Books by Ngaio Marsh

Dead Water

by Ngaio Marsh, C. A. Fletcher

Faith healing can be fatal

When intrepid octogenarian Emily Pride inherits an island, and the miraculous properties of its "Pixie Falls" healing spring, she is shocked by all the vulgarity. The admission fee, the Gifte Shoppe, the folksy Festival, the neon sign on the pub, all must go! But local opposition runs high, death threats pile up, and Miss Emily's old friend Superintendent Roderick Alleyn arrives just in time to discover a drowned body and a set of murder motives that seem to spring eternal.

Dead Water

by Ngaio Marsh, C. A. Fletcher

In a chilling blend of folk horror and twisting suspense, this modern masterpiece depicts isolation and dread within a small island community.

There's something in the water...

On the edge of the Northern Atlantic lies a remote island. The islanders are an outwardly harmonious community—but all have their own secrets, some much darker than others. And when a strange disorder begins to infect them all, those secrets come to light.

Ferry service fails and contact with the mainland is lost. Rumors begin to swirl as a temporary inconvenience grows into nightmarish ordeal. The fabric of the once tight-knit island is unnervingly torn apart—and whatever the cause, the question soon stops being how or why it happened, but who, if anyone, will survive.

Death In A White Tie

by Ngaio Marsh

The Social Event of the Season Has Death on Its Guest List

No one is more popular on London's champagne-and-caviar that charming Lord Gospell. However, on the morning after the year's most glittering ball, someone finds a reason to asphyxiate "Bunchy" Gospell in a taxi headed across town. Scotland Yard's Inspector Roderick Alleyn is called in to find out who killed his old friend, and to cleverly unwind a tangle of murky secrets that began far from the ballroom floor.

Scales of Justice

by Ngaio Marsh

The bestselling author and creator of the hit Netflix drama The Stranger ratchets up the tension as sports agent Myron Bolitar gets mixed up in some international intrigue in this #1 New York Times bestseller.

With an early morning phone call, an old flame wakes Myron Bolitar from sleep. Terese Collins is in Paris, and she needs his help. In her debt, Myron makes the trip, and learns of a decade-long secret: Terese once had a daughter who died in a car accident. Now it seems as though that daughter may be alive—and tied to a sinister plot with shocking global implications....

Hand in Glove (Inspector Roderick Alleyn, 22)

by Ngaio Marsh

No one could doubt that Mr. Percival Pyke Period was genuinely distraught to hear that his neighbor, Harry Cartell, had turned up dead in a ditch. But how is it that Mr. Percival Pyke came to write the letter of condolence before the body was found? And how did Mr. Cartell inspire such violence? Yes he was boring and stuffy, but who would kill a man for the crime of being a bad conversationalist?

Money in the Morgue

by Ngaio Marsh

Inspector Alleyn just wants to write a letter to his wife, but World War II keeps intruding with war-work that has brought Alleyn to a hospital in New Zealand’s hinterlands, and it’s the war that has left the hospital swimming in convalescing soldiers. A storm has killed the electrical power, leaving Alleyn, the soldiers, the medical staff and all stranded in the dark…with a murderer.

Enter a Murderer (Inspector Roderick Alleyn, 2)

by Ngaio Marsh

Ngaio Marsh was, among other things, a well-respected theatrical producer (having started out as an actress), and her passion for and knowledge of the theater was displayed in many of Alleyn’s adventures. In Enter a Murderer, the Inspector has been invited to an opening night, a new play in which two characters quarrel and then struggle for a gun, with predictably sad results. Even sadder, the gun was not, in fact, loaded with blanks.

A Grave Mistake (Inspector Roderick Alleyn, 30) (Volume 30)

by Ngaio Marsh

Upper Quintern is the sort of Little English Village that is home mostly to the very rich and the servants who make their lives delightful. But Sybil Foster’s life is not delightful; exhausted from her various family stresses – a daughter, for instance, who wants to marry a man without a title! – Sybil takes herself off to a local hotel that specializes in soothing shattered nerves. When she’s killed, Inspector Alleyn has a real puzzler on his hands.

