"I'm minded of the way a fire spreads in dry bracken when we burn it off the fellside: tongues of flame this way and that - 'tis human tongues and words that's creeping like flames in brushwood." It all began up at High Gimmerdale with the sheep-stealing, a hateful act in the shepherding lands around the bend in the Lune river - the Crook o' Lune. Then came the fire at Aikengill house and with the leaping of the flames, death, disorder and dangerous gossip came to the quiet moorlands. Visiting his friends, the Hoggetts, while searching for some farmland to buy up ahead of his retirement, Chief Inspector Robert Macdonald's trip becomes a busman's holiday when he is drawn to investigate the deadly blaze and the deep-rooted motives behind the rising spate of crimes. Renowned for its authentic characters and settings based partly on the author's own experiences of life in the Lune valley, E.C.R. Lorac's classic rural mystery returns to print for the first time since 1953.

During a trip to a nearby village to visit friends, Sir Ashleigh Carruthers, the adventurous and eligible son of a country squire, attends an evening service in the small local church. There, he finds himself seated next to the alluring and hypnotically beautiful Woman in Black. When the vicar falls ashen and collapses mid-sermon after looking upon her face--and when he, himself, becomes sick--Carruthers is left to wonder and then investigate: Who is this mysterious woman, and why does she cause mad passion, illness, and fear in her wake? Is she afflicted with the curse of the vampire?

With an Introduction and Notes by Keith Wren. University of Kent at Canterbury. One of the most celebrated and popular historical romances ever written, The Three Musketeers tells the story of the early adventures of the young Gascon gentleman, D'Artagnan and his three friends from the regiment of the King's Musketeers - Athos, Porthos and Aramis. Under the watchful eye of their patron M. de Treville, the four defend the honour of the regiment against the guards of Cardinal Richelieu, and the honour of the queen against the machinations of the Cardinal himself as the power struggles of seventeenth century France are vividly played out in the background. But their most dangerous encounter is with the Cardinal's spy, Milady, one of literature's most memorable female villains, and Alexandre Dumas employs all his fast-paced narrative skills to bring this enthralling novel to a breathtakingly gripping and dramatic conclusion. Our edition uses the William Barrow translation first published by Bruce and Wylde (London,1846)

Meditations is a compendium of ruminations and reflections by the second-century Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, a staunch adherent to the Stoic philosophy. It is a spiritual journal of the author’s philosophical exercises and a chronicle of the paradox of the philosopher-king.

The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm are among the best loved and most famous in world literature. This volume features more than forty of their best-known fairy tales, lavishly illustrated with line drawings and colour plates by Artur Rackham.