The Civil War left its mark on Dr. John Turner. He turns his back on medicine and sees his unexpected inheritance in England as an opportunity to start over. But he never imagines how God intends to use his new role as lord of Ashford Hall or the beautiful woman he finds there to ease his troubled soul. A tragic loss led Penelope Howard to bury her heart and dreams in her work for the Hall and the village of Woodley. But the arrival of the new heir stirs not only her discarded longings but her compassion as well.

Ever since he made his first appearance in A Study In Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes has enthralled and delighted millions of fans throughout the world. Now Audible is proud to present Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, read by Stephen Fry. A lifelong fan of Doyle's detective fiction, Fry has narrated the definitive collection of Sherlock Holmes - four novels and four collections of short stories. And, exclusively for Audible, Stephen has written and narrated eight insightful introductions, one for each title.

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means “slave girl,” begins to collect other words discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.

The orphaned Elsie Camden learned as a girl that there were two kinds of wizards in the world: those who pay for the power to cast spells and those, like her, born with the ability to break them. But as an unlicensed magic user, her gift is a crime. Commissioned by an underground group known as the Cowls, Elsie uses her spellbreaking to push back against the aristocrats and help the common man. Elite magic user Bacchus Kelsey is one elusive spell away from his mastership when he catches Elsie breaking an enchantment. To protect her secret, Elsie strikes a bargain.

Lucy Scarpelli, an Italian dressmaker from New York, befriends socialite Rowena Langdon as she's making her summer wardrobe. It's an unlikely friendship, but one that Rowena encourages by inviting Lucy to the family mansion in Newport, Rhode Island. Grateful for Lucy's skill in creating clothes that hide her physical injury, Rowena encourages Lucy to dream of a better future.

It is 1940 and William, 12, Edmund, 11, and Anna, nine, aren't terribly upset by the death of the not-so-grandmotherly grandmother who has taken care of them since their parents died. But the children do need a guardian, and in the dark days of World War II London, those are in short supply, especially if they hope to stay together. Could the mass wartime evacuation of children from London to the countryside be the answer?

Edinburgh, 1911: When Maud McIntyre and her lady’s maid, Daisy, form a detective agency, they never dream their first case will take place at a glamorous house in the Scottish Highlands. But when the duchess of Duddingston, concerned that a notorious jewelry thief will target her lavish weekend party, employs Maud to go undercover as a guest to find the culprit, the agency has its first case to solve....

Julia Hollis’ opulent life in Victorian London crashes to pieces when her husband passes away. Worse, she is told by his bankers that he gambled away their fortune. Now the family’s hope rests on The Larkspur, an old abandoned coaching inn in the quaint village of Gresham. Driven by dread and her desire to provide for her children, Julia decides to turn the dilapidated inn into a lodging house. But can she - who was accustomed to servants attending to every need - do what needs to be done and cope when boarders begin arriving?

June 1933. Independent, young Kitty Underhay has been left in charge of her family’s hotel, The Dolphin, on the tranquil English coast. But when several rooms are broken into and searched, including Kitty’s own, she quickly realizes that something out of the ordinary is afoot at the hotel. Soon, rumors are flying in the cozy town that someone is on the hunt for a stolen ruby. A ruby that Kitty’s mother may well have possessed when she herself went missing during the Great War.

Twelve-year-old Myrtle Hardcastle has a passion for justice and a highly unconventional obsession with criminal science. Armed with her father’s law books and her mum’s microscope, Myrtle studies toxicology and keeps abreast of the latest developments in crime scene analysis. When her next-door neighbor, a wealthy spinster and eccentric breeder of rare flowers, dies under mysterious circumstances, Myrtle seizes her chance. With her unflappable governess, Miss Ada Judson, by her side, Myrtle takes it upon herself to prove Miss Wodehouse was murdered.

