Murder Short & Sweet

With murder as the unifying theme, this collection of classic stories brings together the best of the genre and features such celebrated authors as Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell, A. Conan Doyle, O. Henry, Donald E. Westlake, Ellery Queen, Roald Dahl, John Updike, Edgar Allan Poe, and Lawrence Block. With stories compiled from the last century and selections that are more literary than hard boiled, this compendium features a bevy of colorful characters, including a jealous wife who kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb before cooking and serving the evidence to investigators and a novelist who offs his critics, one by one, in increasingly imaginative ways. These masterful stories—with motives that vary from hate and revenge to greed and the thrill of the act—are sure to excite any murder mystery maven.