Collection: Fiction

The first story, Rain, was written in 1920 in Hong Kong and the last story was written in New York in 1945. Maugham indicates that he has grouped the stories in one particular country so the reader can take his bearings in the land he chose to lead him to

Two children meet the fairy Puck who enables them to witness events from English history

Only nine when she is orphaned and sent to live with an unloving aunt, Jane spends miserable, lonely years at boarding school before becoming a governess in the home of a mysterious man. A classic story.

When the body of a girl is found, Detective Edgar Stephens is reminded of a magic trick, the Zig Zag Girl. The inventor of the trick, Max Mephisto, is an old friend of Edgar. Max is reluctant to get involved until he finds out he knows the dead girl.

George Mallory once told a reporter that he wanted to climb Mt. Everest, “because it’s there.” On his third attempt he was last seen six hundred feet from the top. His body was found in 1999, and it still remains a mystery whether he reached the summit....

Manchester: Having survived a near-fatal attack, DC Janet Scott is quietly falling apart. Best friend and colleague DC Rachel Bailey is reeling from a love affair gone bad. DCI Gill Murray is having family problems threatening to tip her over the edge.

1963. The year the Beatles first top the charts. The year Martin Luther King has a dream. The year Truman Bird moves his family from their home in Brighton to a dilapidated caravan in the Ashdown Forest - then disappears...

Stephanie Plum is getting desperate. She's running out of leads in the search for Jimmy Poletti, who was caught selling more than cars out of his New Jersey dealership. Even cop Joe Morelli is struggling to find the criminal wheeler and dealer.

Investigator Vissarion Lom, has been summoned to Mirgorod in order to catch a terrorist. Lom discovers the capital to be more corrupted than he imagined: a murky world of secret police and revolutionaries, cabaret clubs and doomed artists...

When massive, intelligent aliens from Mars touch down in Victorian England and threaten to destroy the civilized world, humanity's vaunted knowledge proves to be of little use...