Mike Shayne finds strange secrets hidden beneath the cover of a grisly double suicide It’s 10:30 pm, and Mike Shayne is sipping cognac, ruminating on the perfection of Lucy Hamilton’s fried chicken, when a shotgun fires upstairs. Following the acrid stench of gunpowder to a locked door halfway down the hall, Shayne has no choice but to batter it down, tumbling face first into the scene of a particularly ugly double suicide. The woman lies on the floor in the middle of the sitting room, her face twisted by the deadly kiss of cyanide. A few feet beyond her body is what remains of a man, his head obliterated by the shotgun’s blast. The woman’s father is one of Miami’s power brokers, and he refuses to believe that his daughter would end her life over a silly affair. Isn’t it possible, he asks, that she was murdered? Convinced or not, Shayne is the only man ruthless enough to find out. The Corpse That Never Was is the 45th book in the Mike Shayne Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

His fans include Stephen King, Michael Connelly, Tess Gerritsen, Ian Rankin, and Louise Penney. He has won acclaim and numerous international prizes and awards, including the Edgar. Now celebrated New York Times bestselling author Peter Robinson, one of the greatest suspense writers of our time, demonstrates his mastery once again in this powerful mystery in which legendary detective superintendent Alan Banks is confronted with a pair of perplexing crimes. Two suspicious deaths challenge DS Alan Banks and his crack investigative team. The body of an attractive young woman dressed in evening attire is found in an abandoned car on a country road. The death looks like suicide, but there are too many open questions for Banks and his team to rule out foul play. The car didn’t belong to her—it was badly damaged in an accident involving the vehicle’s owner a week earlier in the same spot. So how did the dead girl get inside the car? Did someone place her there, and if so, why? Where—and when—did she die? While Banks attends the postmortem, DI Annie Cabot is at the scene of another death. A well-dressed man in his sixties has been found in a gully high up on the wild moorland. His injuries were fatal and consistent with those sustained in a fall. Was it an accident—did the man get too close to the edge and slip? Was he pushed? The man was wearing an expensive suit. What was he doing in a rocky spot popular with hikers? There are no signs of a vehicle near where he fell. How did he get there? Banks’s and Cabot’s cases share a few curious similarities. Both of the dead were found in the same area of the moorlands. Both were elegantly dressed. The timing of their deaths coincided. And neither carried identification. As the police uncover who these people were and begin to look into their lives, inconsistencies multiply and the mysteries surrounding the two cases proliferate. Then a source close to Annie reveals a piece of information that rocks the Eastvale detectives working both investigations. An old enemy has returned in a new guise—a nefarious foe who will stop at nothing, not even murder, to get what he wants. With the stakes raised, the hunt is on. But will Banks and his crack squad be able to find the evidence to stop him in time?

Mike Shayne is accused of homicide after a dying man stumbles into his office When an old friend calls begging to see him immediately, Mike Shayne is surprised to say the least. He hasn’t set eyes on Jim Lacy in ten years, and time has not been kind. Jim’s face is deeply wrinkled, and his eyes are glazed. His skin is gray—and there is blood seeping through his shirt. Jim mutters a few last words as he collapses on Shayne’s office floor. His stomach is filled with lead and he is dead before he hits the ground. Shayne reaches into Lacy’s pocket and pulls out his wallet. Emptying it, he finds $200—enough for a retainer fee. Mike Shayne has never let a client’s murder go unpunished, and he will not rest until he catches the men who shot Jim Lacy and sent him to die. But first he will have to convince the police that he was not the man who pulled the trigger. The Corpse Came Calling is the 6th book in the Mike Shayne Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

When an author finds his friend murdered, he calls on hardboiled cop Jerry Burke to track down the killer In a lonely canyon high above El Paso, a ruthless millionaire and a hardline socialist live side by side. Raymond Dwight makes money mercilessly and Leslie Young hates the rich with a passion, but the men have coexisted peacefully—so far. But when Western novelist Asa Baker escapes to Young’s cabin for a weekend of writing, he can sense tension in the air. His friend has always muttered about tossing a few bombs at Dwight’s estate, but his jokes have stopped being funny. Baker has seen enough bloodshed to know that there is murder on the horizon. When he finds Young dead on the floor, a strange mark on his cheek, Baker calls the only man who can help: Jerry Burke, the toughest cop in El Paso. In the shadowy corners of this Texas canyon lie secrets that someone will kill to protect—and Burke is the only man daring enough to uncover the truth.

