"Harry Booth started stealing at nine to keep a roof over his ailing mother's head, slipping into luxurious, empty homes at night to find items he could trade for precious cash. When his mother finally succumbed to cancer, he left Chicago--but kept up his nightwork. Wandering from the Outer Banks to Savannah to New Orleans, he dons new identities and stays careful, observant, distant. He can't afford to attract attention--or get attached. Still, he...

Considered the first true detective story Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868) is a 19th-century British epistolary novel. Originally serialized in Charles Dickens' magazine All the Year Round, it introduced many hallmarks of detective fiction, including an English country house setting, bungling local policemen, and a large number of false suspects. In it, Rachel Verinder, a young English woman, inherits a large Indian diamond on her eighteenth birthday...

Thirteen-year-old Lemony Snicket begins his apprenticeship with S. Theodora Markson of the secretive V.F.D. in the tiny dot of a town called Stain'd By The Sea, where he helps investigate the theft of a statue.

When professional house-sitter Lila Emerson witnesses a murder/suicide from her current apartment-sitting job, life as she knows it takes a dramatic turn. Suddenly, the woman with no permanent ties finds herself almost wishing for one. Artist Ashton Archer knows his brother isn't capable of violence--against himself or others. He recruits Lila, the only eyewitness, to help him uncover what happened. Ash longs to paint her as intensely as he hungers...

As Thanksgiving approaches, Cheryl stumbles across the startling discovery: someone is sleeping in Naomi and Seth Miller's winter buggy and helping himself to food from their farmhouse cellar. Could it be the same person who is stealing from businesses up and down Sugarcreek's Main Street? Despite Naomi's insistence on extending the hand of hospitality to their unknown guest, when items are stolen from the Swiss Miss gift shop, Cheryl intends to get...

Stephanie Plum, Trenton's hardest working, most underappreciated bounty hunter, is offered a freelance assignment that seems simple enough. Local jeweler Martin Rabner wants her to locate his former security guard, Andy Manley (a.k.a. Nutsy), who he is convinced stole a fortune in diamonds out of his safe. Stephanie is also looking for another troubled man, Duncan Dugan, a fugitive from justice arrested for robbing the same jewelry store on the same...

After she loses her engagement ring and her phone is stolen during a hotel fire drill, Poppy Wyatt, discovering an abandoned phone in a trash can, crashes into the life of the phone's owner, businessman Sam Roxton, when she uses his phone to make her wedding preparations. I 've lost it. The only thing in the world I wasn't supposed to lose. My engagement ring. It has been in Magnus's family for three generations. And now the very same day his parents...

It was the halo that caught her heart between beats and made her pause to take notice. When Alessi Moore drives her red Mustang convertible into town, she wonders if this could be the place she was meant to find, a place to settle down. But when her convertible and all she owns is stolen, she is filled with doubt.

One day, Mac (smartest boy in his class in a small town in California) receives a telephone call from the Queen of England, recruiting him to find the crown jewels (well, actually just the Coronation Spoon) and so Mac embarks on his first adventure as a secret agent--with the assurance that the Queen will give him a note excusing him from school.

Detective Nick Belsey is broke. Now it looks like he's out of a job - something happened last night, something with the boss' wife ... At dawn, on what should be the last day of Belsey's career, Hampstead CID is ghostly quiet. Belsey checks the overnight files. There's a missing-person report. But this one's different. It's on the Bishops Avenue, London's richest street. Belsey sees a scam, an escape route. But someone else has got there first. Furiously...