Original mysteryNo. 1401 hr 29 minHercule Poirot
Rome, June 1930s: when fifteen-year-old Caterina Bernardi — dutiful, devout, and entirely without enemies — vanishes after her flute lesson near Sant'Apollinare, leaving behind only a scratched-out name in her notebook and a telephone call home that her sister knew was not entirely free, a brilliant Belgian detective finds himself navigating a city where the Vatican's closed walls and Roman society's overlapping circles conspire to hide an ordinary wickedness behind an extraordinary spectacle; anonymous callers speak of "protection" and "serious matters," journalists begin feeding political rumours, an elegant contessa lies about her alibi, and a woman who knew too much is found dead of a convenient overdose — all of it a staircase of manufactured scandal designed by a cold-eyed fixer to lift one frightened girl so high into the theatre of state affairs that no one thinks to inspect the cellar; the real crime is not espionage, not ideology, but the commonest ugliness of all — a circle of influence that recruits the innocent by exploiting obedience, money, and trust in respectable faces; inspired by the eternal city's layered secrets while remaining entirely fictional, The Vatican Disappearance is an original Golden Age-style mystery about innocence used, truth buried in ceremony, and the theft of simplicity.
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A. J. Raffles
Two cases tonight from the gentleman thief who has drawn more requests than anybody else in the Archive. WILFUL MURDER is the darkest thing in the whole collection. Bunny warns us at the outset that most of their robberies will not bear telling at length.
by E. W. Hornung
1 hr 13 minNo. 246
Hercule Poirot
Mexico City, the summer of nineteen twenty-eight. A banquet is given for the man who is about to become President — a soldier who won a civil war, lost an arm doing it, and has spent the years since collecting enemies with the same efficiency he once collected territory.
1 hr 20 minNo. 245
Loveday Brooke
Somebody has got hold of Miss Loveday Brooke's private address, which she had given strict orders was to be handed to nobody at all. Her holiday lasts precisely as long as it takes to read the note.
by Catherine Louisa Pirkis
55 minNo. 244
Hercule Poirot
A REIMAGINED EDITION — this case first appeared in the second volume of our collected mysteries. We have gone back through it, corrected it, and recorded it properly, so it can be heard as it was always meant to be heard.
2 hr 2 minNo. 243