A beautiful heiress has been found dead on a train. A playboy has been stabbed through the heart during a costume ball. An elderly woman suspects that she is being slowly poisoned to death. A prince fears for his reputation when his fiancÉe is embroiled in another man's murder. A forgotten recluse makes headlines after he is shot in the head. Who but Agatha Christie could concoct such canny crimes? Who but Belgian detective Hercule Poirot could possibly solve them? It's a challenge to be met—in a triumph of detection.

Best known as the original screenwriter of Blade Runner, author Hampton Fancher makes his debut with this extraordinary collection that bears all of the hallmarks that have made him beloved to film fans. These are stories about people and places that exist just outside our perceptions of space and time: in “Narrowing the Divide,” an escaped lab rat winds up in a philosophical conversation with a man whose wife sleeps in the next room; in “Cargot,” a failed actor is reincarnated as a garden snail and avenges himself with a Hollywood producer’s wife; and in “The Black Weasel,” a washed-up bartender finds an unlikely traveling partner in a slow-witted drifter with a suspicious bankroll. These are also stories about survival and instinct, with elements of the absurd and the sublime. The Shape of the Final Dog is a rare literary work that is mordantly funny, deftly written, and bound to delight and entertain.

A dead heiress on a train, a murdered recluse, a wealthy playboy slain at a costume ball are but a few of the unfortunate victims of confounding crimes committed in the pages of Agatha Christie’s The Under Dog and Other Stories, a superior collection of short mystery fiction all featuring Hercule Poirot as the investigator. A beautiful heiress has been found dead on a train. A playboy has been stabbed through the heart during a costume ball. An elderly woman suspects that she is being slowly poisoned to death. A prince fears for his reputation when his fiancée is embroiled in another man's murder. A forgotten recluse makes headlines after he is shot in the head. Who but Agatha Christie could concoct such canny crimes? Who but Belgian detective Hercule Poirot could possibly solve them? It's a challenge to be met—in a triumph of detection.

When her course at Connecticut's classiest dog obedience school is interrupted by a murder, amateur sleuth Melanie Travis, accompanied by companion Sam Driver, enters the championship circuit and discovers a wealth of suspects. Reprint.

In the final years of his life, Chekhov had reached the height of his powers as a dramatist, and also produced some of the stories that rank among his masterpieces. The poignant 'The Lady with the Little Dog' and 'About Love' examine the nature of love outside of marriage - its romantic idealism and the fear of disillusionment. And in stories such as 'Peasants', 'The House with the Mezzanine' and 'My Life' Chekhov paints a vivid picture of the conditions of the poor and of their powerlessness in the face of exploitation and hardship. With the works collected here, Chekhov moved away from the realism of his earlier tales - developing a broader range of characters and subject matter, while forging the spare minimalist style that would inspire such modern short-story writers as Hemingway and Faulkner.