The Day the Music Died is the first in the Sam McCain series by Ed Gorman. The series is the most nostalgic and realistic portrayal of small-town America as it was in the late 50s and Ramble House promises to bring all eight of them back into print. This book also includes, as a gift to all Ed's fans, his short story featuring Sam McCain, The Christmas Kitten.

WHEN DEATH PAYS A CALL he generally leaves a card behind . . . even if it sometimes takes a pathologist to find it. But on the morning that he visited the bathroom at Forstal Farm, he did it incognito. It took a man with a crowbar to break down the bathroom door, and there on the floor was Basil Maplewood, naked, with one foot still hanging over the edge of the bath. Basil was only twenty-one, and in the very pink of health, but the post-mortem didn't help much . . . no violence, no sign of poison. Here is a mystery in a thousand, and one that almost - but not quite - threw dust in the eyes of Inspector Arnold and his colleagues.

American readers will rarely see these two thrillers from the 30s by Britain's Roland Daniel. THE SIGNAL (1933) begins with a rich man receiving in the mail five beans (!) just before he's dispatched with a pistol by an unknown hand. Sounds like something Harry Stephen Keeler might have opined. And Fu Manchu has nothing on the inscrutable and titular Wu Fang, whose sordid machinations threaten a young American woman, her Secret Service beau, his cockney sidekick and Superintendent Bill Saville of the Yard. The wily celestial, introduced in 1934, has picked up some new tortures by 1937, and can't wait to try them on the whole crowd.

Hardcover. When Dennis Tracy visits his old friend Kenneth Darent he isn't prepared for what he finds - a drunk who is in love with Margorie Browne, a beautiful girl who just happens to be the fiancee of the richest man in town! So when Tracy discovers that Darent has no alibi for the time when the rich man is murdered, he and Margorie come up with an alibi for him, an alibi that puts them in danger of prison - or worse! Perjury has never been so fun - or deadly.