Showing results by narrator "Scott Graham" in All Categories

A man apparently sends an incriminating letter to his solicitor, by the simple mistake of placing it into the wrong envelope, and then he abruptly disappears—this, immediately following a sailing trip from Sennen Cove to Penzance with an old friend, the last person known to have seen the missing man alive. But when Dr. John Thorndyke agrees to investigate the disappearance on behalf of the man's wife, he soon begins to question the circumstances and to suspect a more sinister outcome...

Overworked locum Dr. Jervis is called to the bedside of a gentleman who refuses to see a doctor except on the condition that the doctor must be told neither his name nor his address. After a strange ride in a closed carriage, Jervis finds his patient apparently suffering the effects of morphine poisoning, and departs with a sense of uneasiness. Anxious to trace the man again, Jervis consults his old friend and colleague, the eminent scientific investigator Dr. John Thorndyke.

Unlike most of Peacock's novels, The Misfortunes of Elphin has a distinct plot, built around the adventures of prominent figures of Arthurian legend, like Taliesin, the bard, the princes Elphin, and Seithenyn and King Arthur himself. The drama comes to a satisfactory resolution when Arthur's wife, Gwenyvar, who has been kidnapped by the ambitious King Melvas, is restored to her husband, after some skilful negotiation by Seithenyn and a cunning abbot.

The Wind in the Willows, first published in 1908, is one of the most beloved of all children's classics and has been adapted on multiple occasions for presentation on stage, in film, and as an opera. The action centers on the efforts of Mole, Rat, and Badger to discipline and reform their wealthy and self-destructive friend Toad, who lives in a splendid mansion known as Toad Hall.

Seven centuries into the future, aliens and humans compete for the greatest prize in the universe: the Galaxy Bowl trophy. Quarterback Quentin Barnes enters his third season at the helm of the Ionath Krakens. He's reshaped the team in his image, and the time for excuses is over; it's win, or be replaced. Quentin's championship quest carries him and his teammates across the galaxy in a brutal 12-game season fraught with injury and death. But he faces more than just on-field challenges.

Seven more cases for HC Bailey's eclectic golden age sleuth Mr Reginald Fortune: surgeon, general practitioner, and advisor to Scotland Yard wherever surgery, medicine or kindred sciences can elucidate what is or is not crime. Including: a sudden death at Royal Ascot; a young doctor accused of a diamond theft; a strange country house burglary; an incident at the British Museum leading to a far darker crime; a vanished actress; and a diabolical murder at an orphanage, linked to an apparently accidental death and a near-fatal poisoning.

Listed in the BBC's "100 Novels That Shaped Our World", Psmith, Journalist takes Wodehouse's immaculate hero to the apparently dull city of New York, where he takes command of twee family periodical Cosy Moments, converts it to the yellowest of yellow journals, and embarks upon a crusade to unmask the owner of the notorious Pleasant Street tenements. But soon the staff of Cosy Moments find themselves dodging ambushes and assassination attempts, as the mysterious tenement owner tries to put them out of business - permanently; and war breaks out among New York's notorious street gangs.

Just days after the wedding of Valeria Brinton and Eustace Woodville, a series of strange incidents causes Valeria to believe her husband is hiding a dark secret. She discovers he has been living under a false name, and when questioned, Eustace refuses to discuss it. Upon further digging, Valeria finds Eustace had been on trial three years ago for the murder of his wife. However, the verdict had come down as the scotch verdict of not proven. This implied his guilt, but there was not enough evidence for a conviction nor did it exonerate him.

Anna Katharine Green (1846 - 1935) was one of the crime novelists and paved the way for later female writers of detective novels, like Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh.

On the eve of the Civil War, Kirby Jensen is the youngest of three children living on a hardscrabble ranch in Southwestern Missouri. But in 1861, shots were fired in Charleston harbor, and Kirby's father and brother went to war. Smoke Jensen: The Beginning follows the Jensen clan during these volatile years, from Civil War battles to border state raids to the kind of frontier justice achieved only by bullets and blood.

