Graphics Edge

Kitty Calavita - Invitation to Law and Society: An Introduction to the Study of Real Law
Published: 2010-05-01 | ISBN: 0226089975, 0226089967 | PDF | 192 pages | 1.40 MB

 

 

download

blitzdownloads.com 

Stephen Walther, "ASP.NET 3.5 Unleashed"
ISBN: 0672330113 | edition 2008 | PDF | 1918 pages | 20 mb

download

blitzdownloads.com 

Cathryn A. Manduca and David W. Mogk, "Earth and Mind: How Geologists Think and Learn About the Earth"
English | ISBN: 0813724139 | 2007 | 188 pages | PDF | 8,7 MB

 download

blitzdownloads.com 

Douglas C. Montgomery, George C. Runger, "Applied Statistics and Probability for Engineers (5 edition)"
English | 2010-03-23 | ISBN: 0470053046 | 792 pages | PDF | 8.9 MB

download

blitzdownloads.com 

Encyclopedia of Nursing Research, Third Edition By Joyce J. Fitzpatrick, Meredith Wallace Kazer
2011 | 732 Pages | ISBN: 0826107508 | PDF | 5 MB

download

blitzdownloads.com 

download

blitzdownloads.com 

 

download

download

download

At Bertram's Hotel is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on 15 November 1965 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company the following year. The UK edition retailed at sixteen shillings (16/-) and the US edition at $4.50. It features the detective Miss Marple. 

Jane Marple, the elderly amateur sleuth, takes a holiday at Bertram's hotel in London, to re-live her happy memories of staying there during her youth. The hotel is famous for fully preserving its Edwardian atmosphere even into the 1960s, from the proper staff to the elderly guests who frequent the tearoom. Miss Marple first sees Lady Selina Hazy, a childhood friend. Lady Hazy says she often thinks she recognizes people in the hotel but they turn out to be strangers. Miss Marple is intrigued by the other guests in the tearoom, especially a famous adventuress Bess Sedgwick, a young woman Elvira Blake and her guardian Colonel Luscombe, and a forgetful clergyman Canon Pennyfather. 

Elvira's late father left her a lot of money, but it's all held in trust until she, not yet 20, turns 21. Her mother, Bess Sedgwick, had abandoned her as a toddler to become a famous star and adventurer, and has not kept in touch. Elvira suddenly starts asking her guardians who would inherit her money if she dies, and hints that she may be planning marriage. She also says somebody had tried to poison her during her school days in Italy. She secretly flies to Ireland for 24 hours, telling her best friend only that she has to find out something that's a matter of life and death. 

Canon Pennyfather is supposed to fly to Switzerland the same day, also for 24 hours, to attend a religious conference in Lucerne. But he's so forgetful he doesn't arrive at the airport until the following evening, by which time the conference is over. He returns to the hotel around midnight, and upon entering his room, sees something very surprising and is immediately knocked on the head. He wakes up four days later in a house several hours from London but near the location where the Irish Mail train was robbed three days earlier. A family had found him on the side of the road and took him in, but he remembers nothing since taking the taxi to the airport. Yet some witnesses at the train robbery say they saw somebody who looked like him at the scene. Miss Marple also saw him leaving his hotel room at 3 am, three hours after he was knocked on the head, and a few hours before the robbery. 

It turns out that Lady Sedgwick had hidden herself from Elvira because she did not consider herself a suitable mother given her lifestyle. Both Sedgwick and Elvira are lovers of the same man, the race car driver Ladislaus Malinowski. However, both women claim that Elvira doesn't know him. But Miss Marple knows that she does, because she has seen Elvira and Malinowski together at a restaurant. She thinks Malinowski is an unsuitable man for Elvira, and wishes she could save her from getting involved with him. Meanwhile, a car similar to Malinowski's was seen at the train robbery, and at several other train robberies. Similar but not identical: the licence plates were off by one digit. 

Miss Marple overhears Bess Sedgwick talking with the hotel comissionaire Micky Gorman. It turns out they had earlier been married in Ireland. At the time Gorman had told her the wedding was just a game and not a legal marriage. But in fact it was a real marriage, and so her four subsequent marriages were unwittingly bigamous. Elvira also overhears this, and worries it might invalidate her inheritance because she is the daughter of one of Sedgwick's later husbands. She had travelled to Ireland to verify the marriage, but we don't know whether she flew back to England or took a train, perhaps the Irish Mail train, so she could have been a witness or perpetrator in the robbery. 

Police Chief Inspector "Father" Davy, along with Inspector Campbell, has been involved in the mystery since Pennyfather's disappearance. He interviews everybody in the hotel, and quickly realizes that Miss Marple notices things—things in human nature that provide important clues. After Pennyfather is found, the three of them try an experiment. Miss Marple and Pennyfather re-enact their actions from when she saw him in the hallway (although he doesn't remember it). She realizes it wasn't him she saw: the walk was different. Pennyfather then remembers what surprised him when he entered his room: he saw himself sitting on a chair, just before he was knocked on the head. His Doppelganger, with his confederates, left the hotel (when Miss Marple saw him), drove the unconscious Pennyfather to the mail train, made himself visible during the robbery so that people would mistake him for Pennyfather, and then left Pennyfather on the side of the road. 

