The trial of Stephen Bellamy and Susan Ives, accused of murdering Bellamy's wife Madeline, lasts eight days. A trial that seems straightforward at its outset grows increasingly confounding as it proceeds, and surprises abound; by the time the closing arguments are made, however, the reader, like the jury, has all the evidence needed to pass judgement on the two defendants --

"At the hand of an outrageous prankster, top hats are going missing all over London, snatched from the heads of some of the city's most powerful people. But is the hat thief the same as the person responsible for stealing the lost story by Edgar Allan Poe, purloined from a private collection, which Dr. Gideon Fell has just been hired to retrieve? Unlike the manuscript, the hats don't stay stolen for long; each one reappears in unexpected and conspicuous...

Broadway producer Peter Duluth sought solace in a bottle after his wife's death; now, two years later and desperate to dry out, he enters a sanitarium, hoping to break his dependence on drink - but the institution doesn't quite offer the rest and relaxation he expected. Strange, malevolent occurrences plague the hospital. Among other inexplicable events, Peter hears his own voice with an ominous warning: "There will be a murder." It soon becomes clear...

The bait is half of a $10,000 bill, delivered to Perry Mason by a man who promises the second half of the note should his companion, a silent masked woman, ever require the lawyer's services. When a dead body is discovered soon after, Mason feels the hook--but how can one prove the innocence of a person whose identity is unknown?

When Amanda Garth was born, a mix-up caused the hospital to briefly hand her over to the prestigious Garrison family instead of to her birth parents. The error was quickly fixed, Amanda was never told, and the secret was forgotten for twenty-three years until her aunt thoughtlessly revealed it in casual conversation. But what if the initial switch never actually occurred, and what if the real accident was Amanda's being "returned" to the wrong parents?...

When a New York banker is discovered dead from an apparent morphine overdose in a Chicago hotel, the circumstances surrounding his untimely end are suspicious to say the least. The dead man had switched rooms the night before with a stranger he met and drank with in the hotel bar. And before that, he'd registered under a fake name at the hotel, told his drinking companion a fake story about his visit to the Windy City, and seemingly made no effort...

After the death of Inis St. Erme, Dr. Henry Riddle retraces the man's final moments, searching for the moment of his fatal mis-step. Was it when he and his bride-to-be first set out to elope in Vermont? Or did his deadly error occur later--perhaps when they picked up the terrifying sharp-toothed hitch-hiker, or when the three stopped at "Dead Bridegroom's Pond" for a picnic? As he searches for answers, Riddle discovers a series of bizarre coincidences...

The journey of the Mexico City-bound Pullman seems ill-fated from the outset -- what with the engine troubles and the threat of an impending railway strike -- but no one aboard expects the terror that will descend upon the luxury train between Laredo and its destination. First a man dies as the vehicle passes through a dark tunnel and then, just as United States Customs Agent Hugh Rennert begins to investigate, the train comes to a screeching halt...

"Murders plague a university library, and only an intrepid book cataloger can solve them. For the staff of the library at the center of The Widening Stain, it's easy enough to dismiss the death of a woman who fell from a rolling ladder as nothing more than an unfortunate accident. It's more difficult, however, to explain away the strangled corpse of a man found inside a locked room, surrounded by rare and obscure erotica. And that's not all, valuable...

A police detective seeks the rationale between seemingly-unrelated murders, connected only by the appearance of a beautiful woman each time.