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Crime, Thrillers and Mystery — page 3
362 public-domain crime, thrillers and mystery books, summarised. Page 3 of 8.
The Count's Millions
Emile Gaboriau
A sudden death leaves a massive Parisian fortune up for grabs, framing an innocent man and sending an abandoned heiress into a network of ruthless conspirators.
The Secret of Sarek
Maurice Leblanc
A master of disguise navigates the jagged cliffs of Brittany to dismantle a century-old conspiracy of blood, greed, and ancient superstition. The legendary gentleman thief intervenes in a family’s tragic cycle of kidnapping and revenge to unmask a monstrous adversary.
The mystery at Lilac Inn
Carolyn Keene
When a friend’s inheritance is stolen, a young woman’s weekend excursion transforms into a high-stakes investigation. She must outsmart clever criminals to recover a fortune before it is lost forever.
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab
Fergus Hume
A man is found dead in a hansom cab, his life taken by a silent, unseen hand. In the bustling streets of colonial Melbourne, a web of secrets and social facades threatens to condemn the innocent.
Mysteries of the missing
Edward H. (Edward Henry) Smith
The siren call of the unknown draws men and women into shadows from which they never return, leaving behind only fractured narratives and the enduring ache of uncertainty.
She Stands Accused
Victor MacClure
A collection of historical true-crime accounts, this volume examines the lives and legal downfalls of women accused of notorious deeds. It explores the blurred lines between guilt, reputation, and the harsh machinery of justice.
A cowboy detective : a true story of twenty-two years with a world-famous detective agency
Charles A. Siringo
The career of a frontier lawman takes a sharp turn into the shadows when he trades his spurs for a private investigator’s badge, spending two decades hunting outlaws across the American landscape.
The Black Tortoise: Being the Strange Story of Old Frick's Diamond
Christian Sparre
A stolen diamond, a suspicious photograph, and a web of false accusations entangle a private detective and the woman he loves. This narrative of deception unfolds across the quiet villas and courtrooms of Norway.
An Historical Mystery (The Gondreville Mystery)
Honoré de Balzac
A fearless young royalist aristocrat and her devoted bailiff clash with Napoleon's imperial police in a high-stakes struggle of political conspiracy, framed kidnapping, and sacrificial devotion.
Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo
William Le Queux
A handsome young Englishman finds himself accused of a crime he did not commit after a shadowy figure is shot just as she is about to reveal the secret behind his father’s tragic death.
The bungalow mystery
Carolyn Keene
Caught in a terrifying storm on Moon Lake, an adventurous young woman saves a life and stumbles into a web of deceit, identity theft, and stolen fortunes hiding inside a secluded lakeside bungalow.
The Professor's Mystery
Wells Hastings
A chance encounter on a late train plunges an upstanding college professor into a web of dark family secrets, cryptic threats, and spiritualist deception.
Cleek, the Master Detective
Thomas W. Hanshew
A master thief abandons his shadowy past for love, turning his chameleon-like talent for disguise and deduction into a force for justice alongside Scotland Yard.
The Mysteries of Paris, illustrated with etchings, Vol. 1
Eugène Sue
Darkness and light collide in the shadowy underworld of nineteenth-century Paris, where a noble disguised as a commoner seeks to rescue the forgotten and punish the cruel.
Strong poison
Dorothy L. (Dorothy Leigh) Sayers
A dead lover, a tincture of arsenic, and a woman on trial for her life leave an aristocratic sleuth fighting the clock—and his own heart—to expose the real killer.
The crime code
William Le Queux
Framed for a bloody crime and hunted across London, an aspiring politician plunges into a underground network of international thieves, secret codes, and stolen identities, desperate to prove his innocence and rescue the woman he loves.
The Clique of Gold
Emile Gaboriau
A young woman is driven from her home by a scheming adventuress, while her fiancé sails into a web of state-sponsored traps in the Far East.
The Riddle of the Night
Thomas W. Hanshew
A master of disguise, once an underworld legend, returns to the shadows to solve a high-stakes murder that threatens to ruin an innocent family.
Initials Only
Anna Katharine Green
A man washing his hands in the snow on a winter night sets a trap for a brilliant, dangerous mind. This is a tale of obsession, secret invention, and the silent, deadly games played between a hunter and his prey.
The Shape of Fear
Elia Wilkinson Peattie
The specters in these tales are not merely shadows in a room; they are the lingering manifestations of human longing, guilt, and the stubborn persistence of memory. This collection of stories explores how the living are haunted by the unresolved business of the dead, blending the eerie with the deeply domestic.
Red Masquerade: Being the Story of the Lone Wolf's Daughter
Louis Joseph Vance
HOOK A master thief turned intelligence operative must infiltrate a criminal syndicate’s plot to topple the British Empire while navigating the dangerous, conflicting allegiances of his own long-lost daughter.
The stainless steel rat
Harry Harrison
A master thief finds that in a galaxy of absolute order, the ultimate challenge is not stealing—but being recruited by the very man who outsmarted him.
The Darrow Enigma
Melvin L. (Melvin Linwood) Severy
A physician finds himself entangled in a bizarre murder investigation where the victim’s death seems impossible, forcing him to rely on a brilliant, eccentric friend to unravel the truth.
The French powder mystery
Ellery Queen
A high-society murder inside a department store showroom turns into a labyrinthine puzzle of missing keys, illicit drug rings, and a final, desperate bluff.
