Derek Perkins
1) Rabbit Road
Author
Language
English
Description
Pleasant Hill Baptist Church was the center of life and culture for a few hardworking and tough minded African American families in the Mississippi backwoods. Grandma Brillie with her brood of gun-toting sons were at church every Sunday as she paraded down the isle of the old wooden church. Right outside, the Perkins boys were gambling and selling moonshine to sinners and saints alike. Follow these families onto the back roads, into the juke joints,...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"First published in Britain in 1949, Brand's exuberant novel is still regarded as one of the great masterpieces of the classic mystery genre for its fiendishly constructed puzzle, memorable setting, dumbfounding acts of misdirection and thrilling denouement. This edition includes an introduction by award-winning author Martin Edwards. "A very neat version of the 'sealed room' mystery... provides [Miss Brand] with excellent opportunities to indulge...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
In this classic parlor mystery from CWA Diamond Dagger winner Catherine Aird, Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan investigates a dinner party that ended in murder Twelve friends sit down for supper at Strontfield Park-but only eleven survive the evening. After dinner, the host, William Fent, offers to drive one of his guests home, only to die behind the wheel in a violent accident. The autopsy shows that Fent ingested enough barbiturates to kill a horse....
4) Harm's Way
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Can Inspector C. D. Sloan find his man when a dismembered appendage appears at a local farm in this mystery by CWA Diamond Dagger winner Catherine Aird? When the Berebury Footpaths Society created their locally infamous motto, "Every walk a challenge," they couldn't have known just how apt it would be. Avid hikers Wendy Lamport and Gordon Briggs suffer from a good walk spoiled when, while reclaiming a public footpath from the greedy barbed-wire fences...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
From an award-winning historian of ancient Rome, a definitive history of Hadrian's Wall
Stretching eighty miles from coast to coast across northern England, Hadrian's Wall is the largest Roman artifact known today. It is commonly viewed as a defiant barrier, the end of the empire, a place where civilization stopped and barbarism began. In fact, the massive structure remains shrouded in mystery. Was the wall intended to keep out the Picts, who inhabited...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Flying the notorious "Hump" route between India and China in 1943, a twin-engine plane suffered mechanical failure and crashed in a dense mountain jungle, deep within Japanese-held territory. Among the passengers and crew were celebrated CBS journalist Eric Sevareid, an OSS operative who was also a Soviet double agent, and General Joseph "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell's personal political adviser. Against the odds, all but one of the twenty-one people aboard...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
From CWA Diamond Dagger winner Catherine Aird: Caught between an angry government and his employer's profits, an engineer conveniently dies . . . Can Calleshire's greatest detective bring the guilty to justice? What's the value of one British engineer when stacked against the exclusive mining rights to a rare, strategically important, and extremely valuable mineral? The British-based Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company finds itself in hot water...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Sixteen short puzzlers from the inimitable Catherine Aird, author of the acclaimed C. D. Sloan Mysteries A professional pickpocket and accomplished thief ignores his wife's warnings and embarks on an adventure that will change his life-perhaps for the better. A technological marvel of a sports car kills a pedestrian, but no one was at the wheel. A local lunatic admits to murder, but is he crazy-or crazy smart? The life of a researcher with ties...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
An island republic goes to insane lengths to canonize its most famous resident Juanita di Perli was a young woman when she decided to live the rest of her life on a table-top. She called it God's will, but for the order of nuns that sprang up around her, Juanita's devotion was a curse. For decades they did the bidding of the holy grouch, and the entire island of San Juan el Pirata sighed with relief when she died. Twenty years later, the islanders...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The Republic of Venice was the first great economic, cultural, and naval power of the modern Western world. After winning the struggle for ascendency in the late 13th century, the Republic enjoyed centuries of unprecedented glory and built a trading empire which at its apogee reached as far afield as China, Syria, and West Africa. This golden period only drew to an end with the Republic's eventual surrender to Napoleon. The Venetians illuminates the...
