After a murder at their neighbor's Hampstead birthday party is followed up by a killing at the Villa Byzantine, Antonia Darcy and Major Hugh Payne must sort through a number of varied suspects, including a royal biographer, an elderly researcher, the second victim's daughter, and an aging actress.

Lord Remnant’s eccentric parties on his privately owned Caribbean island of Grenadin are the stuff of legends ... but then the 12th Earl suddenly dies in the course of an amateur production of The Murder of Gonzago, the play within a play in Hamlet. The Times obituary gives the cause of death as “heart attack.” However, an anonymous video tape showing Lord Remnant’s final moments makes it clear that the nobleman’s demise was far from natural. As it happens so often, Antonia and Hugh Payne get involved in the sinister events surrounding Lord Remnant’s death entirely by accident. They are intrigued by the boldness of the murder, which seems to have been committed within a full view of Lord Remnant’s wife Clarissa and their four guests. Who killed Lord Remnant? Was it his drug-addicted stepson Stephan? Was it Clarissa’s Aunt Hortense, whose past contains a dark and shocking secret? Was it, as Stephan claims, the demonic “Grimaud”? Or perhaps it is the elusive Mr. Quin, who is left a vast amount of money in Lord Remnant’s will, for no apparent reason. From the Hardcover edition.

Do plots involving exchanged murders still work and who exactly is the victim? Antonia Darcy never imagined that taking her young grandson to his first day at nursery school would embroil her in a most baffling case of mistaken identity and murder. Major Payne, on the other hand, believed that it was their destiny. Olga Klimt played a dangerous game with the affections of the men in love with her, though she knew perfectly well there might be a high price to pay ... Among the unlikely murder suspects is a rich young heir to a biscuit fortune, his Aconite-addicted mother, his manservant and the headmistress of a prestigious nursery school. In this, their ninth investigation, husband and wife sleuths, Antonia Darcy and Major Payne, search desperately for answers before the killer strikes again.

What role does the mysterious Miss Hope, former governess to the Bulgarian royal family, play in the bizarre murder at the Villa Byzantine? And does she in fact actually exist? Antonia Darcy and Major Hugh Payne attend a birthday party for one of their Hampstead neighbours, little knowing they will end up investigating the grisly death of one of Melisande Chevret's other guests. The ageing actress becomes a natural suspect when her love rival is killed. But after that first murder, another murder takes place at the Villa Byzantine. The owner of the exotically styled house is royal biographer Tancred Vane, but he swears he is innocent. And surely his new friend Catherine Hope, an elderly lady helping him with his research, can have nothing to do with it? It looks as though the victim's daughter is to blame - but how likely is it that a teenage girl should have a dainty silk handkerchief bearing her monogram? And would she drop it so conveniently beside her mother's dead body? Praise for R.T. Raichev: 'Deftly mixes dark humor and psychological suspense, its genteel surface masking delicious deviancy.' Kirkus Reviews (starred review) 'Fascinating ... Recalls the best of the Golden Age of Detective fiction.' Lady Antonia Fraser 'Mixes Henry James's psychological insight with Agatha Christie's whodunit plotting skills ... Raichev once again triumphs.' Library Journal (starred review) 'I have read all of Raichev's books. They are very clever. I really am a fan.' R.L. Stine 'A whodunit with more twists than a snake in a basket.' Robert Barnard, Golden Dagger winner 'Adds a P. D. Jamesian subtlety to the comfortable Christie formula. Antonia Darcy is a terrific sleuth, and Raichev is a very clever writer, indeed.' Booklist

When a birthday party for one of their Hampstead neighbors turns deadly, Antonia Darcy and Major Hugh Payne end up investigating the murder of one of Melisande Chevret's other guests. The aging actress becomes a natural suspect, as the victim was her love rival. But after the first murder, a second takes place at the Villa Byzantine. The owner of the house is royal biographer Tancred Vane, who swears he is innocent. And surely Catherine Hope, an elderly lady helping him with his research, can have nothing to do with it. A damning piece of evidence points to the victim's daughter—but why would a teenage girl have a dainty silk handkerchief bearing her monogram? And would she drop it so conveniently beside her mother's body? As the questions mount, Antonia Darcy and Major Payne search desperately for answers.