Through the Wall
Cleveland Moffett
A disgraced detective fights to reclaim his reputation by solving a seemingly impossible murder. He navigates a web of high-society secrets, shadowy criminals, and a city that feels as dangerous as it is grand.
The Black Box
E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
A trail of mysterious thefts, missing bones, and sudden violence draws an urban criminologist into a shadowy web where no suspect is quite what they seem.
The Voice on the Wire
Eustace Hale Ball
An aristocratic criminologist and a stage performer match wits against a sinister mastermind who uses high-tech telephony and a city-wide criminal network to terrorize New York's wealthiest elite.
The Golf Course Mystery
Chester K. Steele
When a wealthy golfer drops dead on the fairway, a quiet community faces a scandal that threatens the legacy of a prominent family.
The Watcher, and other weird stories
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
The past is never truly buried in these chilling tales, where secrets return from the grave to claim their due. A master of the atmospheric gothic, the writer turns ordinary lives into landscapes of dread and inescapable fate.
The Fall River Tragedy: A History of the Borden Murders
Edwin H. Porter
A quiet morning in a Massachusetts home erupts into the most infamous double murder of the nineteenth century, leaving a nation to wonder how a daughter could stand accused of such violence. This is a sober, meticulous reconstruction of the crime and the subsequent legal struggle that captivated the American public.
The Five Knots
Fred M. (Fred Merrick) White
A ship-owner’s dark past returns to haunt him through cryptic, knotted strings that appear inside sealed letters, signaling a lethal reckoning from Borneo.
Some Distinguished Victims of the Scaffold
Horace Bleackley
These accounts of high-stakes crime and final judgment strip away the sensationalism of the gallows to reveal the stark, human realities behind eighteenth-century notoriety.
Half-hours with the Highwaymen - Vol 1: Picturesque Biographies and Traditions of the "Knights of the Road"
Charles G. (Charles George) Harper
The lonely traveler on the turnpike, vulnerable to the sudden shadow of a masked rider, finds no safety in the history of the King’s highway.
The Face and the Mask
Robert Barr
A collection of short stories that navigates the thin, often blurred line between human tragedy and the performative masks we wear to survive.
The House of the Whispering Pines
Anna Katharine Green
A desperate man finds himself caught in a web of circumstantial evidence after stumbling upon a murder. He must navigate a maze of secrets to clear his name while the true killer watches from the shadows.
Trial of Mary Blandy
Unknown
The trial of an eighteenth-century woman accused of poisoning her father serves as a stark, enduring anatomy of a domestic tragedy. This historical account meticulously reconstructs the legal proceedings and the surrounding social fallout of a case that captivated the British public in 1752.
The Strand Magazine, Vol. 17, February 1899, No. 98
Various
A window into the late Victorian imagination, this collection gathers the curious, the scientific, and the dramatic into a singular, bound experience. It captures the rhythm of a world accelerating toward a new century.
Queer people
Basil Thomson
An insider’s view of war, deceit, and civil unrest reveals the fragile mechanics that keep a nation standing.
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Truth [Vérité]
Émile Zola
A child is found murdered in a small French village, and the suspicion cast upon a Jewish schoolmaster tears the town apart, exposing the dark machinery of bigotry, institutional corruption, and the long struggle for the soul of a secular nation.
The Paternoster Ruby
Charles Edmonds Walk
A dying millionaire's stolen gem, a corpse in the hallway, and a secret legacy spark an intense struggle between duty, greed, and love.
The Cry at Midnight
Mildred A. (Mildred Augustine) Wirt
A late-night ski run near a spooky old monastery leads a courageous teenage reporter into a web of counterfeit piety, hidden rooms, and a high-stakes hunt for a stolen star sapphire.
Sidonia, the Sorceress : the Supposed Destroyer of the Whole Reigning Ducal House of Pomerania
Wilhelm Meinhold
The tragedy of a scorned woman who unleashes her fury upon a ducal house, this dark historical narrative explores the thin line between human malice and supernatural terror.
Stories of Mystery
Unknown
This collection of tales explores the thin, trembling boundary between the rational world and the unexplained, where shadows of the past possess the power to alter the present. It gathers classic accounts of spectral visitations, psychological obsessions, and the chilling weight of human guilt.
The Mysteries of Modern London
George R. (George Robert) Sims
The shadows of the Victorian and Edwardian capital conceal more than they reveal, where quiet suburban streets often mask the most desperate and chilling criminal realities.
Doors of the Night
Frank L. (Frank Lucius) Packard
A man marked by scandal and murder infiltrates the city’s most dangerous criminal underworld, playing a lethal double game to unmask the true villain.
Each Man Kills
Victoria Glad
A frantic search for a lost love in the mountains of Transylvania concludes in a grim, supernatural choice. Death is not the end, but a dark threshold into a cycle of hunger and obsession.
Weird Tales, Volume 1, Number 3, May, 1923: The unique magazine
Various
A singular collection of pulp-era fiction and earnest vocational advertisements, this volume captures the breathless, sensational spirit of early twentieth-century genre magazines.
New York: Confidential!
Jack Lait
This is an unvarnished, street-level guidebook to a vanished mid-century New York. It strips away the city's glamour to reveal the grifters, mobsters, and social hierarchies operating beneath its neon glow.