Pretty Sinister Books

There are some books which have achieved legendary status in the Detective Fiction Hall of Fame simply because they have been largely unob...

Busy planning a vacation and tending to our rooftop garden (splendiferous photos coming tomorrow!) so I've little time for a new post. H...

Imagine a mystery novel that is an extravagant conglomeration of Planet of the Apes, The Island of Dr. Moreau and that creepy cult classi...

THE STORY: Robert Teal has been very busy in London. He's been digging around courtroom archives, reading newspapers, spending the da...

THE STORY: Very simply Clue for Murder (1962)  is a detective novel inspired by the board game Clue®. CHARACTERS: Mrs. Pocock, Colone...

John Franklin Bardin wrote this delightfully odd genre blender using the pseudonym "Douglas Ashe." A Shroud for Grandmama (1951...

“That was the whole trouble with police work. You come plunging in, a jagged Stone Age knife, to probe the delicate tissues of people’s r...

 Later US Paperback (Pyramid, 1974) I first came to know That Cold Day in the Park (1965) in its effectively creepy and sometimes h...

I get a lot of book catalogs in my email and I peruse them mostly for my select interests: Victorian sensation fiction and obscure detective...

Cowabunga!  Who would ever have thought that the Grand Dame of the Mystery Novel was into surfing? Peter Robinson, a researcher, at the Mu...

First I read of Judge Dee becoming a martial arts expert and ghost fighting detective in a recent Hong Kong action flick .  Then all this t...

Here's another one of those books that crops up on want lists of collectors of arcane and supernatural fiction. Waldo's Fra...

Here's an odd cast of characters for you: Snotnose Kale, Bigfoot Paden, Dummy Axling, Carlyn Aljor, Wib Turner, Butch Thord, Keb Folde...

The Crime With Ten Solutions (1935) - Patrick Leyton Sometimes a book starts off with a great opening and promises so much. Eleven passeng...