City of Brass by Edward D. Hoch

Three stories starring Simon Ark—one of history’s most unusual detectives

In a college in upstate New York, a professor is carrying out devilish experiments. At Grand Central Station, a student named Cathy Clark corners a friend of her sister’s who runs a large publishing company. She tells him of the evil at Baine University, but he dismisses her panic as undergraduate paranoia, so Cathy vows to take matters into her own hands. A few weeks later, she appears in the paper: gunned down on the side of the road.

The only man fit to unravel the mystery is Simon Ark, a friend of the publisher and an aficionado of the peculiar. A two-thousand-year-old Coptic priest, cursed at the Crucifixion to spend eternity wandering the earth, Ark has seen all that the world has to offer. But in these three stories, he will encounter things that even he could never have imagined.

“Edward D. Hoch is capable of writing a truly classic short story.” —Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

“Satan himself would be proud of [Hoch’s] ingenuity.” —John Dickson Carr