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Search Results for: insider,-the

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Return to Harken House

Return to Harken House

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Joan Aiken

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In the late 1930’s as the threat of war is building in Germany, twelve year old Julia arrives to spend the summer with her famous playwright father, only to find herself alone with Trudl, her Austrian stepmother. With Trudl preoccupied by the plight of her fellow countrymen in Europe, Julia retreats into the scary Gothic novels left behind by her older siblings, and becomes haunted by dreams of Joshua Harken, the notorious alchemist who built the 17th century house, and then disappeared, accused of murder. Even after she joins forces with local boy Tim Bellyap to investigate the stories of Joshua’s ghost, she is afraid to tell anybody about the terrifying voices coming unbidden from somewhere inside her chest…

In a compelling exploration of loneliness and adolescent insecurities, peopled by ghosts from the old house, this is the powerful story of Julia’s awakening from her nightmare world.

Also published as Voices, and set in Joan Aiken’s own supposedly haunted childhood home, Jeake’s House in Rye, Sussex, this Y.A. ghost story draws on some of her own childhood memories to create an unusual thriller.

“When reduced to its essence, Julia’s story may not be so very different from that of Aiken’s Wolves Chronicles heroine Dido Twite: each girl must cope with a distant, unreliable father and learn to survive in a world peopled with self-absorbed adults. It is the exploration of these issues, even more than the fine storytelling, which makes this novel so compelling” Publisher’s Weekly
“Joan Aiken is the godsend to children who are at the age when they read as if there were no tomorrow” Washington Post

“An entertaining read, for readers who like to read suspenseful ghost stories with a hint of real menace. The ghostly elements of this story are nicely mirrored by the historical menace of the times, as Julia ruminates on the dangers of Hitler, whom she sees as a sort of spider, spreading his web out over Europe” Goodreads reviewer
The Duplicators

The Duplicators

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Murray Leinster

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Link Denham needs a job. Any job.

When he’s offered the position of navigator on board the leaky, rickety Glamorgan, he takes it without asking too many questions. The destination? A planet that has barely been contacted in two hundred years, in a dystopic system, isolated from the rest of the galaxy.

What he thought would be a simple job quickly turns into something far more complicated, as he finds himself embroiled in a complex web of treachery, double-crossing and alien politics. And what of this infamous machine the natives have, which can replicate anything put inside . . . ?

Murray Leinster was a prolific figure in pulp fiction, writing short stories and novels across many genres. The Duplicators is a science fiction romp in his characteristic style, and a wonderful example of 1960s pulp science fiction.
The Widening Stain

The Widening Stain

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W Bolinbroke Johnson

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A series of accidents? Or is it Murder in the library…?

A wonderfully entertaining classic from the Golden Age of crime fiction

At first, for the staff of the university library, it’s easy enough to dismiss the death of a woman who fell from a rolling ladder as nothing more than an unfortunate accident. It’s more difficult, however, to explain away the strangled corpse of a man found inside a locked room, surrounded by rare and obscure erotica.

When a valuable manuscript disappears from the archive, it begins to look like both a killer and a thief are on the loose. It’s up to chief cataloguer Gilda Gorham to solve the crimes but, unless she’s careful, the next death in the library might just be her own.
The Chinese Orange Mystery

The Chinese Orange Mystery

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Ellery Queen

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Voted one of the top ten Best Locked Room Mysteries of all Time

‘Ellery Queen IS the American detective story’ New York Times

‘One of the most bizarre puzzles in crime fiction’ Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

The offices of publisher and renowned stamp collector Donald Kirk has seen many things – but this is the most bizarre: the murder of an unknown caller, found dead in an empty room. Nobody entered or exited – and yet everything inside the room has been manipulated, and left upside down and backwards. Stuck through the back of the corpse’s shirt are two long spears – and a tangerine is missing from the fruit bowl.

Amateur sleuth Ellery Queen arrives just in time to witness the discovery of the body – and realises that even the smallest clues could be crucial to solving this most extraordinary murder…
Tomorrow Factory

Tomorrow Factory

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Rich Larson

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£4.99
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ebook
Welcome to the Tomorrow Factory.

On your left, post-human hedonists on a distant space station bring diseases back in fashion, two scavengers find a super-powered parasite under the waves of Sunk Seattle, and a terminally-ill chemist orchestrates an asteroid prison break.

On your right, an alien optometrist spins illusions for irradiated survivors of the apocalypse, a high-tech grifter meets his match in near-future Thailand, and two teens use a blackmarket personality mod to get into the year’s wickedest, wildest party.

This collection of published and original fiction by award-winning writer Rich Larson will bring you from a Bujumbura cyberpunk junkyard to the icy depths of Europa, from the slick streets of future-noir Chicago to a tropical island of sapient robots. You’ll explore a mysterious ghost ship in deep space, meet an android learning to dream, and fend off predatory alien fungi on a combat mission gone wrong.

Twenty-three futures, ranging from grimy cyberpunk to far-flung space opera, are waiting to blow you away.

So step inside the Tomorrow Factory, and mind your head.
Skinner Luce

Skinner Luce

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Patricia Ward

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£4.99
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All around us, under most of humanity’s very noses, lurks a dangerous alien race. The Nafikh inhabit human bodies while visiting Earth, and an underground system designed to disguise and protect them from being discovered allows them to indulge their wildest and often violent urges. The circumstances of these brutal visits require the sacrifice of servs.

Servs are aliens themselves, created by the Nafikh to attend to their every need. Physically indistinguishable from humans, they are destined to live in pain, their very livelihood regulated by the Source, a powerful force of energy inside each of them that burns like a white-hot fire under the stress of their servitude.

