Given its extraordinary span, its international scope, and its variant styles and groundbreaking stylists, A Century of Great Suspense Stories is a singular achievement. A bestselling master of suspense himself Jeffery Deaver had the enviable task of selecting from the thousands of stories written over the past one hundred years those which best represented the classic form, as well as the justly celebrated authors whose ironic twists and stunning payoffs left a lasting, vivid, and unnerving impression. The result is a triumph. In this ambitious anthology you’ll revel in the sardonic, overtly amoral plotting of Patricia Highsmith. You’ll rediscover the strangely poignant and surprising turns of Stanley Ellin, and the profoundly underrated Margaret Millar, a genius who mixed savage social satire with brooding horror. You’ll be treated to Stephen King at his chilling best. You’ll find yourself on the violent urban streets of Ross Macdonald and Mickey Spillane, and seeped in the ominous regional flavor of Sharyn McCrumb and Tony Hillerman. You’ll marvel at the cunning webs spun by Lawrence Block, Ruth Rendell, Anthony Boucher, and Sara Paretsky, all of whom defy expectations as they reinvent the genre. And you’ll understand the awesome reputations of those authors who set the standard, such as the legendary Harlan Ellison, Fredric Brown, the master of the twist ending, and James M. Cain, uncannily skilled at knowing what went on between men and women behind closed doors. (The darker the room the better.) Delivering everything from the one-two punch of the detective story to the ingeniously precise trappings of the police procedural, from the disquieting corners of the criminal mind to sheer dread-inducing horror, A Century of Great Suspense Stories is a rich anthology of this popular literary genre, a stunning tribute to the art of storytelling, and to the men and women who have done it best

She dreamed that she had died four years ago. The dream was terrifyingly real. Then Daisy discovered that the grave and the granite cross were really there in the cemetery, the date of death the same as she had dreamed, but a stranger’s name cut in the stone. Daisy Harker’s search for the lost day of her imagined death becomes a quest for the meaning of several lives, and for her own survival. As her nightmare emerges into reality, it threatens her comfortable relationship with her husband Jim, and thrusts her into more disturbing relationships: with Steve Pinata, the detective of uncertain origins: with Stanley Fielding, who lives by his wits on the edge of the law: and with the dark forces beyond the law. Daisy’s struggle between the world we know and trust, and the underworld of crime and degradation, is resolved in scenes of shuttering suspend and emotional power

The decomposed body of a much-loved eight-year-old, Annamay Hyatt, is found in a wooded creekside area. To an agonizing degree everyone concerned with Annamay feels responsible. To an even more agonizing degree, someone is. The effect of the child’s violent death runs through the community like a plague. It infects not only her parents and her cousin, Dru, the same age as Annamay, but everyone who lives or works in the area, from the aging gay who gives young parties to the white-robed con man who comes to the creek and hears a banshee. Perhaps most bereft is Annamay’s grandfather who studies the ancient Japanese fish in the koi pond, appalled that they and he should still be alive while an eight-year-old is dead. Through a telescope he watches the retired madam who lives in her villa across the canyon, surrounded by keepers. The madam also hears the banshee. Friends of the family are also badly infected, one of them fatally. These include Ben York, the young architect who designed the Hyatts’ house and the little girl’s play palace; his brash mistress who resents his attachment to the Hyatts; the minister who officiated at Annamay’s baptism and now her funeral and loses his faith in the process; and even the housekeeper, Chizzy, bewildered because Annamay did not heed her repeated warnings not to talk to strangers. Margaret Millar is a highly praised, widely read novelist. Banshee shows why, for over four decades, she has maintained a steady and devoted following

Margaret Millar’s latest book — which comes after a break of six years — is another superb example of the fusion of the novel of character and the puzzle of suspense. If it were not about a crime, it would still be an absorbing account of people, precisely studied and perfectly placed in their unfamiliar setting. That setting is a remote ranch on the border between California and Mexico. Robert Osborne inherited the ranch when his father was killed while driving a tractor: his father was usually drunk anyway, and no one was surprised that he’d had an accident. But now Robert has been missing for over a year, and is presumed dead by everyone except his doting mother. Robert disappeared not long after he had been on a trip to New York, from which he had returned with an attractive young wife. There doesn’t seem to be much doubt about what happened. A lot of blood was found on the floor of the bunk-house where the itinerant Mexican laborers were lodged, and all the laborers were missing. Plainly, they were responsible, and Robert must be dead. That’s how the sheriff sees it, and the ranch foreman, and Robert’s young widow, and Robert’s lawyer. Only Robert’s mother holds out, opposing the public hearing which the widow, Devon, is now demanding to legally establish his death. But the solution is not at all the expected one; and after it has been reached, Miss Millar has a startlingly macabre ending in reserve. It’s compulsive reading, and beautiful writing

