Pretty Sinister Books

THE STORY:   James "Peter" Piper, bespectacled, lanky reporter "with an ugly face" working for the Herald  somewhere in ...

UK 1st edition (Bodley Head, 1927) Provocative illustration of a character who appears nowhere in the book There are a handful of Ch...

Let’s start with the only reason I kept reading this book -- a kind of "wink-wink, nudge-nudge" reference to one of the great myst...

THE STORY: The end of the world is nigh! Or so says self-professed fortune teller, astrologer and psychic Madame Sapphira. She has set u...

In honor of St. Patrick's Day tomorrow here's an eerie Irish ghost novel. THE STORY: Jack Quinlan has travelled form the USA to s...

THE STORY: The apparent suicide of an Irishman with ties to the IRA is investigated by Chief Constable Devenish, Lord Benton, and a count...

US 1st edition (Dodd Mead, 1963) Part of the mystique of foreign travel is the total immersion in a different culture. A true traveler d...

US edition (Macmillan, 1950) It’s rare to encounter a discussion of evil in crime fiction these days. Why is that? Why is there such a...

Good Friday. Today Catholics all over the world will attend special masses on this holiest of Holy Days of Obligation and remember the pas...

Jacques Barzun is quick to point out in his brief Catalog of Crime entry for this humanistic detective novel that the setting is not a nu...