Elvira comes to the hotel one foggy night, and somebody shoots at her in the street. Commissionaire Gorman runs in front of her to shield her, and is shot dead. The gun is Malinowski's. 

Miss Marple tells Inspector Davy that she was disappointed to find out that much of the hotel's Edwardian atmosphere is false. Some of the guests are genuine, but others are actors pretending to be other people. So Lady Hazy wasn't wrong after all; the people she mistakenly recognized were actors pretending to be people she knew. Why a hotel would have so many actors is baffling, until the sleuths realize that the hotel is the center of a criminal ring. The actors pose as other people during robberies in order to make it look like their namesakes were at places they weren't. 

"Father" Davy and Miss Marple confront Bess Sedgwick as the orchestrator of these robberies, along with the hotel's owners and staff. Sedgwick confesses, and also admits to killing Gorman. She then drives away recklessly and kills herself in an accident. But it is later revealed that Elvira herself shot Gorman, and that her mother falsely confessed to the shooting in order to save her daughter. 

The originality of this novel is that we not only have to guess who committed the murder but what the crime was. Canon Pennyfather's disappearance is the central mystery, and the reader is led to assume it must be murder, but it turns out to be just a disappearance. Then it appears that somebody shoots at Elvira and accidentally kills Gorman, but actually it's Elvira shooting Gorman.

download

idirectdownload.com 

 

Sleeping Murder: Miss Marple's Last Case is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in October 1976 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company later in the same year. The UK edition retailed for £3.50 and the US edition at $7.95. The book features her detective Miss Marple, and was the final Christie novel published—posthumously—although it was not the last she wrote. 

It was thought that Christie wrote Sleeping Murder and Curtain during World War II to be published after her death, Sleeping Murder was most probably written during The Blitz in 1940. But John Curran proves in his Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks book that Sleeping Murder was still being planned in the end of 40s-beginning of 50s. However, unlike Curtain, which concludes the career of her other famous detective Hercule Poirot, there is nothing in the text of Sleeping Murder which indicates it is Marple's last case. Both books were sealed in a bank vault for over thirty years. 

The last Marple novel Christie wrote, Nemesis, was published in 1971, followed by Christie's last Poirot novel Elephants Can Remember in 1972 and then in 1973 by her very last novel Postern of Fate. Aware that she would write no more novels, Christie authorized the publication of Curtain in 1975 to send off Poirot. She then arranged to have Sleeping Murder published in 1976, but died before the publication. There is a link to Christie's book By the Pricking of My Thumbs, a woman in an asylum asking Gwenda "Was it your poor child", while drinking milk, possibly the character of Mrs Lancaster. 

"Let sleeping murder lie": This is the motto which is not obeyed by Gwenda Reed (née Halliday), a woman in her early twenties who has recently married and now comes to England to settle down there. She believes her father brought her directly from India to New Zealand when she was a two year-old girl, and she has never been in England. While her husband Giles is still abroad on business, she drives around the countryside looking for a suitable house. She finds an old house in Dillmouth which instantly appeals to her, and she buys it. 

After moving in, Gwenda begins to believe that she must be psychic as she seems to know things about the house which she could not possibly know: the location of a connecting door that had been walled over, the pattern of a previous wallpaper, a flight of stairs in the garden, and so on. Becoming increasingly uneasy, she accepts an invitation to go and stay in London with Miss Marple's nephew Raymond West and his wife Joan (who appear also in other stories with Miss Marple). Miss Marple's interest is piqued when, at a performance of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, Gwenda screams and flees the theatre for no readily apparent reason, even to herself, when she hears the actor speaking the famous line "Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young." Gwenda tells Miss Marple later that as she heard those words, she felt she was looking through the banisters, at the dead, blue face of "Helen", listening to someone utter the same line. She insists that she does not know anyone called Helen, and believes she is going mad. Miss Marple suggests that she may be remembering something she witnessed as a small child (looking through rather than over the banisters), and that she may have been in the house that she seemed to know, despite believing that she has never been in England before. 

The Reeds and Miss Marple do a bit of research, and discover that Gwenda is not psychic at all, but in fact spent part of her early childhood in the house that she was later to buy. Her young stepmother, Helen, reportedly man-crazy, disappeared, having presumably run off with a man, and her father died in an asylum. Gwenda was sent to New Zealand to an aunt. The young couple realize that there may be an unsolved crime to investigate. Miss Marple, who first advises the young couple to "let sleeping murder lie", later suggests to her doctor that he prescribe her some sea air, and she travels to Dillmouth. 

The investigation that now sets in is completely in the hands of amateurs: Giles and Gwenda Reed and Miss Marple. The amateur sleuths find two old gardeners who remember the Halliday family and some of the old household staff at St Catherine's by placing an ad in several newspapers. The young couple talk to many witnesses. They talk to Dr Kennedy, Helen's half-brother. They do not inform him of Gwenda's memory, and the doctor seems to be nothing more than a loving brother, heartbroken over the disappearance of his very wild younger sister. The police are absent as it has not even been established that a crime has ever been committed; officially, Helen Halliday ran off with one of her lovers and either died abroad or made a clean break with her brother and never contacted anyone at home. 