In a strange town, Mike Shayne meets a deadly damsel in distress Mike Shayne is 3 hours from Miami when the sun dips below the horizon and he decides to make a pit stop. For Shayne, that means cognac, and the only bar in town is a lonely little dive whose inhabitants don’t look friendly. Shayne doesn’t care. The barkeep pulls a dusty bottle down from the top shelf, and Shayne is settling into his drink when a blonde walks through the door. As the detective admires her, she raises her hand . . . and with a gesture of her dainty little finger, marks him for death. Two men wrestle Shayne outside, beat him senseless, and try to run him over with their car. To escape this hayseed town alive, Shayne will have to discover the identity of the dame from the bar—and why she chose for him to die. Stranger in Town is the 26th book in the Mike Shayne Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Homeric Epic and its Reception, comprising twelve chapters--some previously published but revised for this collection, and others appearing here in print for the first time--offers literary interpretations of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. While some chapters closely study the diction, meter, style, and thematic resonance of particular passages and episodes in the Iliad and the Odyssey, others follow diverse pathways into the interpretation of the epics, including mythological allusion, intertextuality, the metrics of the Homeric hexameter, and the fundamental contrast between divinity and humanity. Also included are two chapters which focus on the work of Milman Parry and Ioannis Kakridis, founders of the two most fruitful twentieth-century scholarly approaches to Homeric scholarship: the study of the Iliad and the Odyssey as traditional oral formulaic poetry (Parry), and the study of the poems' adaptations and transformations of traditional mythology, folktales, and poetic motifs in accordance with their distinctive themes and poetic purposes (Kakridis). The volume draws to a close with three chapters which discuss some of the most compelling poetic and critical receptions of the Iliad and the Odyssey since the late nineteenth century, and the institutional reception of the epics in colleges and universities in the United States over the past two centuries. Written over a period of 45 years, this collection reflects the author's long-standing interest in, and scholarly and critical approaches to, the literary interpretation of Homeric poetry.

The ‘macabre’, as a process and product, has been haunting the theatre – and more broadly, performance – for thousands of years. In its embodied meditations on death and dying, its thematic and aesthetic grotesquerie, and its sensory-rich environments, macabre theatre invites artists and audiences to trace the stranger, darker contours of human existence. In this volume, numerous scholars explore the morbid and gruesome onstage, from freak shows to the French Grand Guignol; from Hell Houses to German Trauerspiel; from immersive theatre to dark tourism, stopping along the way to look at phantoms, severed heads, dark rides, haunted mothers and haunting children, dances of death and dismembered bodies. From Japan to Australia to England to the United States, the global macabre is framed and juxtaposed to understand how the theatre brings us face to face with the deathly and the horrific.

How does one read the Old Testament as Christian Scripture? This question, voiced in both academic and ecclesial settings, invites a reflection on how to take these texts with both hermeneutical alertness and sustained imaginative seriousness. While scholars have recently engaged in robust discussion about theological hermeneutics, there have been relatively few worked examples with particular Old Testament texts. This book seeks to meet this need by providing a close reading of Isaiah 14:3–23, a text with a complex amalgam of textual, historical-critical, history-of-reception, and theological issues.

“One of the best of the tough sleuths” tangles with blackmail and murder in Miami Beach in this hardboiled detective tale by one of the all-time greats (The New York Times). The day he met Phyllis Brighton, Mike Shayne saved her from jumping out a window—and he has been rescuing her ever since. First he helped her beat a murder rap; now he’s trying to pry her away from the sleaziest lawyer in Dade County: Harry Grange. A mouthpiece for every crook in Miami, Grange is running a blackmail racket when Shayne sees him with Phyllis on his arm at a local gambling hall. Shayne warns his friend to ditch her crooked beau, but she is too proud to take his advice. Unfortunately for her, the relationship will end with murder. Shayne gets the call just after he gets back to his office. Harry Grange has been found dead on the sands of Miami Beach. Even worse, Shayne’s gun is missing and his friend Larry Kincaid may have used it to gun down the blackmailing lawyer. To save his friends, Mike Shayne will have to outsmart the cleverest killer in town. Adapted into the film Michael Shayne, Private Detective, this classic PI novel is part of the long-running mystery series that also inspired a 1940s radio show and translations around the world. The Private Practice of Michael Shayne is the 2nd book in the Mike Shayne Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.