On a cold and stormy night in Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy, Richard Marwood returns after a mysterious and long disappearance. While his rich uncle aids him in starting a new life, his reappearance is quickly upended after he is apparently framed for murder. Meanwhile, Jabez North—prodigal son of Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy—schemes to make his fortunes by any means possible.
M. E. Braddon · Mystery · 50 ch
Following the events of the Wilmington Massacre of 1898 and the sensationalist news reports and novels that framed the events as a race riot incited by members of the black community, The Marrow of Tradition was written as a critical response to these harmful reports and provided a perspective that had otherwise been ignored. Developed out of the stories and accounts provided by members of the black community in Wilmington and from his own experience growing up and living in North Carolina, the novel is a probable accounting of the events leading up to and surrounding the Wilmington massacre. On a hot and sultry night, Major Carteret sits anxiously beside his wife, Olivia, as she enters early labor.
Charles W. Chesnutt · Drama · 38 ch
Gilbert Standerton learns that he has been disinherited by his cantankerous uncle, and is forced to find a way to provide for his newly wedded high-society wife. After quitting his appointment at the Foreign Office, he develops a new interest in the stock market, and takes an avid interest in the antics of a gang of safe-cracking burglars. His wife becomes concerned as he frequently begins staying out late at night, and shows an unusual interest in a particular musical melody despite having lost interest in all of his other music interests.
Edgar Wallace · Adventure · 17 ch
A young woman in 17th century Holland inadvertently overhears the details of a plot to kill a political figure. The principal figures in the plot, one of whom is her brother and another her former lover, hire an insolent English mercenary to kidnap her to get her out of the way until their deeds are done. From there very little goes according to plan.
Baroness Orczy · Adventure · 48 ch
Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield’s holiday on the coast is interrupted when he’s asked to assist with the investigation of a murder on a nearby country estate. As Sir Clinton, his friend Wendover, and the local police work to uncover who’s behind the murder, they encounter an expanding web of clues, characters with possible motives, questions related to the large inheritance involving the estate, and additional misdeeds. Working against time and the tides, Sir Clinton and his team must piece together an increasingly complex puzzle of clues, potential suspects, and crimes.
J. J. Connington · Mystery · 17 ch
Harry Clavering is an able, ambitious, and attractive young man, son of a country vicar and cousin to a baronet. His love for the baronet’s beautiful sister-in-law is at first reciprocated, but then rebuffed as her own ambitions incline her towards marrying a wealthy but personally repellent earl. Harry licks his wounds, and seeks to make his own fortune by training for a career as a civil engineer.
Anthony Trollope · Drama · 49 ch
The sons of the Roland family, Pierre and Jean, return home in the lull between the completion of their studies and the start of their professional careers, bringing the Roland family back together again, in a way. This peace, though, is broken when the younger brother Jean is left a life-changing inheritance by Maréchel, an old family friend—and Pierre is left with nothing. Despite the happiness in the rest of the family, unanswered questions start gnawing at Pierre.
Guy de Maupassant · Drama · 9 ch
The Charing Cross Mystery follows a young lawyer, Hetherwick, who happens to be on a train alongside a former police inspector who dies suddenly in front of him. The other man in the carriage runs off at the next stop and vanishes. Hetherwick takes it upon himself to investigate what turns out to be a murder.
J. S. Fletcher · Mystery · 27 ch
Laura Dearborn says she’ll never marry. Living with her sister and aunt in turn-of-the-century Chicago, she’s content with her comfortable, studious life. But with three suitors eager to win her love, Laura must decide between the disparate futures each could provide her—and as speculators struggle for control of the market in the wheat pits of the Chicago Board of Trade, each of those futures hangs in the balance.
Frank Norris · Drama · 13 ch
Scotland Yard Inspector Michael Pretherston has been called to attend a case of missing jewelry at Lord Flanborough’s home. While investigating, Inspector Pretherston comes across a familiar face—and an intriguing mystery to challenge his skills and intellect: a woman by the name of Katharine Westhanger. Kate has been a person of interest in various capers across Europe despite her innocent looks and charming personality.
Edgar Wallace · Mystery · 20 ch
A young girl named Eepersip lives with her parents in a cottage, but she feels trapped within its confines, so she leaves home to live a freer life in the wild. After leaving her parents’ home, she establishes a life for herself outdoors, rejecting both the society of adults and the comforts of civilization. Initially, she is happy to live in a meadow near her family’s home, but over time she is tempted to seek out new natural environments to live in.
