American Detective

A short story from the British Library Tales of the Weird collection Evil Roots. Best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, this short story by Conan Doyle preceded the famous detective by almost a decade. After an altercation, a disgruntled American storms off into the night, only to disappear mysteriously. Could a giant flytrap really be capable of engulfing an adult victim?

IT IS HER DESTINY TO DIE. CAN SHE CHANGE IT? A letter shatters her world. A sacrifice she isn’t willing to make. A man with an agenda of his own. Felicia Wingate has her life planned. She’s going to work with underprivileged children. Until she receives a letter on her twenty-first birthday that sends her careening into the dark belly of evil. Hunted by a fanatical cult leader, she finds herself on the run with her mother, a woman she just met. During their flight, Felicia discovers that friends are not what they seem, and that her birth father is hunting her to further his own evil ...

Murder is easy. Getting away with it is a whole different matter. Prominent Long Beach businessman Wilmer Judd is dead, gruesomely killed by his own employee, Sonny Cai. The case looks cut and dried, but Dapper Luoo isn’t convinced. From a brand new car that’s missing to the burnt-out remains of a corpse, too many things just don’t add up. Dapper thinks there’s some kind of cover-up, and heads out to find the truth. But in the gritty, complex streets of 1950s Los Angeles, one needs to look over their shoulder lest they end up dead too.

Waves of crime were washing the shores of Kenosha by Lake Michigan. Could the police solve the crimes before the next person got hurt? Teressa LeRoy, a young worker at Kenosha Public Library used to rescue street children on her own time. She went missing on the gala night from her workplace and Detective Nathan Adams was assigned the case to find her. One afternoon the gown that Teressa wore on the gala night was found hung on a bookshelf of the library. On another evening, some of the children saw a ghost in the library. One morning, a mangled body appeared in the Library Park and ...

Natalie Spencer was giving a dinner. She was not an easy hostess. Like most women of futile lives, she lacked a sense of proportion, and the small and unimportant details of the service absorbed her. Such conversation as she threw at random, to right and left, was trivial and distracted. Yet, the dinner was an unimportant one. It had been given with an eye more to the menu than to the guest list, which was characteristic of Natalie's mental processes.

When Claire Fontaine learns that her ex-husband, Simon, is marrying again, to a woman with a teenage daughter, her blood runs cold. She is sure that years ago Simon molested her own daughter and was responsible for her mysterious death. She can't let him get away with it a second time. Vandalism, harassment; whatever it takes, Claire will expose him. Simon doesn't know where Claire got this delusion from; her daughter's death was ruled a suicide, but she has always blamed herself - is she just lashing out?

Shadows of Truth By Harold and Carmen Laski They thought their days of danger were behind them. They were wrong. Gabriel Santiago and his wife Isabella had planned to leave their investigative days behind, but when a desperate whistleblower exposes a pharmaceutical giant’s deadly secret, they are thrust back into a world of danger and deception. As they pursue a trail that spans continents—from the sunlit streets of Miami to the shadowy corridors of power in Europe—they uncover a conspiracy that reaches the highest levels of global finance, politics, and corporate greed. With every ...