Historic preservationist Ashley Wilkes finds her friend Valentine Russo murdered at the desk of Valentine's art gallery, and the walls bare of art.

Kayla Lee Ann Davis, a successful lawyer and a loving mother, did not expect to put her own life, as well her whole family’s, in danger when she took Lucky Martin’s case. After she proved in court that Lucky is innocent, his father, Grant Martin, started to come after Kayla and her family. One by one, the people Kayla hold dear in her heart are taken away from her, murdered by Grant and his accomplices. Kayla finds herself struggling to live a normal life for her twins and to find the man responsible for the brutal killings in her neighborhood. As the Christmas holidays draw near and her wedding coming to a close, evil lurks in their midst. Grant Martin will stop at nothing to get what he wants, and he wants Kayla more than anything. Murder in the Pines is not an ordinary mystery and crime story. It speaks of love, relationship, and hope. It speaks of how a bond within a family develops and stays strong despite an outside threat looming over them.

World War II hero Davy Fox has returned to his New England hometown of Wrightsville a changed man. When his wife Linda wakes up to find Davy's hands squeezed around her neck, it takes all of her strength to get away. But Davy is more than shellshocked from the war. He's haunted by events of twelve years before, when his mother was murdered by his father, Bayard, who is serving life in prison and had always insisted that he was not the one who killed his wife. Linda hopes that if Davy's father could be proved innocent, it might clear the conscience of her young, angry war hero husband, saving her marriage and herself. She suggests to Davy that they seek out Ellery Queen, a New York writer whom she remembers successfully solved a previous Wrightsville mystery. For Queen, the case is a long shot: with his only witnesses people closely connected to the victim, and Queen's only clue Bayard Fox's insistence of innocence, the clearest path leads back to the man already serving a life sentence. Determined to get to the truth of the matter, Queen returns to the house where the murder took place, a house preserved down to the smallest detail precisely as it had been when the tragedy struck. And here he finds the clues that blast the case wide open. From his first appearance in print in 1929, Ellery Queen became one of America’s most famous and beloved fictional detectives. Over the course of nearly half a century, Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, the duo writing team known as Ellery Queen, won the prestigious Edgar Award multiple times, and their contributions to the mystery genre were recognized with a Grand Master Award, the highest honor bestowed by the Mystery Writers of America. Their fair-play mysteries won over fans due to their intricate puzzles that challenged the reader to solve the mystery alongside the brilliant detective. Queen’s stories were among the first to dominate the earliest days of radio, film, and television. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which the writers founded and edited, became the world’s most influential and acclaimed crime fiction magazine.

Nominated, 2024 Edgar Allan Poe Award in the category of best critical/biographical, Mystery Writers of America Shortlisted, 2024 Agatha Awards - Best Mystery Nonfiction, Malice Domestic Posthumous Winner - 2023 IFCA Book Prize, International Crime Fiction Association Narrative innovation is typically seen as the domain of the avant-garde. However, techniques such as nonlinear timelines, multiple points of view, and unreliable narration have long been part of American popular culture. How did forms and styles once regarded as “difficult” become familiar to audiences? In Perplexing Plots, David Bordwell reveals how crime fiction, plays, and films made unconventional narrative mainstream. He shows that since the nineteenth century, detective stories and suspense thrillers have allowed ambitious storytellers to experiment with narrative. Tales of crime and mystery became a training ground where audiences learned to appreciate artifice. These genres demand a sophisticated awareness of storytelling conventions: they play games with narrative form and toy with audience expectations. Bordwell examines how writers and directors have pushed, pulled, and collaborated with their audiences to change popular storytelling. He explores the plot engineering of figures such as Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, Dorothy Sayers, and Quentin Tarantino, and traces how mainstream storytellers and modernist experimenters influenced one another’s work. A sweeping, kaleidoscopic account written in a lively, conversational style, Perplexing Plots offers an ambitious new understanding of how movies, literature, theater, and popular culture have evolved over the past century.

The problem of human evil is never far beneath the surface of mystery fiction. This was particularly true in the wake of the horrific events of World War II. One figure who set out to investigate this crisis was Ellery Queen. This book provides a much-needed intervention in the study of detective fiction by giving sustained attention to Ellery Queen as well as suggesting possible directions for broader discussions of the genre. After the war, Queen mounted an inquiry into the state of masculinity and of the world in the wake of unimaginable horrors represented by the death camps and the atomic bomb. During his investigation, Ellery rummaged through the ruins of culture, invoking and evoking figures such as Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and (naturally) Edgar Allan Poe. Ultimately, this quest brought him up against an unexpected foe: God himself. This book examines the ways Queen pushes against the boundaries of what was (and, in some circles, still is) considered possible or desirable in the genre.

Over the decades Francis M. Nevins has written dozens of articles and essays on the major influences of crime literature and here he collects them in 450+ pages. Coupled with some current essays on people he's known this makes for a book that any mystery fan will cherish and use as a reference book.