Academy Chicago Publishers imprint: 34 books

There are strange goings-on at St. Asprey's, an expensive boys' preparatory school: footsteps in passages at night . . . strange lights . . . rabbits with battered skulls. Carolus Deene has some spine-tingling experiences before he solves the mystery.

The place: a remote shelter on the promenade at Selby-on-Sea; the occasion: a stormy evening in late November; the victim: somebody ready-made for a crack-of-doom from a coal hammer.

Richard Hoysden's body is discovered in his country flat, apparently a suicide. Missing from the room is a tape of Hoysden's last moments in which he confesses to the murder of a young woman. Lady Drombone, a Member of Parliament and the young man's aunt, hires Carolus to find the tape and help suppress...

Walking on the sand before breakfast, Carolus Deene's cousin Fay, who was staying on the Suffolk coast, had come upon the head of Lilliane Bomberger, the celebrated and universally detested novelist. The body was buried in the sand with only the head protruding; at least one tide had washed over it....

In a gloomy London suburb, a modern Jack the Ripper stalks at night, killing at random with brutal knife thrusts from behind. Three women fall victim, and the terrorized residents wait to see who will be next.

When Nazi forces occupy the beautiful coastal city of Yalta, Crimea, everything changes. Eighteen-year-old Filip has few options; he is a prime candidate for forced labor in Germany. His hurried marriage to his childhood friend Galina might grant him reprieve, but the rules keep shifting. Galina's...