The sixth and final book in the Inspector Alan Grant series. One of Tey's finest novels, The Singing Sands centres on the mysterious death of a young man on a train, and the cryptic poem that gradually reveals the greed and envy behind his demise. "He stumbled up the steps and across the bridge ... great bursts of steam billowed up round him from below, noises clanged and echoed from the dark vault about him. They were all wrong about hell, he thought....

Considered the first true detective story Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868) is a 19th-century British epistolary novel. Originally serialized in Charles Dickens' magazine All the Year Round, it introduced many hallmarks of detective fiction, including an English country house setting, bungling local policemen, and a large number of false suspects. In it, Rachel Verinder, a young English woman, inherits a large Indian diamond on her eighteenth birthday...