A sudden impulse to help a girl in trouble leads a beautiful woman doctor into the path of murder, blackmail and deadly danger

The request was an odd one, and it came to Quinn from an unlikely source. Her name was Sister Blessing of the Salvation, and she belonged to a quasi-religious colony which had established itself in the California mountains, far from the world, the flesh, and the devil. Though money was forbidden in the colony, she paid Quinn one hundred and twenty dollars to find out if a man named Patrick O’Gorman was still living in the desert town of Chicote. It turned out that O’Gorman had disappeared under mysterious circumstances five years before. As Quinn investigated these circumstances, he discovered that Sister Blessing and some of her fellow colonists were as deeply involved with the world and the flesh as the people of Chicote. He saw their lives disrupted by violent passions and ultimately by violent death. As the intricate design of this novel emerges, it builds a pattern of mounting terror which reaches its climax on the last page, Mrs. Millar has never told a story of such sweep, ranging from the mountains to the desert, from a millionaire’s yacht to a cell in die state penitentiary, and into the darkest recesses of the human mind. Beginning with Quinn himself, the young detective who has his own moral problems, the characters are depicted with wit and penetration. This is perhaps the most compelling novel that Margaret Millar has given us in the course of her continually surprising career

To most of the people in La Mesa, Rose French’s only claim to fame was the brilliant explosiveness of her periodic binges. Frank Clyde and a few others knew that she had been a great star in the days of silent pictures, had married and left five husbands, and that Rose at sixty still had the vitality of a force of nature. Frank was a young social worker who sometimes let his feelings color his work, and Rose was his favorite case history. When that history came to a sudden end in a deserted garden, Frank was deeply affected. The coroner’s jury pronounced Rose dead of natural causes, but Frank had his doubts. They deepened when her past began to emerge in the present. One of the shadowy five to whom she had once been married turned up in La Mesa, prosperous and aggressive. Then the implausibly moronic couple in whose garden the body was found began to behave like people with something to hide. Frank became a detective in spite of himself.　

In Santa Felicia County, California, Cully Paul King, the attractive Caribbean captain of a private yacht — a black man, a ladies’ man — is on trial for first-degree murder. Madeline Pherson, a married woman whose body was found in the ocean, wrapped in kelp, was last seen on Cully’s boat, Bewitched. Cully is accused of killing her for her jewelry, which she kept in a green box that has mysteriously disappeared. But just as perplexing as the circumstances of Pherson’s death are the motives of the people involved in Cully’s trial. Cully’s lawyer, Charles Donnelly, has volunteered to become the defense counsel — for no fee. Eva Foster, the feminist court clerk, takes an unusual interest in the case. Harry and Richie Arnold, a father and son who were Cully’s crewmen, have vastly different stories to tell about the accused. All these characters are caught in webs of suspicions, secrets, and hidden passions, as are the crochety old Judge Hazeltine and Oliver Owen, the racist district attorney. Intermingled with the court proceedings are scenes from the private lives of the people involved in the trial: Eva Foster combining her work as court clerk with falling in love with the defendant; defense counsel Donnelly trying to cope with a life and a wife he despises; the teenaged crewman, Richie, convincing himself that Cully is his real father; and Cully himself presenting two faces to the world. Was he a promiscuous man with a violent temper when drunk? Or was he a hardworking innocent man drawn into someone else’s tragedy? As expert testimony weakens the case against Cully, it merely strengthens the opinion of his own lawyer, Donnelly, and the judge, Hazeltine, that he is guilty. Free-spirited Cully is not sure which would be worse, to be sent to prison or to be acquitted to face the demands of all the people who want something from him, people to whom he wishes to give nothing in return. Margaret Millar has been attending murder trials as a court watcher for forty years, but this is the first book she has written about a trial. Although entirely fictional, Spider Webs has all the elements of an actual trial — tragedy, comedy, and the suspense caused by the unpredictable behavior of human beings under stress

About ten years ago Mrs. Millar and her husband, writer Ross Macdonald, settled on the outskirts of Santa Barbara in a wooded canyon which was alive with birds and other wild creatures. Her book is first of all an account of their growing intimacy with the birds, and their adventures in operating a feeding station for all comers

