The residents of tiny Crozet, Virginia, thrive on gossip, especially in the post office, where Mary Minor "Harry" Haristeen presides with her tiger cat, Mrs. Murphy. So when a belligerent Hell's Angel crashes Crozet, demanding to see his girlfriend, the leather-clad interloper quickly becomes the chief topic of conversation. Then the biker is found murdered, and everyone is baffled. Well, almost everyone...Mrs. Murphy and her friends, Welsh corgi Tee Tucker and overweight feline Pewter, haven't been slinking through alleys for nothing. But can they dig up the truth in time to save their humans from a ruthless killer?

Death in the desert is a grimmer thing than elsewhere—but in all ways the desert is a grim school for men, as Pete and his partner knew only too well

Gold is the pay dirt in all these rip-roaring western stories, more of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Whispering Sands series with their unique desert setting. Again the master storyteller features his rugged western hero, the philosophical prospector Bob Zane. In the title story Zane is true to form when he gets a spoiled rich kid to behave like a man and beat out claim jumpers in the desert. Men learn fast out there, or die, and Zane moves faster than any of them, rescuing a pretty hostage from Yaqui Indians, outwitting murderous gangsters in the Painted Desert, avoiding death from poisonous alkali springs, and hunting lost gold in Death Valley. Around camp at night, the sand whispers on the wind and the philosopher in Zane may start talking — but he always keeps his hand on his gun. The stories move at the headlong pace for which all Gardner adventures are famous, and Zane himself is an exceptional character who often reveals ideas that are clearly Gardner’s own about life, justice, and the debatable values of civilization. Says Zane: “The reason men don’t know the law of life is because they’re afraid to look Eternity in the face. Out in the desert they have to look at Eternity. It’s on all sides of them; they can’t turn their eyes away. That’s the spell of the desert.”

Mrs. Murphy - 4, 5, 6

Sonia Orin Lyris takes on our vast, and sometimes incomprehensible, universe in a compact tale that sweeps across the eons

Old soldiers never die. They just come back for more. Three terrorist missiles have struck three jetliners filled with innocent people. America knows this shock all too well. But unlike 9/11, the nation is already on a war footing. The White House and Pentagon are primed. All they need now is a target and someone bold — and expendable — enough to strike it. That someone is retired Gen. Douglas Freeman, the infamous warrior who has proved his courage, made his enemies, and built his legend from body-strewn battlegrounds to the snake pits of Washington. Using a team of “retired” Special Forces operatives and a top-secret, still-unproven stealth attack craft, Freeman sets off to obliterate the source of the missiles, a weapons stockpile in North Korea. Some desktop warriors expect Freeman to fail — especially when an unexpected foe meets his team on the Sea of Japan. But Freeman won’t turn back even as his plan explodes in his face and the Pacific Rim roils over — because this old soldier can taste his ultimate reward…

Inspector Thomas Lynley of Scotland Yard, who first appeared in "A Great Deliverance", investigates the murder of a playwright at a Scottish country house hotel, where the members of a West End theatre company have assembled for the first reading of a controversial new play