A young couple deeply in love comes to seek Nero Wolfe’s help because the young woman’s husband has died. She believes he was murdered but because of her affair is afraid to go to the police. The mystery clue seems to concern the movement of the murder weapon. It takes much persuasion by Wolfe to get the young man to admit that he moved the gun, placing it next to the body. Both he and she were afraid that that the other had committed the crime. Would Wolfe help them uncover the truth? He consents and begins to interview all who may have a motive to kill the husband, a famous singer.

Whether poor Stella had been a good girl or a bad one, what mattered most was the fact that she was now awfully dead.

Armed men invade the Queen apartment. At their head is Abel Bendigo, brother of one of the world’s most powerful men, King Bendigo of Bodigen Arms, industrial monster whose tentacles embrace the planet. Someone is threatening to kill King Bendigo, and Ellery must undertake to save that hated life! Virtual prisoners, the Queens are rocketed a sealed plane to the headquarters of the Bendigo empire — a mysterious island believed to be “somewhere in the Atlantic.”

On Bendigo Island — in a frightening atmosphere of concentration camp, industrial slavery, and brute militarism — Ellery comes to grips with a baffling murderer who calmly announces not only the exact date of the assassination, but the exact hour and minute as well! He finds himself matching wits with the fascinating American-born King, handsome, cynical, an absolute monarch; with King’s disturbing wife Karla, from a European royal family; Abel, King’s Prime Minister, of acute intelligence; and Judah, the saturnine little third brother with an inexhaustible thirst for $50-a-bottle cognac.

Ellery solves a difficult locked-room puzzle with classic brilliance and at the same time grapples with the life-and-death problem of the democratic world today — how to deal with the violent threat of totalitarian power.

NERO WOLFE, in this complete mystery novel, admired the knives displayed at the picnic until he found one in a corpse in the tent.

Ellery Queen is asked by a lawyer friend to help protect the interests of a pretty young heiress. They meet her, along with an unpleasant physician who is a friend of her family, as she disembarks in New York from an ocean liner arriving from England. She learns that her father, from whom she has been separated since her toddler years, has died just as she is to be reunited with her eccentric family and inherit her father’s fabled hoard of gold. The group drives for hours to reach an ugly and sinister Victorian house called the Black House at nightfall.The Black House, where her father died, is uninhabitable — the group meets the family and beds down in a small stone house next door. When they awake, the Black House has vanished as though it never existed. Ellery must shake off the Gothic trappings and the suggestions of black magic in order to figure out what has happened to the Black House and the gold.

Nero Wolfe is back in all his orchid-growing, gourmandizing glory! In The Bloodied Ivy and two previous bestsellers. Robert Goldsborough re-creates Stouts sedentary supersleuth and his energetic aide. Archie Goodwin, so convincingly that even the most devout Stout fans are delighted. John McAleer, Stouts official biographer and editor of The Stout Journal, has said, “A half dozen other writers have attempted it, but Goldsborough’s is the only one that feels authentic, the only one able to get into Rex’s psyche. If I hadn’t known otherwise. I might have been fooled into thinking this was the genuine Stout myself.’

Playboy Sparky Linville has a nasty notion of fun and games. But when he picks popular Noreen James as his unwilling playmate, the result is murder — and a case that will rock Manhattan’s trendy Upper East Side and divide the family of Lily Rowan. Noreens aunt.

As furor rages in the local press and the police fix their attention on her relatives. Lily turns to her old friend and confidant Archie Goodwin for help, hoping he can convey the seriousness of the family’s plight to his eminent employer, Nero Wolfe.

Wolfe decidedly doesn’t enjoy being distracted from his greenhouse and his groaning board. Yet Archies eloquence — and the prospect of an enormous fee — seduce him into accepting the case. It is, of course, understood that since the master detective has no intention of venturing forth from his snug brown stone sanctuary on Manhattan’s West Side, Archie will handle the leg work.

But the more shoe leather Archie burns, the more burning questions arise. There are altogether too many suspects — and every one of them has (a) a strong motive and (b) no alibi.

And on top of that, two people have confessed to the crime! Now as Archie faithfully relates his findings, the great Nero Wolfe is left to ponder this bizarre puzzle — and the deadliest coincidence-in the most baffling case of his career.

The fiftieth is pure gold: from the author The New York Times calls "the man with the golden ear" comes the fiftieth novel in the th Precinct series. In this city, you can get anything done for a price. If you want someone's eyeglasses smashed, it'll cost you a subway token. You want his fingernails pulled out? His legs broken? You want him more seriously injured? You want him hurt so he's an invalid his whole life? You want him skinned, you want him burned, you want him — don't even mention it in a whisper — killed? It can be done. Let me talk to someone. It can be done. The hanging death of a nondescript old man in a shabby little apartment in a meager section of the th Precinct was nothing much in this city, especially to detectives Carella and Meyer. But everyone has a story, and this old man's story stood to make some people a lot of money. His story takes Carella, Meyer, Brown, and Weeks on a search through Isola's seedy strip clubs and to the bright lights of the theater district. There they discover an upcoming musical with ties to a mysterious drug and a killer who stays until . is 's fiftieth novel of the th Precinct and certainly one of his best. The series began in with Cop Hater and proves him to be the man who has been called "so good he should be arrested."

When Colonel Phillips begins his final game of golf, his greatest problem in life is that he has begun to slice the ball. Playing with his lawyer and nephews, Phillips fights his way back into the game and is on the verge of victory when he keels over. He clutches his chest, mumbles a few words, and is dead in minutes. The doctor has no doubt: The colonel was poisoned. Finding the culprit falls to the president of the golf club, amateur detective Canby Rankin, who will do whatever it takes to find the killer on the links.

Written nearly a century ago, “The Last Drive” is now available for the first time in book form. Clever, charming, and absolutely baffling, it is the tale that inspired the first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance, and along with the other stories in this volume represents the early efforts of a modern genius.

The Last Witness involves an ingenious way of using a phone-answering service for a blackmail racket.

The green wig belonged to a redheaded Vegas show girl. The sequined gown had highlighted the bouncy silhouette of a blonde off-Broadway actress.

The long evening gloves were the property of a bosomy smalltown nurse. These were more than an inventory of ladies’ wear. For they were found on the scene of a brutal crime during a hideaway weekend, near the body of an internationally known jet-setter notorious for his pursuit of beautiful women. What did they mean?

The question plagues Ellery and Inspector Queen — and it will plague you — throughout the Queens’ newest murder case, most of which takes place in Queen fans’ favorite New England town, Wrightsville. But it is far from the only missing piece of the puzzle. There is the victim’s dying message. There is the mysterious woman to whom the trail is long and difficult. Above all there is the question: Who was THE LAST WOMAN IN HIS LIFE?

Follow Ellery as he works his way through a typically labyrinthine Queen maze, from one surprise to another, with the most stunning surprise of all waiting for you at the end.

Paulina Paine is deaf, but her ability to lip-read is astonishing. So two men who met one day during an art exhibition did not realize that the woman sitting out of earshot could understand every word they said. It was no ordinary conversation, and Paulina went straight to see Miss Silver.