In the days before the First World War, the measured routine of barrister and accidental Member of Parliament Edward Leithen is disrupted when Charles Pitt-Heron, an Oxford contemporary and now the husband of Leithen’s old flame, abruptly goes missing. As he investigates the mystery, Leithen is soon pitted against the murderous forces of “the Power-House,” an international network of anarchists, and its chilling leader.

It's hard to find a lesser man than Apropos: a con man, a knave, a scalawag...and those are his finer points. This time, Apropos winds up a stranger in a strange land called "Chinpan," populated by those who speak a different language and live by a code of honor, neither of which Apropos can comprehend. And yet it is here that he begins to examine his life and question whether he can aspire to become more than the hard-bitten cynic he's always been.

Persuasion was the last novel completed by Jane Austen and was first published posthumously in December, 1817. The story represents an interesting configuration of Austen’s characteristic narrative patterns. The heroine, Anne Eliot, is something of an old maid—she is twenty-seven years old, still single and is considered by family and friends to have lost her youthful beauty. Several years earlier, her engagement to Captain Frederick Wentworth had been broken off, due to the insistence of her family that the Captain lacked the wealth and status needed for a suitable husband.

Sense and Sensibility follows the fortunes of sensible Elinor and her volatile younger sister, Marianne, as each searches for a spouse—a quest made urgent by the family’s financial embarrassment. While Elinor pursues the heart of clergyman, Edward Ferrars, Marianne impulsively falls in love with a glamorous but unscrupulous adventurer, Willoughby. Elinor sees trouble brewing but the enraptured Marianne does not. The sisters question each other’s choices in love.

Young Dr Oldfield is puzzled by the strangely intractable illness of his recently acquired patient, the Modernist potter Peter Gannet, and he calls upon his old teacher, Dr Thorndyke, to consult. Thorndyke quickly identifies the true cause of the illness as arsenic poisoning, and there seems little doubt that the poison has been administered by someone in Gannet's household. After his discharge from the hospital, what will be the result when Gannet returns to his home?

Nineteen of Wodehouse's funniest stories, all focusing upon the tribulations of the followers of the great mystery that is golf. Collecting the complete text of both The Clicking of Cuthbert and The Heart of a Goof, and including such classics as A Woman is Only a Woman, Ordeal by Golf, The Long Hole, Keeping in with Vosper, and The Magic Plus Fours.

The Pothunters was Wodehouse's first published novel and the first of a number of early school stories. Life at the fictional St. Austin's public school is thrown into confusion when the cricket pavilion is burgled, and two of the school's silver sports trophies (or "pots" in the language of the schoolboys) are stolen. The hunt for the missing trophies piques the interest of the boys, their school masters, and even a Scotland Yard detective, and is played out against the idyllic background of Edwardian public school life.

Holidaying in a country inn, wealthy Jephthah Mottram dies, poisoned by gas. But Mr Mottram was insured with the massive Indescribable Insurance Company, under its famously extravagant Euthanasia policy: with half a million pounds payable on death... except in the case of death by suicide. The Indescribable's somewhat desultory private detective, Miles Bredon, along with his wife Angela, is sent to investigate. Was Mottram's death suicide, or something more sinister?

HG Wells' perennially popular, and never out-of-print, 1898 science fiction novel, depicting a sudden invasion of the English heartland by highly intelligent and coldly malevolent creatures from Mars, and the rout of human resistance before the invaders' superior technology. The novel has been many times adapted for other media, including Hollywood movies, and the legendary 1938 radio presentation by Orson Welles.

When her beloved father is threatened with imprisonment over misappropriated trust funds, Helen Vardon agrees secretly to marry the man who holds her father's fate in his hand, to save both her father and herself from poverty and social disgrace. But the marriage merely precipitates a terrible personal disaster, and a series of events involving death and blackmail, which puts Helen herself under suspicion of murder. Can Dr. Thorndyke unravel the mystery in time to save her?