Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1837-1915), Victorian England's bestselling woman writer, blends Dickensian humor with chilling suspense in this "exuberantly campy" (Kirkus Reviews) mystery. The novel features Jabez North, a manipulative orphan who becomes a ruthless killer; Valerie de Cevennes, a stunning heiress who falls into North's diabolical trap; and Mr. Peters, a mute detective who communicates his brilliant reasoning through sign language.

This edition includes a critical Afterword and endnotes by Victorian scholar Dr. Chris Willis.

A village in Cornwall is thrown into turmoil after a young girl falls from a train to her death. The mystery deepens when clues link the girl to a double homicide committed ten years earlier. Braddons sensational novel takes readers to the estates of aristocrats, the haunts of tabloid writers, the homes of Bohemian artists, and the dark alleyways of Paris.

MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON (1835-1915) was one of the most prolific and popular authors of her day. She was responsible for no less than 80 novels, 9 plays, and dozens (perhaps hundreds) of short stories and articles, many of which were published pseudonymously in cheap and sensational magazine. Today Mary Elizabeth Braddon is remembered among fans of weird fiction for her classic horror and ghost stories, the most famous of which are collected herein. "At Chrighton Abbey" is a Christmas ghost story; "The Cold Embrace: is the story of a proud art student pursued by the ghost of a lover he...

Ten years ago, a shocking murder cut short a blossoming romance between beautiful young heiress Sibyl Higginson and her cousin Brandon Mountford. When Mountford, an epileptic subject to seizures and memory loss, awakened near a bloody corpse, he was forced to escape to avoid execution for the crime. The years passed, nothing was heard of Mountford, and it was supposed he had either died or fled the country.

A decade later, Sibyl, now Lady Penrith, is travelling along a desolate moor when a crazed man stops her carriage and hands her a scrawled note. Believing the note to be from Mountford,...

With Lady Audley's Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon had established herself, alongside Wilkie Collins and Mrs Henry Wood, as one of the ruling triumvirate of sensation novelists'. Aurora Floyd (1862-3), following hot on its heels, achieved almost equal popularity and notoriety.
Like Lady Audley, Aurora is a beautiful young woman bigamously married and threatened with exposure by a blackmailer. But in Aurora Floyd, and in many of the novels written in imitation of it, bigamy is little more than a euphemism, a device to enable the heroine, and vicariously the reader, to enjoy the forbidden...

Eighteen stories of the macabre and supernatural in this final volume from Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Lovers of the Victorian fiction of Wilkie Collins know that to discover his female counterpart they need look no further than the works of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. She was a prolific author of the kind of dark melodrama much loved by her contemporary audience and her most renowned work, 'Lady Audley's Secret, ' has been often dramatised, filmed and, indeed, has never been out of print from the time of its original publication. Never was the accolade, 'The Queen of Sensation' so well deserved...

More tales of intrigue, horror and the world beyond
Lovers of the Victorian fiction of Wilkie Collins know that to discover his female counterpart they need look no further than the works of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. She was a prolific author of the kind of dark melodrama much loved by her contemporary audience and her most renowned work, 'Lady Audley's Secret, ' has been often dramatised, filmed and, indeed, has never been out of print from the time of its original publication. Never was the accolade, 'The Queen of Sensation' so well deserved as it was by her. It is not unusual that a...

A second helping from the 'Queen of Sensation' and her dark imaginings
Lovers of the Victorian fiction of Wilkie Collins know that to discover his female counterpart they need look no further than the works of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. She was a prolific author of the kind of dark melodrama much loved by her contemporary audience and her most renowned work, 'Lady Audley's Secret, ' has been often dramatised, filmed and, indeed, has never been out of print from the time of its original publication. Never was the accolade, 'The Queen of Sensation' so well deserved as it was by her. It is not...

Eighteen stories of the macabre and supernatural in this final volume from Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Lovers of the Victorian fiction of Wilkie Collins know that to discover his female counterpart they need look no further than the works of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. She was a prolific author of the kind of dark melodrama much loved by her contemporary audience and her most renowned work, 'Lady Audley's Secret, ' has been often dramatised, filmed and, indeed, has never been out of print from the time of its original publication. Never was the accolade, 'The Queen of Sensation' so well deserved...

More tales of intrigue, horror and the world beyond
Lovers of the Victorian fiction of Wilkie Collins know that to discover his female counterpart they need look no further than the works of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. She was a prolific author of the kind of dark melodrama much loved by her contemporary audience and her most renowned work, 'Lady Audley's Secret, ' has been often dramatised, filmed and, indeed, has never been out of print from the time of its original publication. Never was the accolade, 'The Queen of Sensation' so well deserved as it was by her. It is not unusual that a...