Constance Duncan has more important things on her mind than finding a husband - for herself, at any rate. Constance connects lonely hearts, and nothing will distract her from it - until she finds herself irresistibly drawn to a man of disastrously different views. Max Ensor is a politician whose outmoded attitudes outrage her - even as his powerful presence intrigues her. Clearly there is only one thing to do with such an exasperating man: convert him! Little does Constance know that Max has the same plan in mind for her....

England 1912. Danby Hall is the only home Lady Cecilia Bates has ever known. Despite the rigid rules of etiquette and her mother's fervent desire to see her married off, Cecilia can't imagine life anywhere else. But now, with an agricultural depression sweeping the countryside, the Bates family's possession of the hall is suddenly in peril. A possible solution arrives in the form of the imperious American heiress Annabel Clarke. The Bates and their staff arrange a grand house party upon the heiress's arrival. Then a guest dies after sipping from a glass meant for Annabel....

New York City, 1899. Tillie Pembroke’s sister lies dead, her body drained of blood and with two puncture wounds on her neck. Bram Stoker’s new novel, Dracula, has just been published, and Tillie’s imagination leaps to the impossible: the murderer is a vampire. But it can’t be - can it? A ravenous reader and researcher, Tillie has something of an addiction to truth, and she won’t rest until she unravels the mystery of her sister’s death.

December 1899. After the death of her beloved grandmother, Cleopatra Fox moves into the luxury hotel owned by her estranged uncle in the hopes of putting hardship and loneliness behind her. But the poisoning of a guest on Christmas eve throws her new life, and the hotel, into chaos. Cleo quickly realizes no one can be trusted, not Scotland Yard and especially not the hotel’s charming assistant manager.

India Steele is desperate. Her father is dead, her fiancé took her inheritance, and no one will employ her, despite years working for her watchmaker father. Indeed, the other London watchmakers seem frightened of her. Alone, poor, and at the end of her tether, India takes employment with the only person who’ll accept her–an enigmatic and mysterious man from America. A man who possesses a strange watch that rejuvenates him when he’s ill.

A breakdown in the strategic balance during the last decade of the Cold War prompts the Kremlin into launching an elaborate plan to insert a "dirty bomb" in the island of Manhattan, and blow it off the face of the Earth in in the event of nuclear war. Marlon Berkowitz, a retired special forces colonel, is selected by the U.S. State Department of Defense to shape and lead The Quadrille, a shadow-network of expendable undercover operatives tasked with the elimination of all Soviet nuclear saboteurs operating on U.S. soil.

On New Year's Day 1891, Sherlock Holmes summons the limping street urchin, Wiggins, to Baker Street and decrees he must die at dawn. Wiggins, however, has other plans. To fulfil the dying wish of his mother, Irene Adler, he schemes with his two formidable American aunties to keep two important facts from the great detective: Mrs. Hudson is actually his Aunt Grizelda, and he is both Holmes' child and a girl pretending to be a boy. Through a series of mysterious letters Adler bequeathed to Wiggins, the dark backstory of her parents and all their long-kept family secrets unravel.

Holmes and Watson are on the trail of seemingly unrelated deaths preceded by sudden unexplained madness as they work to solve the case of the abominable worm. Are the deaths murders? And if so, what is the motive and who is responsible? Can Holmes and Watson solve the mystery of the abominable worm before her Majesty's navy experiences an unprecedented two-fold loss. Rebecca St. John has established herself as a force to be reckoned with in London's mysterious spiritual world and the hidden world of London's private clubs. But she wants more.

"There is a spirit that moves amongst us. They call him the Messenger of Death. And tonight... tonight... he called my name." The Loxworths are a family of clairvoyant mediums. Sitters at their seances are dying. Their deaths predicted by a mysterious entity known as The Messenger of Death. Holmes, Watson, and Lestrade must stop the deaths, before someone close to them becomes the next victim.