11) His Burial Too
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
In this crime novel by CWA Diamond Dagger winner Catherine Aird, Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan returns to solve a locked-room mystery, but he's thrown for a loop when a prominent industrialist turns up dead On the hottest day in living memory, Richard Mallory Tindall, the owner of a patent firm, does not return home to Cleete village. When a man is found crushed to death, Tindall's case goes from missing person to homicide. In the course of solving...
12) Last Respects
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
In this C. D. Sloan Mystery by CWA Diamond Dagger winner Catherine Aird, a body is found in the river-but the victim didn't drown When local fisherman Horace Boller decided to row his boat out on the tidal backwash of the river one morning, he couldn't have meant to land a catch like this. What he ended up with was a body floating on the river's surface. And judging by the state of the corpse, the death was not a recent one. The strange thing...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
First arson, then murder strike Emily Dickinson's hometown Although she spent her life withdrawn from the people of Amherst, Massachusetts, every man, woman, and English professor in this small university town claims ownership of poet Emily Dickinson. They give tours in her house, lay flowers on her grave, and now, as the hundredth anniversary of her death approaches, they organize festivals in her name. Dickinson scholar Owen Kraznik has just been...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
After the unprecedented destruction of the Great War, the world longed for a lasting peace. The victors, however, valued vengeance even more than stability and demanded a massive indemnity from Germany in order to keep it from rearming. The results, as eminent historian Norman Stone describes in this authoritative history, were disastrous.
In World War Two, Stone provides a remarkably concise account of the deadliest war of human history, showing...
15) After Effects
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
In this mystery by CWA Diamond Dagger winner Catherine Aird, Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan investigates a case of medical malpractice that looks a bit too much like foul play Muriel Ethel Galloway passed away at home, twitching and grasping at objects only she could see. Her family mourns, sad but unsurprised that an old woman suffering from heart disease should die suddenly. But when Mrs. Galloway's son receives an anonymous call alerting him that...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
In an intellectual hamlet, century-old love letters give rise to murder The citizens of Concord, Massachusetts, never tire of their heritage. For decades, the intellectuals of this little hamlet have continued endless debates about Concord's favorite sons: Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and their contemporaries. Concord's latter-day transcendental scholars are a strange bunch, but none is more peculiar than Homer Kelly, an expert on Emerson and on homicide....
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Homer defends a crazed poet accused of using an eclipse as cover for murder For all her life, poet Kitty Clark has waited to see a total eclipse of the sun. News of an impending eclipse thrills her until she learns it will be visible only from Nantucket, where one year ago her ex-lover Joe Green moved with his new wife. Unable to resist the astronomical lure, she flies in from Boston, and makes her way to an isolated lighthouse, hoping to avoid seeing...
18) The Lady Chapel
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
A blood-curdling murder in the minster grounds proves to be a difficult case for Owen Archer when a young witness goes missing.
York, 1365. The Corpus Christi Day pageant is winding down when Owen Archer is summoned to see John Thoresby, Archbishop of York. Wool merchant Will Crounce has been violently murdered - his throat slit and his right hand cut off. Terrified eight-year-old, Jasper de Melton, saw it all - including the woman in a hooded...
19) The Nun's Tale
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
God's will or the Devil's work? Owen Archer investigates a young runaway nun who claims to have been resurrected, setting a series of dark discoveries and violent deaths in motion.
York, 1365. Dame Joanna Calverley of Leeds fled St. Clement's Priory with its precious relic - the milk of the Virgin - and died of fever soon after in Beverley.
A MIRACLE RESURRECTION?
Joanna is dead and buried . . . isn't she? Not according to housemaid Maddy, who...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
A healing remedy or a deadly poison? Owen Archer confronts a lethal mix of dangerous attraction and troubling secrets when two knights die unexpectedly.
York, 1363. Master apothecary Nicholas Wilton provides a healing potion for a wounded soldier at St. Mary's Abbey.
A KILLER CURE?
When Brother Wulfstan administers the special physick to the pilgrim and a fellow knight, tragedy strikes. Is the poisonous potion an accident, or a deliberate act...