Pick and Mix Deal - Penguin Modern Classics – Crime & Espionage III

Eighteen-year-old Merricat may, or may not be, a mass murderer

Six years ago everyone in the Blackwood family was poisoned by sugar laced with arsenic – everyone, that is, apart from Merricat and her elder sister Constance. They live in peaceful, ordered isolation, away from prying eyes in the nearby village, until one day boorish cousin Charles arrives with designs on their father’s fortune. Whether by practical or magical means, Merricat will do whatever is necessary to protect their home.

Private Detective Lew Archer doesn’t believe in coincidences…

A forest fire has mysteriously broken out in the hills above southern California. Meanwhile, Lew Archer has been asked by a desperate mother to find her six-year-old son. Instead, he discovers the boy’s wealthy father, murdered, and buried in a hole in the ground. The mystery will lead Archer to unearth a tragic, years-old history of abandonment, obsession and illusion, where the past won’t let go of the present – and everything is connected.

At the start of it all, Jonathan Pine is merely the night manager at a luxury hotel. But when a single attempt to pass on information to the British authorities - about an international businessman at the hotel with suspicious dealings - backfires terribly, and people close to Pine begin to die, he commits himself to a battle against powerful forces he cannot begin to imagine.

In a chilling tale of corrupt intelligence agencies, billion-dollar price tags and the truth of the brutal arms trade, John le Carré creates a claustrophobic world in which no one can be trusted.

A missing plane resurfaces – and so do long-submerged secrets…

An RAF Dakota, presumed lost at sea during World War Two, has just been discovered at the bottom of a drained lake over twenty years later – complete with the skeletal remains of the pilot and a strange cargo of rubble. Why are the Soviets so interested in it, even attending the dead man’s funeral? Why has unassuming civil servant David Audley been tasked with leading the investigation – and what was the plane carrying that some will kill for?

Who stole George Matthews’ life?

‘Doctor, I think I’m losing my mind…’

When a wealthy young man turns up at respected psychiatrist Dr George Matthews’ office uttering these words, it changes his safe existence forever. Suddenly Matthews finds himself dragged into a strange, surreal world where nothing is certain. And when an actress is found murdered, a horse tied up outside her apartment, Matthews loses his memory – and must find it in a nightmarish urban jungle of mistaken identities, secrets and insanity.

With its unique atmosphere of threat, secrets and madness, The Deadly Percheron is a great New York noir novel. The extraordinary climax — in an abandoned Coney Island Fun House — has to be read to be believed.

Judge Dee is about to step into the shoes of a dead man…

Most people would refuse the job of Magistrate at the lonely port town of Peng-lai – especially as the last occupant of the post has been found poisoned in his library, his papers missing. But Judge Dee is not most men. He arrives ready to get to the truth, only to find his life complicated even further by a missing bride, a vanished artisan, a man-eating tiger and an evil conspiracy.

Maigret has been interrogating Carl Andersen for seventeen hours without a confession. He's either innocent or a very good liar. So why was the body of a diamond merchant found at his isolated mansion? Why is his sister always shut away in her room? And why does everyone at Three Widows Crossroads have something to hide?

What if you woke up to discover everyone thought you were somebody else?

Pregnant and abandoned, all Helen Georgesson has is five dollars and a one-way ticket to San Francisco. Then she is involved in a train crash, and regains consciousness only to discover that she has given birth – and, in a bizarre twist of fate, has been mistaken for somebody else. Helen decides to claim this opportunity to make a new life for herself and her son. But eventually her past will catch up with her, in terrible ways…

Can an ace detective outwit a thief with many faces?

They call him ‘Gold Mask’: a fiendishly clever master of disguise whose crime spree has shocked Tokyo. The dogged detective Akechi Kogoro is on the trail, and soon the two become locked in a frenzied battle of wits as his seemingly superhuman nemesis leads a chase across Japan, gleefully tricking the police at every turn. Will this ingenious villain’s true identity be revealed – and will he, eventually, make a mistake?

James Bond, the secret service’s most lethal agent, is a marked man.

Deep inside the Soviet Union, a plot is taking shape. Under the fiendish Colonel Rosa Klebb, the Russian counter-intelligence organisation SMERSH are laying a trap that will not only eliminate Bond, but strike at the very heart of the British establishment. The bait is the irresistible ‘defector’ Tatiana Romanova and a precious coding machine. The weapon is the psychotic assassin, Grant. As 007 is lured to Istanbul, a deadly game begins.