The Nutcracker: The Classic Christmas Fantasy features two rare versions of the holiday tale that was adapted for Tchaikovsky’s classic ballet, The Nutcracker. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s original fairy tale, “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King,�� published in 1816 and Alexandre Dumas’s interpretation, “The History of a Nutcracker,�� published in 1845.

Lavishly illustrated with hundreds of vintage drawings from the nineteenth century, this beautifully designed book kindles the spirit of the holidays through its timeless tale of an enchanted nutcracker made human through the love of a young girl, and the couple’s magical journey through exotic lands of sweets and spices.

The set also contains a decorative 8-inch nutcracker figurine!

So pleasant in fact, she was the Anthony Award Winner for Best Series of the Century. Here she solves a crime that not only has no body, no weapon, and no suspects, but no evidence that a crime has even been committed. All Miss Marple has to go on is one single word: nemesis.

When Mary Borlase, English governess of the little Countess Nadine, escapes from Russia during the Great War, she brings with her jewels belonging to the ill-fated Romanoffs, including a famous emerald, the Eye of Nero. Mary dies of pneumonia a few days after reaching England, in a room over her brother’s antique shop. What has become of the now missing jewels? Has she hidden them somewhere, or entrusted them to someone before her death?

Years later a Russian waiter sells a secret twice over, and pays the ultimate price. The search for the emerald has begun.

For a man calling himself Mr. Brown, and his gang, it is first an adventure, but becomes a matter of life and death. For Martin Drury, chicken-farming in Sussex it brings the gleam of romance and a chance of knight errantry. And for Inspector Hugh Collier of Scotland Yard, young and ambitious, backing his intuitions against the opinions of his superiors, it is a case full of pitfalls, whose issues might spell promotion—or a fatal mark against his name.

The Belfry Murder was originally published in 1933. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

Suppose your country began to change. Suppose that without your noticing, it became dangerous for some people to live in Germany any longer. Suppose you found, to your complete surprise, that your own father was one of those people.

That is what happened to Anna in 1933. She was nine years old when it began, too busy with her schoolwork and toboganning to take much notice of political posters, but out of them glared the face of Adolf Hitler, the man who would soon change the whole of Europe �� starting with her own small life.

Anna suddenly found things moving too fast for her to understand. One day, her father was unaccountably missing. Then she herself and her brother Max were being rushed by their mother, in alarming secrecy, away from everything they knew �� home and schoolmates and well-loved toys �� right out of Germany��