A Man Lay Dead (Inspector Roderick Alleyn, 1) (Volume 1)

by Ngaio Marsh

Ngaio Marsh was one of the queens (she has been called the empress) of England’s Golden Age of mystery fiction. And in true Golden Age fashion, her oeuvre opens with, yes, a country-house party between the two world wars – servants bustling, gin flowing, the gentlemen in dinner jackets, the ladies all slink and smolder. Even more delicious: The host, Sir Hubert Handesley, has invented a new and especially exciting version of that beloved parlor entertainment, The Murder Game.

Death in Ecstasy

by Ngaio Marsh

Ahhh, prussic acid, that hallmark of classic Golden Age mysteries. Did lovely Cara Quoyne get a whiff of the bitter almonds as she raised the goblet to her lips? We'll never know: With a single sip she transported herself to the Hereafter. At least, that's the romantic view. But Inspector Alleyn has little interest in romance; he's investigating a murder. Cara was a deeply spiritual young woman, a novice with the House of the Sacred Flame. It seems, however, that somebody was operating from very un-spiritual motivations.

Photo Finish (Inspector Roderick Alleyn, 31) (Volume 31)

by Ngaio Marsh

Photo Finish’s dead diva, the soprano Isabella Sommita, was so widely loathed that the problem is less a lack of plausible suspects than an embarrassment of options. Though the grand country-house – and with it, the country-house murder – was history by 1980, when Photo Finish was originally published, Dame Ngaio got around the problem by setting the story on a lavish island estate, cut off from the mainland by a sudden storm. Happily, Inspector Alleyn is among the guests, and can take charge in the coppers’ absence. The penultimate book in the series, Photo Finish is also one of only four books set in Marsh’s native New Zealand.

Last Ditch (Inspector Roderick Alleyn, 29) (Volume 29)

by Ngaio Marsh

Astonishingly, this "Inspector Alleyn" mystery was written in 1977, and Inspector Alleyn has a 21 year old son who gets into trouble in the Channel Islands, necessitating the arrival of Roderick Alleyn himself to sort out the colorful locals and solve the mystery.

Tied Up in Tinsel (Inspector Roderick Alleyn, 27) (Volume 27)

by Ngaio Marsh

It’s murder at a country-house party; a Christmas party, in fact, where all the guests are eccentric, and all the household staff are former criminals. Which of them caused the disappearance of one of the players in the holiday pageant? Luckily, both Inspector Alleyn and his wife, Agatha Troy, are on hand to wrap up the case.

Light Thickens (Inspector Roderick Alleyn, 32) (Volume 32)

by Ngaio Marsh

Ngaio Marsh wisely set this last novel in her mystery series in the world of theater. It was in this setting that she produced some of her best work, and Light Thickens is among her best. This time, tragedy strikes during a production of Macbeth, reportedly a cursed play Marsh herself had staged many times in her career as a theater producer and director.

Bodies from the Library 3

by Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, Nicholas Blake

This anthology of rare stories of crime and suspense brings together 18 tales from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction for the first time in book form, including uncollected stories by Ngaio Marsh and John Dickson Carr.

The Golden Age of detective fiction had begun inauspiciously with the publication of E.C. Bentley's schismatic Trent's Last Case in 1913, but it hit its stride in 1920 when both Agatha Christie and Freeman Wills Crofts - latterly crowned queen and king of the genre - had crime novels published for the first time. They ushered in two decades of exemplary mystery writing, the era of the whodunit, the impossible crime and the locked-room mystery, with stories that have thrilled and baffled generations of readers.

This new volume in the Bodies from the Library series features the work of 18 prolific authors who, like Christie and Crofts, saw their popularity soar during the Golden Age. Aside from novels, they all wrote short fiction - stories, serials and plays - and although most of them have been collected in books over the last 100 years, here are the ones that got away...

In this book you will encounter classic series detectives including Colonel Gore, Roger Sheringham, Hildegarde Withers and Henri Bencolin; Hercule Poirot solves 'The Incident of the Dog's Ball'; Roderick Alleyn returns to New Zealand in a recently discovered television drama by Ngaio Marsh; and Dorothy L. Sayers' chilling 'The House of the Poplars' is published for the first time.

With a full-length novella by John Dickson Carr and an unpublished radio script by Cyril Hare, this diverse collection concludes with some early 'flash fiction' commissioned by Collins' Crime Club in 1938. Each mini story had to feature an orange, resulting in six very different tales from Peter Cheyney, Ethel Lina White, David Hume, Nicholas Blake, John Rhode and - in his only foray into writing detective fiction - the publisher himself, William Collins.