The Red House Mystery

A remote estate, two eerie children, and whispers of ghosts. When a young governess arrives at Bly Manor, she begins to see shadowy figures watching from the dark. As fear and doubt consume her, she must uncover the truth, if she can trust her own mind.

Understanding that his beauty will fade, Dorian Gray expresses the desire to sell his soul, to ensure that his picture, rather than he, will age and fade. The wish is granted, and Dorian pursues a libertine life of varied and amoral experiences, while staying young and beautiful; all the while his portrait ages and records every sin.

Without, a midwinter twilight, where wandering snowflakes eddied in the bitter wind between a leaden sky and frost-bound earth. Within, a garret; gloomy, bare, and cold as the bleak night coming down. A haggard youth knelt before a little furnace, kindling a fire, with an expression of quiet desperation on his face, which made the simple operation strange and solemn. A pile of manuscript lay beside him, and in the hollow eyes that watched the white leaves burn was a tragic shadow, terrible to see,—for he was offering the first-born of heart and brain as sacrifice to a hard fate. Slowly the charcoal caught and kindled, while a light smoke filled the room. Slowly the youth staggered up, and, gathering the torn sheets, thrust them into his bosom, muttering bitterly, “Of all my hopes and dreams, my weary work and patient waiting, nothing is left but this. Poor little book, we’ll go together, and leave no trace behind.”

Mr Verloc, the secret agent, is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. Things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be “a simple tale” proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats and London’s fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations. The novel, one of the best Conrad’s works, deals broadly with anarchism, espionage and terrorism.

The Secret of Sarek, also known as The Island of Thirty Coffins, is the tenth novel in the Arsène Lupin series of books by Maurice Leblanc. First published in 1919, it is the story of Véronique Degremont. Fourteen years previously, her own father had kidnapped her baby in an act of revenge for Veronique’s marriage, and both her father and her child drowned at sea. While watching a film, she spots her childhood signature on the side of a hut in the background of a scene, and after visiting the place where the film was shot, she becomes trapped in a mystery of prophecies, sinister forces, long lost relations, and ancient secrets.