Life smiles on Connie Brandon: law degree nearly in hand, a loving husband and two wonderful kids, a vibrant faith in God in a quiet Missouri town.

But her quiet family life is rocked when her husband, Jack, turns up dead in the Missouri River -- a suicide, police say -- and then another woman claims to have been his mistress.

Although grief-stricken, Connie's sharp legal mind locks on to the belief that her husband was murdered for his staunch opposition to riverboat gambling in the Missouri capital of Jefferson City. Yet as she searches for the truth, secrets about Jack emerge -- secrets of a past cloaked in riddles and danger; secrets that threaten her faith and her life unless she can piece it all together in time.

Agatha Christie's first ever murder mystery, now presented as a sumptuous special edition hardback. 'Beware! Peril to the detective who says: "It is so small - it does not matter..." Everything matters.' After the Great War, life can never be the same again. Wounds need healing, and the horror of violent death banished into memory. Captain Arthur Hastings is invited to the rolling country estate of Styles to recuperate from injuries sustained at the Front. It is the last place he expects to encounter murder. Fortunately he knows a former detective, a Belgian refugee, who has grown bored of retirement... The first Hercule Poirot mystery, now published with a previously deleted chapter and introduced by Agatha Christie expert Dr John Curran.

The second in a series of republished classic literature, The Ghost Stories of M. R. James collects the tales that best illustrate his quiet mastery of the ghost story form. Running through each of these stories is a slowly escalating sense of unease and dread, which ultimately shifts into the wildly uncanny. James' characters exist in a world of ancient objects whose atrocious histories begin to repeat when they are disturbed, and the blinkered repression common to James' narratives only amplifies the shock of the spectral appearance.