Historic preservationist Ashley Wilkes finds her friend Valentine Russo murdered at the desk of Valentine's art gallery, and the walls bare of art.

On the morning of March 5, 1959, Luvenia Long was listening to gospel music when a news bulletin interrupted her radio program. Fire had engulfed the Arkansas Negro Boys Industrial School in Wrightsville, thirteen miles outside of Little Rock. Her son Lindsey had been confined there since January 14, after a judge for juveniles found him guilty of stealing from a neighborhood store owner. To her horror, Lindsey was not among the forty-eight boys who had clawed their way through the windows of the dormitory to safety. Instead, he was among the twenty-one boys between the ages of thirteen and seventeen who burned to death. Black Boys Burning presents a focused explanation of how systemic poverty perpetuated by white supremacy sealed the fate of those students. A careful telling of the history of the school and fire, the book provides readers a fresh understanding of the broad implications of white supremacy. Grif Stockley’s research adds to an evolving understanding of the Jim Crow South, Arkansas’s history, the lawyers who capitalized on this tragedy, and the African American victims. In hindsight, the disaster at Wrightsville could have been predicted. Immediately after the fire, an unsigned editorial in the Arkansas Democrat noted long-term deterioration, including the wiring, of the buildings. After the Central High School desegregation crisis in 1957, the boys’ deaths eighteen months later were once again an embarrassment to Arkansas. The fire and its circumstances should have provoked southerners to investigate the realities of their “separate but equal institutions.” However, white supremacy ruled the investigations, and the grand jury declared the event to be an anomaly.

World War II hero Davy Fox has returned to his New England hometown of Wrightsville a changed man. When his wife Linda wakes up to find Davy's hands squeezed around her neck, it takes all of her strength to get away. But Davy is more than shellshocked from the war. He's haunted by events of twelve years before, when his mother was murdered by his father, Bayard, who is serving life in prison and had always insisted that he was not the one who killed his wife. Linda hopes that if Davy's father could be proved innocent, it might clear the conscience of her young, angry war hero husband, saving her marriage and herself. She suggests to Davy that they seek out Ellery Queen, a New York writer whom she remembers successfully solved a previous Wrightsville mystery. For Queen, the case is a long shot: with his only witnesses people closely connected to the victim, and Queen's only clue Bayard Fox's insistence of innocence, the clearest path leads back to the man already serving a life sentence. Determined to get to the truth of the matter, Queen returns to the house where the murder took place, a house preserved down to the smallest detail precisely as it had been when the tragedy struck. And here he finds the clues that blast the case wide open. From his first appearance in print in 1929, Ellery Queen became one of America’s most famous and beloved fictional detectives. Over the course of nearly half a century, Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, the duo writing team known as Ellery Queen, won the prestigious Edgar Award multiple times, and their contributions to the mystery genre were recognized with a Grand Master Award, the highest honor bestowed by the Mystery Writers of America. Their fair-play mysteries won over fans due to their intricate puzzles that challenged the reader to solve the mystery alongside the brilliant detective. Queen’s stories were among the first to dominate the earliest days of radio, film, and television. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which the writers founded and edited, became the world’s most influential and acclaimed crime fiction magazine.

The clues to a series of remorseless killings go up in smoke—and only Kay Scarpetta can find them in this #1 New York Times bestseller from Patricia Cornwell. “Sears its way into the psyche…Ablaze with Cornwell’s finest, scariest writing.”—Atlanta Journal Constitution The devastating fire tore through the horse farm, destroying everything it touched. Picking through the wreckage, Dr. Kay Scarpetta uncovers human remains—the work of an audacious and wily killer who uses fire to mask his brutal murders. And when Scarpetta learns that her old nemesis, Carrie Grethen, has escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane and is somehow involved, the investigation becomes personal. Tragedy strikes close to home. And Scarpetta must match Grethen’s every move with one of her own to douse the inferno of evil that threatens everyone around her... Includes an Introduction by the Author

A nursery rhyme leads Ellery Queen to a killer—from the author who took “the formal detective novel to greater heights than any American writer” (The Weekly Standard). Ellery Queen was raised in New York City, but his heart belongs to the village of Wrightsville. An idyllic New England hamlet, it was the site of some of the world-famous detective’s most remarkable investigations. After years of solving murder cases in Wrightsville’s coziest parlors, Queen was sure the community did not have any further mysteries to offer. But an anonymous letter draws him back to the most dangerous small town in America. Luke MacCaby’s sagging old Victorian mansion sits on the edge of a respectable Wrightsville district as a fading reminder of the area’s long-vanished heyday. When the owner—a seemingly impoverished hermit—passes away, the town is shocked to learn that he was a partner in the local dye works and left behind a fortune worth millions. To find MacCaby’s killer, Queen must peel away the surface of the place he so dearly loves.

Ellery Queen and his father discover a baffling murder on a private island Ellery Queen and his father are meandering through breakfast when their apartment is invaded. Without making a sound, 2 men appear in the Queens’ living room, guns drawn, and proceed to search the place. When they’re done, a 3rd man follows: a paunchy little professor-type who happens to be the brother of a king. King Bendigo doesn’t rule a country, but his control of the international arms trade has made him one of the richest men in the world. It’s not surprising that somebody wants him dead. Bendigo’s brother comes to the Queens to ask them to save the tycoon’s life—but they fail. The king is found dead in a hermetically sealed room, a bullet lodged in his heart. The murder is impossible to solve—that is, for anyone but Ellery Queen.