The three men in Helen's life at the time of her disappearance: Walter Fane, a local lawyer, J J Afflick, a local tour guide and Richard Erskine, who resides in the north of England. At one point it seems very likely that one of them must be the murderer: They were all "on the spot", as Miss Marple calls it, that August night eighteen years ago when Helen was murdered. Dr Kennedy deflects the investigation by presenting two letters posted abroad (forged by him, as it turns out later) which he says he got from his half-sister after her disappearance. 

When Lily Kimble, who used to be in Halliday's employ, reads an advertisement looking for information about Helen, she senses there could be money in it, and contacts Dr Kennedy to ask for his advice. Kennedy interprets her letter to him as a blackmail attempt. He writes back to her, inviting her to see him at his house and including a train timetable and exact instructions on how to get to his house. He misdirects her to a stretch of woodland, where he strangles her. Then he replaces his original letter with a fake one and is back at his house in time to "wait", together with Giles and Gwenda Reed, for her arrival. 

When Lily Kimble's body is found, the police finally start investigating. (When the police inspector sees Miss Marple he comments on a case of poison pen near Lymstock, thus Sleeping Murder is set after the happenings in The Moving Finger, which was published in 1942.) Now it dawns upon the Reeds that with a murderer still at large, their lives are in danger. This proves true: after Dr Kennedy unsuccessfully tries to poison Gwenda and/or Giles—it is Mrs Cocker, the cook, who takes a sip of the poisoned brandy instead and who consequently has to be hospitalized—Dr Kennedy tries to strangle Gwenda. But Miss Marple has foreseen this; she remained hidden in the house and disables Dr Kennedy by spraying soapy liquid into his face after which policemen appear to arrest him. Miss Marple explains that she believes that Helen was an ordinary, decent young woman, trying to escape from a brother who was pathologically obsessed with her, and that the only evidence of her being "man-mad" came from him. He strangled her to prevent her from living an ordinary, happy life with her husband. Being a learned man, Dr Kennedy was able to hide his condition from the villagers and he staged his sister's death in revenge for her marriage to the man she loved. There are subtle indications that Dr Kennedy had an incestuous desire for his half sister due to some kind of mental illness.

download

idirectdownload.com 

 

Miss Marple's Final Cases and Two Other Stories is a short story collection written by Agatha Christie and first published in the UK by Collins Crime Club in October 1979 retailing at £4.50. It was the last Christie book to be published under the Collins Crime Club imprint although HarperCollins continue to be the writer's UK publishers. 

The book contains eight short stories and did not appear in the US. 

List of stories: 

- Sanctuary 

- Strange Jest 

- Tape-Measure Murder 

- The Case of the Caretaker 

- The Case of the Perfect Maid 

- Miss Marple Tells a Story 

- The Dressmaker's Doll 

- In a Glass Darkly

download

idirectdownload.com 

download

idirectdownload.com 

 

The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on November 12, 1962 and in US by Dodd, Mead and Company in September 1963 under the shorter title of The Mirror Crack'd and with a copyright date of 1962. The UK edition retailed at fifteen shillings (15/-) and the US edition at $3.75. It is set in the fictional English village of St. Mary Mead and features Miss Marple. It was dedicated by Christie: "To Margaret Rutherford, in admiration."

At first, detecting the murderer is extremely difficult because there seems to be no motive. Because Marina Gregg had given Heather Badcock her own drink shortly after meeting her it is assumed that Marina Gregg must have been the intended victim. Also Marina is much more famous and correspondingly more likely to be a target. However, it eventually becomes apparent that Marina herself poisoned the drink and intended to kill Heather Badcock. Discovering the murderer is complicated because the motive is so obscure.

It is known that when Heather Badcock encountered Marina Gregg at the party where she is murdered, she had told her her favourite anecdote about how, years before, she had been ill, but had sneaked out to meet Marina and get her autograph. A terrible expression appeared on Marina's face as she heard this story, reminding a witness of the line from Tennyson's poem. Marina had always desperately wanted children but had found it difficult to conceive. However, after adopting three children, she had finally become pregnant. But when her baby was born it was found to be mentally retarded and was abandoned to a lifetime of institutions, leaving Marina emotionally scarred.

Miss Marple later deduces what Marina had instantly realised. Heather's minor illness was German measles; she had infected Marina and caused the mental retardation, and effectively the 'loss', of her only child. Marina murdered Heather for revenge.

download

idirectdownload.com 

 

Yoga and Multiple Sclerosis: A Journey to Health and Healing English | PDF | Pages 293 | 10.2 Mb

download

idirectdownload.com 

 

download

The unifying premise for this short story collection is the Tuesday Club: six people who meet socially one evening at Jane Marple's home and then decide to meet regularly each Tuesday night to solve a mystery which a group member must relate.

download

idirectdownload.com