Later Novels and Other Writings begins with The Lady in the Lake (1943). Written during the war, the story takes Marlowe out of the seamy L.A. streets to the deceptive tranquility of the surrounding mountains, as the search for a businessman's missing wife expands into an elegy of loneliness and loss. The darker tone typical of Chandler's later fiction is evident in The Little Sister (1949), in which an ambitious starlet, a blackmailer, and a seemingly...

"Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is one of America's most beloved writers, most known for his short stories of mystery and horror. He was also an accomplished poet and tough literary critic. Much like the drama and fiction, Poe's life was full of hardships. Orphaned at a young age, he was raised by a foster family. As a young man, he developed problems with gambling, debts, and alcohol, and was even dismissed from the army. His love life was marked by...

"It's going to be a tough trial. Manhattan sex-crimes prosecutor Alexandra Cooper's case, involving an attack on investment banker Paige Vallis, would be difficult to prove even without the latest development - it seems that Paige has something to hide." "Most of her story is clear. She'd had dinner with New York consultant Andrew Tripping three times before the March evening when she accepted his invitation to accompany him to his apartment. But...

A psychological thriller on a serial killer who hunts homicide detectives. The hero of the tale is Denver newspaper reporter Jack McEnvoy whose brother, a detective, shoots himself. McEnvoy investigates police suicides in other cities and discovers a sinister pattern: sex killings, followed by the "suicide" of the detective on the case and a suicide note in the form of a poetic riddle. In this way McEvoy stumbles on the killer known to the FBI as...

After tragic events tear Mickey Bolitar away from his parents, he is forced to live with his estranged Uncle Myron and switch high schools, where he finds both friends and enemies, but when his new girlfriend, Ashley, vanishes, he follows her trail into a seedy underworld that reveals she is not what she seems to be.

A novel on the witness protection program. The heroine is Lacey Farrell of New York, a real estate agent who witnesses a murder. The police relocate her to Minneapolis, but she is lonely, makes phone calls to her mother and the killer finds out.

Idaville's secret weapon against lawbreakers, ten-year-old Leroy "Encyclopedia" Brown, helps the police force solve ten new cases, the solutions to which are found in the back of the book.

'Tis the season for trimming the tree, caroling, baking cookies, and curling up by the Yuletide waiting for Santa to drop down the chimney. But in this festive collection of holiday whodunits, murder is also paying a visit...