Barbara Newhall Follett · Drama · 5 ch
Sixteen-year-old Mary Makebelieve shares a small room with her mother, a charwoman, in the tenements of early twentieth-century Dublin. While Mrs. Makebelieve is at work cleaning the houses of the wealthy, Mary wanders around the city and its parks absorbed in daydreams. Her encounter with a policeman who appears to signal romantic interest in her is the beginning of Mary’s coming-of-age story, which combines elements of folk- or fairytale with a complex vision of human psychology and the relations between various social groups: mothers and daughters, men and women, the rich and the poor, the young and the old.
James Stephens · Drama · 36 ch
Silas Lapham’s long-lasting paint, made with minerals found on his family’s farm in Vermont, has helped make him a millionaire—as has hard work, ambition, and tough business sense. Now that he’s reached late middle age, he’s a success. A newspaper is writing him up in its “Solid Men of Boston” series, his family goes to seaside resorts in the summer, the scion of the aristocratic Covey family has joined his firm, his daughters have made inroads into 1880s society, and he’s even having a lavish house built in the newly fashionable Back Bay.
William Dean Howells · Drama · 27 ch
Tab Holland, newspaper reporter and a friend of a local police investigator, is surprised to discover that his roommate’s uncle Jesse Transmere, a wealthy miser, has been found murdered in a cellar vault locked from the inside. More surprising is the fact that Ursula Ardfern, a famous actress and new acquaintance of Tab’s, has had her plays backed by the murder victim in the past. Although he has been regularly reporting on the case for the newspaper, Tab’s interest in the case intensifies after both his own apartment and the murdered man’s house are ransacked.
Edgar Wallace · Mystery · 41 ch
Published in 1922, Huntingtower is the first of John Buchan’s novels to feature Dickson McCunn. McCunn, recently retired, embarks upon a walking tour of southwestern Scotland and encounters a poet and former soldier on his travels. They spend the evening in a small village, and when they investigate a large empty house nearby, they hear a woman singing from within.
John Buchan · Adventure · 18 ch
Elmer Gantry isn’t suited to be a lawyer, so he becomes a preacher instead. Although he experiences a variety of failures, and even more successes, Gantry ultimately finds this new career path suits him very well indeed—despite his drinking and womanizing. Throughout his time as a preacher Gantry progresses through the hierarchies of the Baptist and Methodist churches, dabbles in revivalism and “New Thought,” and even experiments with politics, all the while emerging from scandals relatively unscathed and ready to move onward and upward once again.
Sinclair Lewis · Drama · 197 ch
Published in the United Kingdom in 1927, The Story of Ivy is a melodramatic murder mystery centered on a young woman, Ivy Lexton, who is caught up in the lifestyle of fashionable London during the Roaring Twenties. Having run through her late husband’s fortune after only a few years, Ivy chances upon a millionaire whom she seems to be able to charm—at least at first, before he refuses her further advances. Meanwhile, Ivy must also untangle herself from her devoted lover, a poor but handsome doctor.
Marie Belloc Lowndes · Mystery · 25 ch
The Sport of the Gods is a novel set in the United States in the late nineteenth century. It chronicles the tribulations of the Oakleys, an African American family of four, as they struggle to survive and maintain their integrity in a Southern town and then in New York City. Prejudice, provincialism, and temptation take their tolls, and the justice system stands ever ready to grab the losers.
Paul Laurence Dunbar · Drama · 20 ch
Riceyman Steps, first published in 1923, is set in “dingy and sordid” Clerkenwell, in central London, where “existence was a dangerous and difficult adventure in almost frantic quest of food, drink and shelter.” It’s there that Henry Earlforward runs a gloomy, dusty store full of secondhand books. He eats less and less with every day, keeps his young servant Elsie working long hours for minimal pay, and never lights a candle when darkness will do. One day he takes notice of Violet, a middle-aged widow who owns a confectionary shop nearby, and they become husband and wife soon after.
Arnold Bennett · Drama · 50 ch
Betty Zane, published in 1903, was Zane Grey’s first novel. It tells the romanticized story of Grey’s great-great-aunt, who made a miraculous dash under fire to save a frontier fort from Indian attack. Fort Henry sat on the site of present-day Wheeling, West Virginia.
Zane Grey · Historical · 18 ch