Every English mansion has a locked room, and Grinton Hall is no exception - the library has hidden doors and passages?and a corpse. But when the corpse goes missing, Sir John Appleby and Charles Honeybath have an even more perplexing case on their hands - just how did it disappear when the doors and[...]

Arbuthnot is paying for a rash decision - he recently married a beautiful but slightly amoral girl whose crazy antics caught his rather cynical professional interest. His wife has taken a lover, Rupert Slade, and Arbuthnot wants nothing more than to see him dead - but the last thing he expected was [...]

Sir John Appleby's son, Bobby, assumes his father's detective role in this baffling crime. When Bobby finds a dead man, in a bunker on a golf course, he notices something rather strange - the first finger of the man's right hand is missing. A young girl approaches the scene and offers to watch the b[...]

When John Appleby's wife, Judith, sets eyes on Scroop House, she insists that they introduce themselves to the owners - a suggestion that makes her sometimes reserved husband turn very pale. When Judith hears the village gossip about the grand house, she is even more intrigued; but when a former emp[...]

Over a period of twenty years, a series of highly elaborate art hoaxes have been perpetrated at carefully time intervals, and in each case, the victim has a very good reason for keeping quiet. Inspector Appleby's interest is kindled by an amusing dinner-party anecdote - when he enlists the help of h[...]

Reissue with striking new jacket.

When half of the guests at a charity masquerade fete at Drool Court turn up dressed as sheiks, it must be more than pure coincidence. One of them is the real thing, however, and Sir John Appleby, master detective, discovers that he is in grave danger. When one of the pseudo-sheiks is murdered, Apple[...]

Public debate over surrogate forces and proxy warfare has been largely dormant since the end of the Cold War. The conventional wisdom has been that with the end of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry, state sources of support for proxy guerrilla, insurgent, and terrorist organizations dried up. This only forced[...]