Enthralling children's fiction for everyone who loves Robin Steven's Murder Most Unladylike Mysteries and Frances Hardinge's The Lie Tree. Twelve mysteries. Twelve authors. One challenge: can YOU solve the crimes before the heroes of the stories? These are twelve brand-new short stories from twelve of the best children's crime writers writing today. These creepy, hilarious, brain-boggling, heart-pounding mysteries feature daring, brilliant young detectives, and this anthology is a must for fans of crime fiction and detection, especially the Murder Most Unladylike Mysteries, The Roman Mysteries and The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow. The Crime Club are twelve UK-based authors who are mad about crime fiction. Clementine Beauvais, Elen Caldecott, Susie Day, Julia Golding, Frances Hardinge, Caroline Lawrence, Helen Moss, Sally Nicholls, Kate Pankhurst, Robin Stevens, Harriet Whitehorn and Katherine Woodfine can be found anywhere there is a mystery to be solved, a puzzle to be cracked or a bun to be eaten, and they are always ready for the next puzzling case.

MILES VORKOSIGAN TIMES THREE EQUALS ENTERTAINMENT,EXCITEMENT & EXCELLENCE Diplomat, soldier,spy-Lieutenant Lord Miles Naismith Vorkosigan of the Barrayaran Empire, a.k.a.Admiral Naismith of the D

Murder Mystery & Mayhem is a collection of the dark, the fear-inducing and the mysterious, written by the ingenious writers of Creative Quills Creative Writing Group. Some of the stories may be true, and some are not. Can you guess which are truth and which are lies? Who can tell?

Five orphans. Two sword-wielding vigilantes. One mansion. No rules. April thought she had her happy ending. After all, she has her new house and new friends and new guardian. But she also has a very big new secret. The kids of Winterborne House are the only ones who know that Gabriel Winterborne--famous billionaire and terrible cook--is really a sword-wielding vigilante. What they don't know is that he's not the only one. When a masked figure breaks in, looking for something--or someone--it's clear that Gabriel has met his match, and now no one is safe. April and her friends will have to solve a decades-old mystery in order to hang on to the most important thing in the world: each other.

Brother detectives Frank and Joe go full-steam ahead to find the truth in the twenty-third book in the thrilling Hardy Boys Adventures series. The Hardys and some of their friends hop aboard an old train that’s been restored and turned into a murder mystery experience. A cast of actors will perform an immersive theatrical production while passengers dine in style, assume roles in the game, and ultimately try their hand at solving the case. This should be a cakewalk for Joe and Frank! The production is a mess. The actors are lousy, fumbling their lines and spelling out obvious clues. At least the food is pretty good. But just as the Hardy Boys are trying to make the most of a disappointing situation, one of the cast members goes missing. At first, the audience thinks that the show is taking a turn for the better, but it quickly becomes clear that this is not part of the act. For the Hardys, the mystery has gone from good fun to deadly serious. And trapped on a train full of people who aren’t who they say they are, everyone is a suspect. Will Frank and Joe be able to figure out how someone can vanish into thin air on a moving train before this case goes completely off the rails?

From murder and matchstick men to all-consuming fires, painted women, and Great Lakes disasters--and the wide-eyed public who could not help but gawk at it all--"Milwaukee Mayhem" uncovers the little-remembered and rarely told history of the underbelly of a Midwestern metropolis. "Milwaukee Mayhem" offers a new perspective on Milwaukee's early years, forgoing the major historical signposts found in traditional histories and focusing instead on the strange and brutal tales of mystery, vice, murder, and disaster that were born of the city's transformation from lakeside settlement to American metropolis. Author Matthew J. Prigge presents these stories as they were recounted to the public in the newspapers of the era, using the vivid and often grim language of the times to create an engaging and occasionally chilling narrative of a forgotten Milwaukee. Through his thoughtful introduction, Prigge gives the work context, eschewing assumptions about "simpler times" and highlighting the mayhem that the growth and rise of a city can bring about. These stories are the orphans of Milwaukee's history, too unusual to register in broad historic narratives, too strange to qualify as nostalgia, but nevertheless essential to our understanding of this American city.

