his collection Winner Take Nothing (1933). James Joyce once remarked: "He [Hemingway] has reduced the veil between literature and life, which is what every writer strives to do. Have you read 'A Clean Well-Lighted Place'?... It is masterly. Indeed, it is one of the best short stories ever written..."
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A Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories

Ray Bradbury is a painter who uses words rather than brushes--for he created lasting visual images that, once observed, are impossible to forget. Sinister mushrooms growing in a dank cellar. A family's first glimpse at Martians. A wonderful white vanilla ice-cream summer suit that changes everyone who wears it. A great artist drawing in the sand on the beach. A clunky contraption made out of household implements to help some kids play a game called Invasion. The most marvelous Christmas display a little boy ever saw. All those images and many more are inside this book, a new trade edition of thirty-one of Bradbury's most arresting tales--timeless short fiction that ranges from the farthest reaches of space to the innermost stirrings of the heart. Ray Bradbury is known worldwide as one of the century's great men of imagination. Here are thirty-one reasons why.
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The Enchanter

The Enchanter is the Ur-Lolita, the precursor to Nabokov's classic novel. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls, whose coltish grace and subconscious coquetry reveal, to his mind, a special bud on the verge of bloom. From the Trade Paperback edition.
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Pebble in the Sky

One moment Joseph Schwartz is a happily retired tailor in Chicago, 1949. The next he's a helpless stranger on Earth during the heyday of the first Galactic Empire. Earth, as he soon learns, is a backwater, just a pebble in the sky, despised by all the other 200 million planets of the Empire because its people dare to claim it's the original home of man. And Earth is poor, with great areas of radioactivity ruining much of its soil—so poor that everyone is sentenced to death at the age of sixty. Joseph Schwartz is sixty-two. This is young Isaac Asimov's first novel, full of wonders and ideas, the book that launched the novels of the Galactic Empire, culminating in the Foundation series. This is Golden Age SF at its finest.
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The Parliament of Birds

In this collection of poems, among his very best, Chaucer showcases his lyrical skills to perfection. Verging from tragic to comic, the overriding theme of the poetry is love, in its many guises. Chaucer tells of his passion for reading, which allows him to eavesdrop on a "parliament of birds" on St Valentine’s Day; he tells how he, as an inveterate reader, forsakes his books on the first of May to wander into the fields; he complains of being short of money; and he complains to his scribe for copying his verses badly. All in all, in the course of the poetry he reveals a lot about himself, and does so throughout in an engaging and civilized manner.
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Billy Budd and the Piazza Tales

Largely neglected in his own lifetime, Herman Melville mastered not only the great American novel but also the short story and novella forms. In Billy Budd and The Piazza Tales, Melville reveals an uncanny awareness of the inscrutable nature of reality. Published posthumously in 1924, Billy Budd is a masterpiece second only to Melville’s Moby-Dick. This complex short novel tells the story of “the handsome sailor” Billy who, provoked by a false charge, accidentally kills the satanic master-at-arms. Unable to defend himself due to a stammer, he is hanged, going willingly to his fate. Although typically ambiguous, Billy Budd is seen by many as a testament to Melville’s ultimate reconciliation with the incongruities and injustices of life. The Piazza Tales (1856) comprises six short stories, including the perpetually popular “Benito Cereno” and “Bartleby,” a tale of a scrivener who repeatedly distills his mordant criticism of the workplace into the deceptively simple phrase “I would prefer not to.” Billy Budd The piazza -- Bartleby -- Benito Cereno -- The lightning-rod man -- The encantadas -- The bell-tower --
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