Sherlock Holmes has been a beloved character from his first story, and his mystique endures to the modern age in print and on screen, but he has had a long life in the theater, as well. Where did it begin? What are the themes, stories, and characterizations that make his stage presence unique and just as enduring?

When a half-naked man is found gibbering on the moor, Sherlock Holmes uncovers a series of bizarre murders. At their heart lies a shadowy figure known only as The Sorcerer. He can talk to the dead, they say. He can bend any will to his own. Even a will as formidable as the detective's. The investigation leads from Dartmoor to Ireland and, ultimately, back to one of the most terrifying scenes of his career. Can Holmes survive the Reichenbach Falls a second time?

"Of all the conundrums that have puzzled Sherlockian scholars, few have been thornier than the "vexed question" of Dr. Watson's wives. In these ten stories, listeners will meet the all-but-unknown women who preceded and succeeded Mary Morstan, as well as learning more about poor Mary's fate. Other cases involve Our Heroes with all levels of Victorian society, including prime ministers and prostitutes, aristocrats and generals, amateur sleuths and Scotland Yarders, composers, novelists, and even ghosts.

An eclectic mix of eight stories drawn from the annals of the MX Series of New Sherlock Holmes stories and the many Holmes anthologies of Belanger Books, all from the pen of emerging pastiche author Stephen Herczeg.

Emily Watson lives in a quaint English manor house with her twin sister, confined to a 20-mile radius around the estate for reasons she has never known. When the mysterious Professor Moriarty comes to visit and her sister goes missing, she discovers she is the half-sister of Dr. John Watson. Traveling to London to meet him, she finds that he is the biographer and flatmate of famed consulting detective Sherlock Holmes, in whom Professor Moriarty has expressed a sinister interest.

What is a crimson trail? Is it blood? Or paint? Or yarn? Why would Sherlock Holmes revisit a previously solved case? How could an open window be important and how can a house be blackmailed? Dr. John Watson reveals the answers to these questions in The Crimson Trail and Other Stories along with cases involving the disappearance of a poet's intended, a Christmas card clue, a missing tiara, a caped murderer, a vampire attack, and a mythical moor creature.

Are librarians meek and mild bookish types with orthopedic shoes and granny glasses? Or are they ruthless killers with voracious appetites for wine, women, and song? Can a young widow solve a murder with the help of a Chicago policeman and an affinity for Sherlock Holmes? The Murder in the Library reveals all. It is elementary, my dears.

This is the story of Oscar Slater, a Jewish immigrant in Glasgow, Scotland and two fellow Scottish scammers, Helen Lambie and Patrick Nugent. In the Christmas season of 1908, the trio conspired to rob an elderly, wealthy lady of her diamonds, and, in the course of which burglary, Oscar Slater murdered her on December 21, 1908.

The fog, the mystery, the intrigue of 19th Century London, the incomparable team of Holmes and Watson, the brilliant deductions, the twisting plots, and the unimagined solutions—all these elements are accounted for in The Business of Baker Street, a collection of five new Sherlock Holmes stories. Each tribute tale respects the renowned style of Arthur Conan Doyle, and every story lures the listener into the entrancing world of Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes thrives on danger. Sudden knife attacks, being stalked, and facing a network of assassins present little more than a cheery break in the monotony. But the enigmatic Lady Beatrice presents danger of a different kind. Is she a murderer or a potential victim? Or something even more perilous? Uncovering her secrets could change Holmes's life forever, and in ways even he cannot anticipate.

Sherlock Holmes, the best-known detective (sorry, consulting detective) on Earth, celebrates his 160th birthday on January 6, 2014. As a tribute to his genius, and to mark the occasion, The Holmes Sutra is presented (by a crazed fan) as: a compilation of 160 mantras (aphorisms/slogans/sayings - call them what you will) - some original, some canonical, some based on various print/media adaptations - that are aimed to make Sherlock Holmes (and his fans) smile and a test of the readers' Holmes Mania Quotient (HMQ).