Detective story writer Antonia Darcy and her husband Hugh Payne are asked to travel to Devon in order to prevent a murder on Sphinx Island, but they are far from enthusiastic as they suspect an elaborate joke. And when they hear that one of the house party guests is Romaine Garrison -Gore, another crime writer, they have no doubt that they will walk into a rather tedious variant of the Murder Weekend. After all, it is their tenth wedding anniversary and Major Payne's aunt, Lady Grylls, has been trying to think of a truly original present for them . . . But then they receive a rather sinister letter signed 'The Riddler' and become curious . . . could the devil speak true?

Detective story writer Antonia Darcy and her husband Hugh Payne are asked to travel to Devon in order to prevent a murder on Sphinx Island, but they are far from enthusiastic as they suspect an elaborate joke. And when they hear that one of the house party guests is Romaine Garrison-Gore, another crime writer, they have no doubt that they will walk into a rather tedious variant of the Murder Weekend. After all, it is their tenth wedding anniversary and Major Payne's aunt, Lady Grylls, has been trying to think of a truly original present for them... But then they receive a rather sinister letter signed 'The Riddler' and become curious... could the devil speak true?

Following the success of Paris Noir, the Akashic Noir Series has expanded to include the famously diverse and sometimes controversial suburbs of this legendary city. "A treasure chest of resources for any noir author seeking a more gruesome approach or a more relentless destruction of the soul. One might hope the real Paris suburbs are not so dark and blood drenched. But by the end of the collection, that hope seems almost foolish, and the body found on the quay seems to be the lucky guy in the story." —New York Journal of Books "The short stories center on the suburbs of Paris, fertile soil for all sorts of resentment and violence. . . .For lovers of crime noir short fiction, these are 12 stories of life lived in the raw." —Library Journal "Dark tales shine a bright light on some little-seen parts of greater Paris." —Kirkus Reviews "Paris’s suburbs—a mix of slums, posh neighborhoods, fading industrial centers, and the city’s notorious housing projects that lie out of the sight of most tourists—provide the setting for [these] 13 tales." —Publishers Weekly Featuring brand-new stories by: Cloé Mehdi, Karim Madani, Insa Sané, Christian Roux, Marc Villard, Jean-Pierre Rumeau, Timothée Demeillers, Rachid Santaki, Marc Fernandez, Guillaume Balsamo, Anne Secret, Anne-Sylvie Salzman, and Patrick Pécherot. (All stories were written in French and translated into English by Katie Shireen Assef, David Ball, Nicole Ball, and Paul Curtis Daw.) From the introduction by Hervé Delouche: The term Greater Paris is in vogue today, for it has an administrative cachet and seems to denote a simple extension of the capital—as if a ravenous Paris need only extend her web. However, it was not our goal to embrace the tenets of the metro area’s comprehensive plan, aka the Grand Projet, envisioned as a future El Dorado by the planners and developers. Rather, our aim was to depict the Parisian suburbs in all their plurality and diversity. Without pretending to encompass every spot on the map, we instead opted to give voice and exposure to the localities chosen by the writers who have been part of this adventure. Thus, we decided to adopt the word “suburbs”— in the plural, obviously, for the periphery of the capital is not a homogeneous bloc, nor is it reducible to a cliché like “the suburban ring” . . . Here are thirteen stories, decidedly noir, to be savored without sugar or sweetener.

What role does the mysterious Miss Hope, former governess to the Bulgarian royal family, play in the bizarre murder at the Villa Byzantine? And does she in fact actually exist?

This early work by S. S. Van Dine was originally published in 1928 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. 'The Greene Murder Case' is one of Van Dine's novels of crime and mystery. S. S. Van Dine was born Willard Huntington Wright in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1888. He attended St. Vincent College, Pomona College and Harvard University, but failed to graduate, leaving to cultivate contacts he had made in the literary world. At the age of twenty-one, Wright began his professional writing career as literary editor of the Los Angeles Times. In 1926, Wright published his first S. S. Van Dine novel, The Benson Murder Case. Wright went on to write eleven more mysteries. The first few books about his upper-class amateur sleuth, Philo Vance, were so popular that Wright became wealthy for the first time in his life. His later books declined in popularity as the reading public's tastes in mystery fiction changed, but during the late twenties and early thirties his work was very successful.