Ngaio Marsh

It was planned as an act of charity: a new piano for the parish hall, an amusing play to finance the gift. But its execution was doomed when Miss Campanula sat down to play....

It was a horrible death - Maurice Questing was lured into a pool of boiling mud and left there to die. Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn...

It began as an entertainment: eight people, many of them enemies, gathered for a winter weekend by a host with a love for theatre....

When Lord Pastern Bagott takes up with the hot music of Breezy Bellair and his Boys, his disapproving wife Cecile has more than usual to be unhappy about....

Who in the quiet village of Chipping would kill wealthy spinster Idris Campanula? Plenty of people—among them her fellow cast members from a troubled charity production....

The stage is set for one of Roderick Alleyn's most baffling cases....

A body in the back of a taxi begins an elegantly constructed mystery....

Rickie Alleyn, son of the famed detective Roderick Alleyn, had taken to the peaceful Channel Island village of Deep Cove to write his book....

Lord Pastern fired his revolver. The figure in the spotlight fell and the coup-de-theatre had become murder. Could Inspector Alleyn believe Pastern had let hatred of his future son-in-law go too far? Or would the tangle of jealousies and blackmail among the guests reveal another murderer?...

Dreams of stardom had lured Martyn Tarne from faraway New Zealand to make the dreary, soul-destroying round of West End agents and managers in search of work....

Now Sir Henry was dead, after a large and lethal birthday dinner of champagne and crayfish, and after changing his will in favor of his glamorous young fiancee....

On a cold February night, the police find the third corpse on the quayside in the Pool of London, her body covered with flower petals and pearls....

Peregrine Jay, owner of the Dolphin Theatre, is putting on a magnificent production of Macbeth, the play that, superstition says, always brings bad luck....

When the President of Ng'ombwana proposes to dispense with the usual security arrangements on an official visit to London Chief Superintendent Alleyn, is called in to try to persuade him otherwise....

Wealthy Sir Hubert Handesley's original and lively weekend house parties are deservedly famous....

New Zealand theatrical manager Alfred Meyer wanted to celebrate his wife’s birthday in style. The piece de résistance would be the jeroboam of champagne....

Sir John Phillips, the Harley Street surgeon, and his beautiful nurse, Jane Harden, are almost too nervous to operate....

The poison was cyanide, slipped into the sacred wine of ecstasy just before it was presented to Miss Cara Quayne at the House of the Sacred Flame....

When an inhabitant of the small community os Swevenings is found brutally murdered, beside him is the freshly killed trout....

On the night of the embassy's reception, the house and grounds are stiff with police....