Amateur sleuth and crossword impresario Cora Felton is asked to solve a puzzle, only to find that it’s been stolen—and a murder weapon has been left in its place. When the obnoxious sixteen-year-old Peggy Dawson asks Cora Felton to solve a puzzle for her, Cora is delighted to find that the puzzle has been stolen. She is less delighted, however, when a blood-stained knife is found in its place. Soon a body is discovered in the middle of Main Street, and Cora has a murder investigation on her hands. It does not help matters when she hears that her least favorite ex-husband, Melvin, is in town pulling a real estate scam, particularly when she discovers that Melvin may have purchased the knife. Now it’s up to the Puzzle Lady to figure out what really happened, in The Purloined Puzzle, from the New York Times' bestselling author Parnell Hall.

Dog detective Sebastian is on the trail of auto thieves and also tries to retrieve his stolen sirloin.

In 1956 Jacques Lacan proposed as interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's "Purloined Letter" that at once challenged literary theorists and revealed a radically new conception of psychoanalysis. Lacan's far-reaching claims about language and truth provoked a vigorous critique by Jacques Derrida, whose essay in turn has spawned further responses from Barbara Johnson, Jane Gallop, Irene Harvey, Norman Holland, and others. The Purloined Poe brings Poe's story together with these readings to provide, in the words of the editors, "a structured exercuse in the elaboration of textual interpretation. The Purloined Poe reprints the full text of Poe's story, followed by Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" along with extensive commentary by the editors. Marie Bonaparte's and Shoshana Felman's discussions of traditional and contemporary approaches to "psychoanalysing" texts precede Alan Bass's new translation of Derrida's "Purveyor of Truth." The subsequent essays join the Lacan-Derrida debate and offer alternative readings by literary theorists, philosophers, psychologists, and psychoanalysts. The Purloined Poe convenes much of the most important current scholarship on "The Purloined Letter" and presents a rich sampling of poststructuralist discourse.

Word and number problems, visual mysteries, and even sneaky puns and riddles will keep solvers on their mental toes as they try to uncover their solutions. There are pictures filled with mistakes to find, matchstick games, scrambled words, rebuses, crafty calculations, and much more.

Sunny Southern California seems an unlikely place for a British widow to call home. But pet detective Delilah Doolittle is probably the least eccentric--if not the most civilized--of Surf City's resident population. With the astute Doberman pinscher Watson sniffing out clues, Delilah follows the trails of missing animals, which often lead to the worst of human nature. The first thrilling pet detective mystery has Delilah Doolittle searching for a champion German shepherd. But when she finds a murdered man instead, it's up to Delilah to collar a killer!

A study that is less concerned with detective fiction's overt manifestations in African-American literature, such as the works of Chester Himes and Walter Mosley, than in its transformation in the work of Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, and Ralph Ellison, among others, where a pattern of detection emerges which has its roots in African mythology and aesthetics. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR