HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.

'Sherlock Holmes was transformed when he was hot upon such a scent as this. Men who had only known the quiet thinker and logician of Baker Street would have failed to recognize him. His face flushed and darkened. His brows were drawn into two hard black lines, while his eyes shone out from beneath them with a steely glitter.'

Set against the foggy, mysterious backdrops of London and the English countryside, these are the first twelve stories ever published to feature the infamous Detective Sherlock Holmes and his side kick Doctor Watson. They first appeared as stories in the Strand Magazine and feature some of his most famous and enjoyable cases, including 'A Scandal in Bohemia', 'The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle' and 'The Red-headed League'.

A Christmas slaying, an Egyptian puzzle, and a night in the home of a stranger-three chillers from the New York Times-bestselling "grandmaster" of mystery (Publishers Weekly). A thriller writer is embroiled in a real-life whodunit when a friend drops dead in front of her, with her own hatpin impaled in his back. The violation of a sealed West Bank tomb, its rock walls intact, provides a Thebes investigator with a mystifying conundrum. And two sisters take shelter from a storm in a shuttered old house at the end of a country road . . . only to discover they're not alone. Settle in with this trio of short stories-available for the first time in a single volume-from one of the most popular mystery writers of all time. With her customary sharp wit, historical expertise, and effortless knack for freezing the blood, Elizabeth Peters "never fails to entertain" (The Plain Dealer).