Ayllene Gibbons

The suicide of his expatriate uncle draws Englishman and poet Dennis Barlow into California's booming funeral industry.

The daughter of a dead magician who accidentally killed his wife, her mother, while performing a guillotine trick must spend the night in his house in order to collect her inheritance. Is the house haunted or is it all magic?

A widow hires an ex-gambler to retrieve gold bars from a sunken river boat in Colorado and discreetly return them to the Federal Mint, from where they had been stolen by her dead husband.

Citizens of San Francisco are stunned by the news that Robert Ironside, the city's hard-nosed, tough-talking chief of detectives, has been shot and left for dead while vacationing at his friend the Police Commissioner's rural retreat. Ironside survives the murder attempt, but the bullet has damaged nerves in his spine, leaving him a paraplegic. Unable to gain reinstatement as chief of detectives, Ironside gets permission to continue investigating criminal cases as a citizen volunteer. With the assistance of two former protegees, Det. Sgt. Ed Brown and Officer Eve Whitfield, and a newly-hired aide/driver, Mark Sanger, Ironside sets out to solve his first case as a civilian by finding the people responsible for the attempt on his life.

A one-handed madman (he lost the hand while escaping a hanging) uses various detachable devices as murder weapons to gain revenge on those he believes have wronged him.

An architect and his wife are staying in an empty castle in California. They are joined by an unhappily married lawyer and his wife. Things start getting strange when they spot a half man/half beast prowling around the house and keep seeing a headless woman wandering the grounds.