Disaster
6 total works
The Lusitania’s final voyage is a newsman’s dream. First come the torpedo warnings. Then come the murders… Journalist and mystery writer Willard Huntington Wright boards the Lusitania in pursuit of a hot story. Under the guise of conducting interviews with prominent passengers, his real assignment is to investigate rumors that the luxury liner is carrying illicit cargo for the British war effort against Germany. But Wright, traveling under the pseudonym S.S. Van Dine, isn’t the only passenger with an ulterior motive. Hours after the ship receives torpedo threats, three German stowaways are found murdered. And Wright suspects the deaths are part of a larger conspiracy. Comparing clues and matching wits with Detective Philomina Vance, the pair must solve the murders before the killer can sabotage the entire ship. Recreating the days up to the ship’s fatal encounter with a German U-boat, The Lusitania Murders is historical fiction at its entertaining best.
Orson Welles is the bombastic wonder boy of radio and stage. But is he also a murderer? Walter Gibson—creator of pulp superhero the Shadow—travels to New York City to collaborate on a script with Welles, star of the radio show The Mercury Theatre on the Air. The young Welles is a charming but difficult taskmaster who relishes dramatic blowouts with friends, lovers, and colleagues. So when a dead body is found in the studio minutes before the live broadcast of The War of the Worlds, Gibson knows Welles will be the New York Police Department’s number one suspect. Gibson has exactly one hour—while Welles is on the air enacting the infamous hoax story of a Martian invasion—to find the real murderer and clear the radio star’s name. With its brilliant reconstruction of the broadcast that hoodwinked the nation, The War of the Worlds Murder is a paean to radio’s golden age.
How the Hindenburg went from luxury airship to gargantuan fireball wasn’t the only mystery surrounding the zeppelin’s fatal flight. First came the murder. When a passenger vanishes during the Hindenburg’s trans-Atlantic voyage from Frankfurt to New Jersey, mystery writer Leslie Charteris is asked to use his knowledge of the criminal mind to quietly pinpoint the killer. Charteris is famous for his fictional detective, the Saint, who extracts riches as well as vengeance from evildoers in true Robin Hood fashion. But in this case, the villain turns out to be the murder victim himself—a Nazi spy. And the list of passengers who might want him dead is long. Suspecting that sabotaging the German airship is the killer’s true aim, Charteris must solve the murder before innocent lives are engulfed in flames. Reconstructing the zeppelin’s fatal flight on the eve of World War II, The Hindenburg Murders proves that Max Allan Collins is the master of hard-boiled historical fiction.
Edgar Rice Burroughs created the wildly popular Tarzan of the Apes and John Carter of Mars, but the exploits of his heroes cannot rival the writer’s own explosive adventure, sparked by the tragic murder of an exotic young beauty on a moon-swept Honolulu beach. The killing is written off as the tragic result of a lovers’ quarrel, but Burroughs suspects that the alluring half-Japanese singer was executed by espionage agents. It’s December 6, 1941. War with Japan is looming, and Burroughs has reason to suspect an attack on Oahu is imminent. Was the songstress silenced to prevent her from “singing” about certain sinister plans? As Burroughs and his son Hully search for clues and track down suspects, all signs point to the next day—Sunday—as the perfect time for a Japanese invasion. But the thought of such devastation raining down on paradise seems almost unbelievable…. Set against the catastrophic aerial strike that led the United States into another world war, The Pearl Harbor Murders effortlessly mixes hard- hitting action and exotic romance in this gripping untold chapter from our nation’s most tragic day.
By day, she’s Mrs. Mallowan, hospital pharmacist. By night, she’s Agatha Christie, queen of crime. Doing her part for the war effort, Agatha dispenses medicine in shell- shocked London. But the world’s most renowned mystery writer is troubled. Compared to the horrors of World War II, her detective novels seem trivial and quaint. When a Jack the Ripper–style murderer strikes, Agatha lobbies her friend, forensics expert Sir Bernard Spilsbury, to take her to the crime scenes. But the killings are far more gruesome than any that her fictional detectives have ever solved. Can a crime writer also be a crime fighter? Joining forces with London’s top investigators, Agatha risks her life to stop the monstrous serial killer. With this ripped-from-the-headlines mystery, author Max Allan Collins presents a blood-stained valentine to the most celebrated author of detective fiction.
When a passenger is found dead inside a locked cabin aboard the opulent Titanic, it’s a crime worthy of “the Thinking Machine,” the popular fictional investigator who solves mysteries using formidable logic. So who better to crack this real-life case than author Jacques Futrelle, the man behind America’s favorite detective? On board for a romantic getaway with his wife, Futrelle agrees to conduct a stealth inquiry. The list of suspects on the Titanic’s first-class deck is long and includes the brightest lights from high society, each with no shortage of dark secrets. As the mammoth ship speeds across the Atlantic toward its doom, Futrelle races to uncover which passenger has a secret worth killing for—before the murderer strikes again. Set in the days leading up to the luxury liner’s tragic sinking, this historical thriller is a dazzling blend of fact and fiction that will enthrall readers with page-turning revelations and Titanic lore.