In this remarkable novel, Margaret Millar returns to the themes of death and terror which first made her reputation as a writer. It concerns a New York family who rented a house on the California coast in the hope of a tranquil summer. Mark Banner was a young, successful publisher. His wife. Evelyn. was bright and competent, and very much afraid of losing her husband. When Janet Wakefield returned from her travels to take inventory in the house she had rented to the Banners, Evelyn recognized an enemy at sight. The covert struggle between the two women for the possession of Evelyn’s husband, and her daughter, Jessie, gradually became a fight to the death. The story covers only three days, but it has the compactness of an ancient tragedy. It strikes deep into the life of its characters, and into the past which had changed a strong and beautiful woman to a figure of frightening evil. Much of it is seen through the eyes of the child. Jessie, who is Mrs. Wakefield’s first convert and her final victim. The dark relation between the imaginative eight-year-old and the desperate woman mounts gradually toward a peak of intensity. But at the end the terror is subtly changed to pity. Mrs. Wakefield is not a villainess of melodrama, but a woman whom we pity because we understand her. Margaret Millar’s new novel is daring, deeply disturbing, yet marked by unusual beauty. Its love passages between Mark Banner and Janet Wakefield are real and moving

The premise of Margaret Millar’s new suspense novel is simple and shocking. Charlie Gowen, a handsome young man with a badly disordered past, finds himself profoundly drawn toward a nine-year-old girl. His past record suggests, even to Charlie himself, that his sick passion for little Jessie is placing her life in jeopardy. But he can’t stay away from her school, her street, her house. If the premise of Mrs. Millar’s story is simple enough, its development is complex and compelling. Charlie’s fiancée Louise, who loves him desperately, risks her life in an effort to save him from the dark forces of his own nature. Half a dozen other adults, Jessie’s parents, friends and neighbors, become involved in the network of guilt and menace which surrounds the child. Without sacrificing its quality of almost unbearable suspense, this novel makes a searching and scathing inquiry into the guilty relations of adults with children. To read it is a shaking experience

Lucille Morrow, the central figure in this novel of psychological mystery, was, to all appearances, a fortunate and happy woman. In early middle life she retained the beauty of her youth: her husband. Dr. Morrow, was wealthy and devoted to her; she was the mistress of a large and charming house, properly staffed. No one was more astonished than her immediate family when Lucille, in mad fear and horror, ran away from her comfortable home, her loving husband, and all the things she had seemed to value. In one day she changed from a serene and self-possessed woman into a creature dominated by a fear so intense that she was glad to be shut up behind the iron gates of an asylum for the insane. In searching for the cause of Lucille Morrow’s flight Detective Inspector Sands (whom we met in Wall of Eyes) followed a long trail which took him to the ugly cadaver of an ex-convict in the Toronto morgue, through the maze of fears which tortured the mind of Lucille Morrow in her last days, and even back to the bloody death of Dr. Morrow’s first wife sixteen years before. As his case progressed, Sands observed, with the cold and catholic sympathy which made him a great detective, the deterioration of the Morrow family under the influence of fear and guilt. The Iron Gates is a strange and fascinating novel of murder psychological horror and inevitable retribution. Few writers have approached insanity, human fear and human evil with more relentless honesty and more precision of style

Did she fall? When Mrs. Wilma Wyatt crashed to her death from the balcony of her room in a Mexico City hotel, no one knew whether it was an accident, suicide or murder. And when, shortly after, her friend and travelling companion, Amy Kellogg, disappeared into thin air, the mystery deepened. Did Wilma fall...? Or was she pushed?

Miranda Shaw was a rich and recent widow in her early fifties. The head lifeguard at the Penguin Beach Club, Grady Keaton, was exactly half her age. When Grady and Miranda dropped out of sight at the same time, rumors began to circulate among the other members and employees of the club. And when Admiral Young’s two somewhat addled daughters, Cordelia and Juliet, spotted some of Miranda’s jewels at an estate auction, the rumors darkened and the hunt was on. Tom Aragon, the engaging lawyer who solved the bizarre mystery in Ask for Me Tomorrow, has to undertake an even stranger case in Margaret Millar’s new tragicomedy. Aragon has the dubious assistance of nine-year-old Frederic Quinn, who boasts of his Mafia connections at private school. Adding to the confusion is Mr. Van Eyck, who, under cover of age and convenient spells of deafness, eavesdrops on his fellow members and commits his findings to paper in the form of anonymous letters. Margaret Millar’s new novel is one of her best, and certainly her funniest. Its structure is as dazzling as its prose is witty. The author contrives to postpone the full solution until the last words of the final sentence, when the elements of the plot come together and the characters who sustain it, living and dead, are shown in tragic relation to each other

