"Mystery: Two men claim to be Simon Warwick, heir of millionaire Lord Charlton. Then one of them turns up dead." --

Stanley Elkin's short comic novel "The Living End" is a nifty, nasty blast against the Judeo-Christian tradition. By hilariously excoriating the conventional vision of the afterlife, Elkin (1930-1995) uses his fandangoing language to accuse God of cultivating an imagination that's sadistic rather than sublime. Elkin's satiric misanthropy is worthy of Twain, though it falls short of Swift. The action in "The Living End" jumps from Heaven to Hell and...

Henry the duck tries all sorts of methods to rid his kitchen of an ant before his guest comes to supper.

A sassy Siamese cat stows away on a hot air balloon and ends uptaking a fur-raising flight across the mountains.

From an Edgar award–winning British crime novelist, an Inspector Castang thriller that "has it all-politics, sex, metaphysics" (The New York Times). It's a quiet night at the Police Judiciare in Detective Castang's provincial corner of France when a prominent politician stumbles in, claiming he was in a car accident he can barely recall, with a passenger who is his mistress-and is very likely dead. But when the unorthodox inspector's astute investigation...

"Henry the Duck is a very good neighbor. Even though he has never babysat, when his friend Clara asks him to watch her nephew he says yes. How hard can it be? But then, one neighbor after another asks Henry to babysit and before he knows it, he's in the middle of five crying, crawling, out-of-control babies!" -- Amazon.com.

A crossword puzzle compiled by a mischievous group of mystery writers leads Chief Superintendent Henry Tibbett and his wife into a murder case involving a horrifying twenty-year-old secret.

"The death of Curtis Gregson had left his wife very rich. It had also left her marked in the public's mind as "the woman who poisoned her husband." A jury had acquitted her, of course. But the suspicion remained. Now she wanted Gamadge to clear her name--and to keep her alive. For some very nasty anonymous notes to Mrs. Gregson had been followed by several equally nasty, and nearly fatal, "accidents." Gamadge quickly lined up five suspects. Murder...

"Strange things were going on at Underhill, the Hutter family's country estate. One of the weekend guests blamed it on malevolent spirits, accidently unleashed by Florence Hutter Mason's fiddling with a Ouija board. Gamadge agreed the ominous messages typed into the manuscript copy of Florrie's novel were evil, but he knew they weren't put there by a spectral hand. And he feared that somewhere between the formal gardens outside and the servants' quarters...

The ninth Inspector Castang murder mystery is "a heady pleasure" in which "learning the identity of the miscreant is only one of the delights" (Publishers Weekly). Recently promoted to Commissaire of a small province in northeastern France, Inspector Castang must tread lightly when the wife of a prominent wine merchant is murdered. Especially since the victim's sister is very well-connected in political circles. Castang has his work cut out for...