A group of Christie buffs. . .In honor of Agatha Christie's one hundredth birthday, mystery bookstore owner Annie Laurance Darling plans a week-long celebration of mystery, treasure hunts, title clues, and Christie trivia. Yet even as the champagne is chilling and the happy guests begin arriving on Broward's Rock Island, Annie feels a niggling sense of doom. But the last thing she or her guests expect is that the scheduled fun and mayhem will include a real-life murder. The unexpected arrival of Neil Bledsoe, the most despised book critic in America, was sure to raise a few hackles. An advocate of hard-boiled detection and gory true crime, Bledsoe drops a bombshell on the devoted Christie assemblage: He's penning a scurrilous biography of the grand dame of suspense herself. Before the first title clue is solved, no less than two attempts are made on Bledsoe's life. Now Annie and her unflappable husband, Max Darling, find themselves trying to stop a murder in the making-only the first corpse isn't the one they're expecting. . .and it isn't the last.

The undisputed "Queen of Crime," Dame Agatha Christie (1890-1976) is the bestselling novelist of all time. As the creator of immortal detectives Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, she continues to enthrall readers around the world and is drawing increasing attention from scholars, historians, and critics. But Christie wrote far beyond Poirot and Marple. A varied life including war work, archaeology, and two very different marriages provided the backdrop to a diverse body of work. This encyclopedic companion summarizes and explores Christie's entire literary output, including the detective fiction, plays, radio dramas, adaptations, and her little-studied non-crime writing. It details all published works and key themes and characters, as well as the people and places that inspired them, and identifies a trove of uncollected interviews, articles, and unpublished material, including details that have never appeared in print. For the casual reader looking for background information on their favorite mystery to the dedicated scholar tracking down elusive new angles, this companion will provide the most comprehensive and up-to-date information.

With their intimate settings, subdued action and likeable characters, cozy mysteries are rarely seen as anything more than light entertainment. The cozy, a subgenre of crime fiction, has been historically misunderstood and often overlooked as the subject of serious study. This anthology brings together a groundbreaking collection of essays that examine the cozy mystery from a range of critical viewpoints. The authors engage with the standard classification of a cozy, the characters who appear in its pages, the environment where the crime occurs and how these elements reveal the cozy story's complexity in surprising ways. Essays analyze cozy mysteries to argue that Agatha Christie is actually not a cozy writer; that Columbo fits the mold of the cozy detective; and that the stories' portrayals of settings like the quaint English village reveal a more complicated society than meets the eye.

A collection of mystery criticism and essays from the reviewer of books for Ellery Queen Magazine. Jon Breen is the worthy successor of Anthony Boucher and his hundreds of reviews of books and authors is a must-have for all serious mystery fans. A Ramble House book

Many bibliographers focus on women who write. Lawyer Barnett looks at women who detect, at women as sleuths and at the evolving roles of women in professions and in society. Excellent for all women's studies programs as well as for the mystery hound. Look at the popularity of such reading guides as Willetta Heising's Detecting Women (3rd ed. 0-9644593-7-X) or Amanda Cross' fiction (Honest Doubt 0-345-44011-0 11/00).