Father Brown: The Essential Tales

This definitive collection of fifteen stories, selected by the American Chesterton Society, includes such classics as The Blue Cross, The Secret Garden, and The Paradise of Thieves. As P. D. James writes in her Introduction, "We read the Father Brown stories for a variety pleasures, including their ingenuity, their wit and intelligence, and for the brilliance of the writing. But they provide more. Chesterton was concerned with the greatest of all problems, the vagaries of the human heart."

Random House—The Modern Library, 2005, ISBN 978-0812972221, 288pp.