A cold-blooded adventurer schemes, swindles, and seduces his way across Europe without a shred of remorse. A dark early novel about a villain told entirely from the villain's side of the table.
Tobias Smollett · Drama · 68 ch
Roger Gale, a media-monitoring business owner nearing retirement, observes life in early 20th century New York City through the eyes of his three daughters. The youngest, Laura, is a social butterfly always going to the latest excitements the city can offer. The middle, Edith, is a mother to four children, on whom she dotes.
Ernest Poole · Drama · 44 ch
The young Vicomte de Marny rashly challenges a French official to a duel, and dies as a result. The Vicomte’s father, the ancient Duc de Marny, insists that his daughter, Juliette, swear an oath before God to seek revenge on the man who killed her brother. Years later, as the French Revolution rages, Juliette insinuates herself into the official’s household, and quickly discovers a way to anonymously accuse him before the National Convention.
Baroness Orczy · Adventure · 32 ch
A murder is discovered. The authorities quickly arrest an obvious suspect. A detective spends hours at the scene in disguise before making himself known, and proceeds to minutely examine the evidence with the assistance of a doctor, among others, before proclaiming the answer lies in a completely different direction.
Émile Gaboriau · Mystery · 34 ch
While on travels in the Mandarin Islands, Louis Trevelyan meets and then, on return to England, marries Emily Rowley, the eldest daughter of the governor of the Islands. They seem ideally suited, but Emily’s mother spots a potential sore spot: they both like to have their “own way.” For two years, and with the birth of their child, all goes well. But when the philandering Colonel Osborne—a lifelong friend of Emily’s father—comes calling in the Trevelyan home, their equilibrium is disastrously unsettled.
Anthony Trollope · Drama · 99 ch
Jim Steele, a clerk for a prominent London attorney, has the distasteful task of assisting a notorious client, Digby Groat, who stands to inherit the Jonathan Danton fortune. Danton’s infant daughter and closest heir, Dorothy, was thought to have died in a boating accident twenty years ago. Adding to the mystery, Dorothy’s mother, Lady Mary Danton, also disappeared around the same time.
Edgar Wallace · Adventure · 49 ch
At one of Robespierre’s “Fraternal Suppers,” a young man denounces Robespierre but is saved by an asthmatic vagabond. The young man flees to the home of his friend Theresia Cabarrus, who is engaged to one of the most important men in the government, and who is also desired by Robespierre himself. When the young man disappears from her home, allegedly at the hands of the Scarlet Pimpernel, the ever-present Chauvelin enlists her help in trying to capture the elusive Pimpernel.
Baroness Orczy · Adventure · 89 ch
In the Scarlet Pimpernel’s fourth outing, he and his league want to free the orphaned Dauphin of France from his captors. But someone else has the same idea, although for very different, and selfish, reasons. In addition to trying to outflank his rival, the Pimpernel also has to deal with a member of his inner circle whose romance has caused him to disobey orders and put the entire plan in jeopardy.
Baroness Orczy · Adventure · 50 ch
Such Is Life is an Australian novel written by Joseph Furphy under a pseudonym of “Tom Collins” and published in 1903. It purports to be a series of diary entries by the author, selected at approximately one-month intervals during late 1883 and early 1884. “Tom Collins” travels rural New South Wales and Victoria, interacting and talking at length with a variety of characters including the drivers of bullock-teams, itinerant swagmen, boundary riders, and squatters (the owners of large rural properties).
Joseph Furphy · Drama · 30 ch
Man and Wife is the ninth novel by Wilkie Collins, and was published in serial form in 1870. Like many of his other novels it has a complex plot and tackles social issues, in this case the then-lax state of the marriage laws, particularly in Scotland and Ireland. As always, Collins deals carefully but frankly with human personal behavior.
Wilkie Collins · Drama · 61 ch
Frank Cowperwood, a disgraced robber baron, has just been released from prison. After some canny investments pay off, he decides to head west to Chicago, where he can rebuild his fortune and his good name. He takes his mistress, Aileen, with him, and quickly learns how to use his wealth and machine politics to take over the Chicago streetcar system.
Theodore Dreiser · Drama · 64 ch
Behind That Curtain, published in 1928, finds Charlie Chan in San Francisco preparing to return to Honolulu after a working holiday. He meets a Sir Frederic Bruce from Scotland Yard, who is following the trail of a woman who disappeared fifteen years before. The two attend a dinner party together—where Sir Frederic is murdered.
Earl Derr Biggers · Adventure · 22 ch
Billy Byrne, a rough and unpolished young man, finds himself entangled in a series of unexpected events that lead him from the urban jungle of early 20th century Chicago to the high seas and, eventually, to revolutionary Mexico. When he and a wealthy heiress named Barbara Harding become shipwrecked on a remote island, the harsh realities of survival force Billy to reevaluate his values and confront his own identity. He undergoes a profound transformation, discovering hidden depths of courage, compassion, and integrity within himself.
Edgar Rice Burroughs · Adventure · 36 ch
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