Erle Stanley Gardner

John Leland is arrested for fatally stabbing Iris Jantzen, stepmother of his fiancee, Anne Kimbro, who engages Mason to save her beloved. With Della Street and Paul Drake, the attorney searches for facts to refute the mass of evidence against Leland. But information about an earlier murder in the same house where Iris was killed further incriminates the accused, who repeatedly disappears while shrewd Mason, preparing for the trial, looks elsewhere...

"Private investigators Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, stars of five of Hard Case Crime's most popular novels, return to solve their toughest case yet. Hired to prevent a socialite from poisoning her husband, Donald Lam dreams up an ingenious scheme involving a carton of anchovy paste and a fictitious national ad campaign. But when the whole thing backfires spectacularly and bodies, witnesses, and suspects start piling up, it'll take every ounce of Donald's...

"Fourteen impossible crimes from the American masters of the form. For devotees of the Golden Age mystery, the impossible crime story represents the period’s purest form: it presents the reader with a baffling scenario (a corpse discovered in a windowless room locked from the inside, perhaps), lays out a set of increasingly confounding clues, and swiftly delivers an ingenious and satisfying solution. During the years between the two world wars,...