Hard Labor

Charles Dobbs is a British secret agent investigating the apparent suicide of Foreign Office official Samuel Fennan. Dobbs suspects that Fennan's wife, Elsa, a survivor of a Nazi Germany extermination camp, might have some clues, but other officials want Dobbs to drop the case. So Dobbs hires a retiring inspector, Mendel, to quietly make inquiries. Dobbs isn't at all sure as there are a number of anomalies that simply can't be explained away. Dobbs is also having trouble at home with his errant wife, whom he very much loves, having frequent affairs. He's also pleased to see an old friend, Dieter Frey, who he recruited after the war. With the assistance of a colleague and a retired policeman, Dobbs tries to piece together just who is the spy and who in fact assassinated Fennan.

As bombs fall on London, writer Agatha Christie decides it is time to kill off her most famous creation.

At an exclusive boys' school, a new gym teacher is drawn into a feud between two older instructors, and he discovers that everything at the school is not quite as staid, tranquil and harmless as it seems.

After freeing a young Bedouin girl from her unjust imprisonment in Jerusalem, an Australian adventuress, together with her devoted police detective friend, begins to unravel a decade-old mystery concerning priceless emeralds, an ancient curse and the disappearance of the girl's mother and massacre of her tribe.