Virginia Barkeley spoiled child of a wealthy family, sat it a Michigan jail cell and refused to answer even her lawyer’s questions. Her husband knew that she had been intimate with Claude Margolis. Her mother knew that Virginia was capable of killing a man with a knife. Even Meecham, her lawyer, believed that she was guilty, so far as he believed anything at all. Then Meecham was approached by a young man with a weirdly distorted body and death in his face. His name was Earl Duane Loftus. and he brought with him a signed confession which the police were unable to pick to pieces. If Loftus was lying, his lie seemed as unshakable as truth itself. But if Loftus was telling the truth, he had killed on impulse a man he had never seen before. Meecham, a doubter by nature, doubted this. He resolved to probe the lives beneath the obvious police case: the ingrown hatreds which flourished subtly behind the social facade which Virginia Barkeley’s family tried to maintain; the side streets and dark alleys of frustration where Earl Loftus had developed his twisted idealism. Somewhere, he suspected. he would find a link between these two lives and the death of Margolis. But the truth he found was unexpected and shocking. In the climax of his search, Meecham caught a flashing glimpse of a tragic reality, redeemed by a love which was literally stronger than death. Here is a mystery novel in the great tradition. Its author, Margaret Millar, has forged two reputations in the past ten years, one as a brilliant writer of mystery stories, one as a serious novelist. In this book her diverse talents have merged completely to produce a baffling mystery which is also a first-rate novel

Alice told the psychiatrist about her blind sister. “She has built a wall of eyes around her, the good eyes of the rest of us, the eyes of the people who hate her and watch her and wait for her to die. That’s what she says, that the eyes are watching and waiting.” Soon the waiting would be over

Рон Гэлловей устраивает рыбалку для друзей в своем домике недалеко от Джорджиан-Бей. Прибывшие друзья приступают к ислледованию содержимого бара, но когда пунктуальный Гэлловей не появляется даже за полночь, они приступают к его поискам. По мере того как поиски продолжается, проявляются секреты и отношения существующие между приглашенными друзьями. Незаконная любовь, похоть, обман, предательство и убийство - в этом коктейле им придется разобраться вместе с читателем

…До самых последних страниц романа «Загнанный зверь» читатель так и не может догадаться, кто же из героев ощущает себя загнанным зверем в каменных джунглях современного мегаполиса; кто от отчаяния и непереносимого чувства одиночества становится беспощадным и изобретательным убийцей. В романе Маргарет Миллар (которая практически не знакома российскому читателю, несмотря на мировую славу) есть и трагическое раздвоение личности, и подавляющие личность комплексы, есть, наконец, глубокое и тонкое проникновение в тайны человеческой психики, во многом определяющее своеобразие триллера знаменитой писательницы. Удостоенный премии Эдгара По, роман года «Загнанный зверь» считается одним из самых удачных произведений писательницы

Религиозное братство стало прибежищем не только для тех, кто решил удалиться от суетного мира, но и для тех, кто пытается скрыть прошлые преступления…

В сборник вошли лучшие образцы творчества американского мастера психологического детектива Маргарет Миллар (р. 1915). Супруга Росса Макдональда — корифея крутого детектива, она нашла свою неповторимую тональность и считается одним из лидеров современного криминального романа США

Действие психологического триллера американской писательницы Маргарет Миллар «Совсем как ангел» разворачивается на мрачном готическом фоне, оттененном странным монастырем-башней. Необъяснимое исчезновение любящего мужа, его отсутствие в течение нескольких лет разрешаются катастрофой, когда в дело вмешивается старая монахиня из заброшенного лесного монастыря. Ее сомнения подвигают частного детектива Куинна взяться за расследование. «Винтовая лестница» — один из лучших и, пожалуй, наиболее жестоких романов Мэри Робертс Райнхарт. Летний отдых в деревне нарушает цепь загадочных убийств. Безумие одного человека и тайна запертой комнаты

Действие психологического триллера американской писательницы Маргарет Миллар «Совсем как ангел» разворачивается на мрачном готическом фоне, оттененном странным монастырем-башней. Необъяснимое исчезновение любящего мужа, его отсутствие в течение нескольких лет разрешаются катастрофой, когда в дело вмешивается старая монахиня из заброшенного лесного монастыря. Ее сомнения подвигают частного детектива Куинна взяться за расследование