Books with author Ellery.- QUEEN

King Bendigo is the wealthiest man alive. He has an enormous security detail on his private island, quite capable of dealing with international aggression. But not threats from within his own family. Fearing for his life, he hires brilliant detective Ellery Queen. The King's brother Judah makes no secret of wanting him dead. He even gives a date and a time on which he will commit the crime. So when the day comes, the King is kept in a hermetically sealed room while his brother is guarded by Ellery himself. But the King is still shot... This is the ultimate in locked door mysteries from a classic master of the genre.

[Read by Robert Fass]Anyone in the theater could have killed the lawyer, but only Ellery Queen, in his debut novel, can decipher the clue of the dead man's missing top hat.Despite the dismal Broadway season, Gunplay continues to draw crowds. A gangland spectacle, it's packed to the gills with action, explosions, and gunfire. In fact, Gunplay is so loud that no one notices the killing of Monte Field. In a sold-out theater, Field is found dead partway through the second act, surrounded by empty seats. The police hold the crowd and call for the one man who can untangle this daring murder: Inspector Richard Queen. With the help of his son Ellery, a bibliophile and novelist whose imagination can solve any crime, the Inspector attacks this seemingly impenetrable mystery. Anyone in the theater could have killed the unscrupulous lawyer, and several had the motive.

At the 37th libel suit Thurlow Potts has brought to court to protect the family name, the family’s beleaguered lawyer Charlie Paxton loses the case. Thurlow seems driven beyond reason to protect the million dollar shoe business of his mother, Cornelia Potts, known to the press as the ‘Old Woman who Lived in a Shoe.’ But some people in the courtroom think Thurlow should be taken seriously, including Ellery Queen, who is looking on while waiting with his father, Inspector Queen of the New York Police Department, for another case. Afraid Thurlow will make good on his threats, Paxton begs Queen for help. Paxton’s fiancee is Thurlow’s sister, and she secures Queen an invitation to dinner, where Queen meets the extended and unusual Potts family. But before the meal ends, Thurlow challenges his younger brother to a duel, and not one, but two murders ensue. For the twin victims, and for Queen who must now solve the crimes, the fairytale is over.

In a successful series of novels and short stories that covered 42 years, "Ellery Queen" served as a joint pseudonym for cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee, as well as the name of the primary detective-hero they created. During the 1930s and much of the 1940s, that detective-hero was possibly the best known American fictional detective.

[Read by Mark Peckham]When a diabolical mystery comes calling, Ellery Queen is on the case. -- Once upon an evil time, there was a wicked old woman with a mammoth shoe company worth many millions of dollars, a henpecked husband, and six miserable children. Then one day death came visiting the vast Potts mansion -- and began claiming its inhabitants one by one. It was then that Ellery Queen was invited to sup on this nightmare brew of diabolical murder and baffling mystery -- in a case that made the most horrific crimes in his entire career seem like fairy tales. As he endeavors to solve the case, he tries to make sense of this family that defies rationality.