Trick 'r Treatdelves into the four stories that make up the feature film,Trick 'r Treatreleasing in October 2007. It reflects Dougherty's personal take on the filmmaking process, details how the ideas and art came together, and presents it with exclusive special features in a unique format. The genre encompasses drama, horror, thriller...mixed with a good dose of twisted humor. Set in a small suburban town,Trick 'r Treatexplores Halloween traditions while following a group of people trying to survive the most terrifying night of the year. From a serial killer who specializes in poisoning candy; to a group of mischievous kids who unearth their town's dark secret; to a young woman hunted by masked stalker at the local festival; to a cantankerous old hermit confronted by a demonic trick-or-treater, the film is filled with horrifying surprises, nervous laughs and strange creatures of every variety--human or otherwise. The atmosphere Dougherty creates on film mirrors the flavor of his art--whimsical, yet eerie. It seems welcoming from a distance, but the closer you look, the more you see the twisted, dark side of Dougherty's mind. Dougherty's third-grade teacher once remarked on a report card that his behavior exhibited "early evidence of what may be an extraordinary morbid ingenuity." Years later, his drawings and doodles of the youthful, eerily pumpkin-headed character, Sam--a kind of ghost of Halloweens past--along with a number of other creepy, unforgettable characters, have made it to the big screen. There, Dougherty's art and storytelling promise to take a fresh twist. At the launch of his career he's already got a loyal following eagerly awaiting his next spooky project.

Dark and Twisted Secrets Emerge in the Wake of a Deadly Wedding Daniel Richardson and his best friend, Hugh Ashley-Hunt, both rising British actors, are in love with the same woman, the free-spirited Tamsyn Burke. Daniel reluctantly steps aside when Tamsyn decides to marry Hugh, but right before the wedding ceremony, Tamsyn is murdered. Suspicion falls on the family, friends, and associates in attendance. Motivated by both Hugh's grief and his own, Daniel joins forces with Tamsyn's younger sister, Carey, to find the killer. As he digs into Tamsyn's past, Daniel unearths secrets she was hiding, and begins to discover why someone wanted her silenced forever. Praise: "An entertaining contemporary crime novel about love and revenge."—Library Journal (starred review) and Debut of the Month "A real gem...This is an excellent mystery and readers are in for quite a surprise at the end." —Suspense Magazine "[An] eminently readable debut."—Kirkus Review "A tightly sequenced tale with the many flashbacks expertly woven in."—Reviewing the Evidence

A famous fiddler has been kilt. A magic garden's left to wilt. Does Fiona Knox's father hold the guilt? Will florist Fiona's blood be spilt? World-famous fiddle player Barley McFee arrives in blustery Bellewick, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, for a grand homecoming concert organized by jeweler Bernice Brennan. Fiona Knox, owner of the Climbing Rose Flower Shop, is starting to regret volunteering to help with the concert. Bernice is an exacting taskmaster, and Fiona has enough tension dealing with her parents, who have traveled from Tennessee to visit Fi and her younger sister, Isla, and to reveal a secret about Fi's birth. But when Barley is found dead in his trailer during the concert's intermission, and his death is shockingly tied to Fiona's father, Fiona discovers there are more secrets surrounding her family than she realized. Much to the chagrin of handsome Neil Craig, Chief Inspector of the County Aberdeen Police, Fiona delves into the case to clear her father's name. To make matters worse, Fiona learns that Duncreigan, the magical garden that she inherited from her godfather, is dying. At some point during the concert, someone broke into the garden and cut the centuries-old climbing rose--the source of the garden's magic--from the standing stone. The stakes are higher than ever and Fiona could lose all that she's grown unless she's able to dispel this terrible curse and dig up the truth--fast.

First published in 1850, New York by Gas-Light explores the seamy side of the newly emerging metropolis: "the festivities of prostitution, the orgies of pauperism, the haunts of theft and murder, the scenes of drunkenness and beastly debauch, and all the sad realities that go to make up the lower stratum—the underground story—of life in New York!" The author of this lively and fascinating little book, which both attracted and offended large numbers of readers in Victorian America, was George G. Foster, reporter for Horace Greeley's influential New York Tribune, social commentator, poet, and man about town. Foster drew on his daily and nightly rambles through the city's streets and among the characters of the urban demi-monde to produce a sensationalized but extraordinarily revealing portrait of New York at the moment it was emerging as a major metropolis. Reprinted here with sketches from two of Foster's other books, New York by Gas-Light will be welcomed by students of urban social history, popular culture, literature, and journalism. Editor Stuart M. Blumin has provided a penetrating introductory essay that sets Foster's life and work in the contexts of the growing city, the development of the mass-distribution publishing industry, the evolving literary genre of urban sensationalism, and the wider culture of Victorian America. This is an important reintroduction to a significant but neglected work, a prologue to the urban realism that would flourish later in the fiction of Stephen Crane, the painting of George Bellows, and the journalism of Jacob Riis.