Who had a hand in the murder of a country gent? All manner of friction fills the English country house shared by genteel retiree Percival Pyke Period and fuddy-duddy lawyer Harry Cartell. Until one of them, after a flamboyant dowager's treasure hunt party, is found murdered-face down in the mire of an open drain. Which of Superintendent Roderick Alleyn's suspects-linked by a tangled set of relationships-wore a crucial, missing pair of gloves to commit this dirty deed?

And though she laments, "So many mysteries, so little time," she makes a good effort at mentioning "some of the best of the rest.""--BOOK JACKET.

Faith healing can be fatal When intrepid octogenarian Emily Pride inherits an island, and the miraculous properties of its "Pixie Falls" healing spring, she is shocked by all the vulgarity. The admission fee, the Gifte Shoppe, the folksy Festival, the neon sign on the pub, all must go! But local opposition runs high, death threats pile up, and Miss Emily's old friend Superintendent Roderick Alleyn arrives just in time to discover a drowned body and a set of murder motives that seem to spring eternal.

A murdered body is discovered on a farm, packed in a bale of wool--and Roderick Alleyn must find a wild, woolly killer.

While the roots of the detective novel go back to the 19th century, the genre reached its height around 1925 to 1945. This work presents information on 21 British and American women who wrote during the 20th century. As a group they were largely responsible for the great popularity of the detective novel in the first half of the century. The British authors are Dora Turnbull (Patricia Wentworth), Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Elizabeth Mackintosh (Josephine Tey), Ngaio Marsh, Gladys Mitchell, Margery Allingham, Edith Pargeter (Ellis Peters), Phyllis Dorothy James White (P.D. James), Gwendoline Butler (Jennie Melville), and Ruth Rendell, and the Americans are Patricia Highsmith, Carolyn G. Heilbrun (Amanda Cross), Edna Buchanan, Kate Gallison, Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, Nevada Barr, Patricia Cornwell, Carol Higgins Clark, and Megan Mallory Rust. A flavor of each author's work is provided.

Superintendent Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard visits the Channel Islands after a riding accident leads to charges of premeditated murder.

For an unlucky member of parliament, a hospital stay is the unkindest cut of all... When Britain's Home Secretary complained of abdominal pains, it seemed like a simple case of appendicitis. But minutes after his operation, the ill-fated politician lay dead on the table. When Chief Detective-Inspector Roderick Alleyn arrives to dissect the situation, he finds many a likely suspect, including a vengeful surgeon, a lovelorn nurse, an unhappy wife, and a cabinet full of political foes.