Lucy is a serv who arrived a baby, and by chance was adopted by humans. She’s an outcast among outcasts, dwelling in both worlds but belonging to neither. For years she has been walking a tightrope, balancing between the horrors of her serv existence and the ordinary human life she desperately longs to maintain, her family unaware of her darkest secrets.

But when the body of a serv child turns up and Lucy is implicated in the gruesome death, the worlds she’s tried so hard to keep separate collide. Hounded by the police, targeted in the dog-eat-dog world of servs, she’ll find herself fighting to protect her family and the life she’s made for herself. Skinner Luce is Lucy’s story.
Supreme Villainy

Supreme Villainy

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King Oblivion

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For eons, King Oblivion, Ph.D., was one of the most ruthless supervillains the world has ever known. As the CEO of the ISS (International Society of Supervillains) for half a century, he was personally responsible for numerous nefarious acts, including Nixon’s presidential election, stealing the country of Japan, Star Wars: Episode I-III, and Milli Vanilli, just to name a few.

Since his untimely (and inexplicable) passing, Matt D. Wilson, who was found rotting in one of Oblivion’s numerous dungeons, has discovered in his giant lair (located in the Earth’s mantle) what seems to be the early workings of the villain’s ultimate manifesto. Though in-depth research (and paper cuts), Wilson reviewed endless documents and has compiled numerous unedited chapters, email correspondences, and various threats which combine tell the “life story” of this anti-hero.

Supreme Villainy is an intimate look into the mastermind who once ruled the globe with an iron fist (and ray gun). For the first time ever, readers will learn of his birth (which has never been noted on record), rise to power, and domination of the world as we know it today. Revealed inside are never-before-seen notes, illustrations, and personal letters which, now collected, show a glimpse into the once-infamous villain’s uncompleted manuscript, and maybe a hint into who the real man was behind that horrible mask.
The Naked World

The Naked World

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Eli K. P. William

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In a world stripped bare of digital images and promotainment, unveiled with the audiovisual overlay of the ImmaNet, in an exposed world, a naked world, Amon Kenzaki awakens, lost and alone. He must now travel deep into the District of Dreams in search of Anisha Birla, the one person that might help him unravel the mystery of jubilee. But deprived of the apps and informational tools he’s depended on his entire life, traversing the largest bankdeath camp on Earth is no easy task.

Inside an ephemeral labyrinth of slowly-dissolving disposable skyscrapers clogged to the limit with the bankdead masses, Amon soon finds himself face to face with two dangerous groups: a luddite cult called the Borginans, who preach bizarre superstitions about electronic banking, and a supposedly humanitarian army called the Charity Brigade, whose mandate of protecting the bankdead conceals opportunistic motives.

Taking refuge in a hospital that strives to improve conditions in the camps, Amon begins to work towards its cause and reconciles himself to his newfound poverty. But when political forces threaten the community’s existence and the lives of its members, he is forced to team up with a vending-machine designer, an Olympic runner, a fertility researcher, a corporate tycoon, and many others to expose the heinous secret festering at the heart of the action-transaction market he once served.

In book two of the Jubilee Cycle, Eli K. P. William delves beneath the surface of his cyber-dystopian Tokyo to unearth the fate of outcasts trapped in its depths and shine a light on the financial obstacles blocking one individual’s efforts to help them.
Deserts of Fire

Deserts of Fire

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Douglas Lain

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In 1987, the New York Times published their first front-page review of a science fiction anthology for a collection called In the Field of Fire, themed around the war in Vietnam. “Vietnam was science fiction,” the reviewer wrote, and writing about it through that lens found meaning in a war few understood.

This idea, that speculative fiction is a vital tool to understanding the inexplicable, is just as relevant nearly thirty years later. Deserts of Fire is a war-inspired anthology for the new millennium, because for many, the recent wars in the deserts of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East are just as slippery to grasp and difficult to understand as Vietnam was two generations earlier.

Inside Deserts of Fire are stories from a variety of bestselling and award-winning authors that start with the simple and modest ambition of making the reader feel strange about the recent past. Because when there are too many explanations, the truth won’t be found by merely choosing one side or the other. But rather, the truth is in the existence of the confusion itself.
The Pilots of Borealis

The Pilots of Borealis

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David Nabhan

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Top Gun heads to outer space in this throwback to the classic science fiction of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein.

Strapped in to artificial wings spanning twenty-five feet across, your arms push a tenth of your body weight with each pump as you propel yourself at frightening speeds through the air. Inside a pressurized dome on the Moon, subject to one-sixth Earth’s gravity, there are swarms of chiseled, fearless, superbly trained flyers all around you, jostling for air space like peregrine falcons racing for the prize. This was the sport of piloting, and after Helium-3, piloting was one of the first things that entered anyone’s mind when Borealis was mentioned.

It was Helium-3 that powered humanity’s far-flung civilization expansion, feeding fusion reactors from the Alliances on Earth to the Terran Ring, Mars, the Jovian colonies, and all the way out to distant Titan. The supply, taken from the surface of the Moon, had once seemed endless. But that was long ago. Borealis, the glittering, fabulously rich city stretched out across the lunar North Pole, had amassed centuries of unimaginable wealth harvesting it, and as such was the first to realize that its supplies were running out.

The distant memories of the horrific planetwide devastation spawned by the petroleum wars were not enough to quell the rising energy and political crises. A new war to rival no other appeared imminent, but the solar system’s competing powers would discover something more powerful than Helium-3: the indomitable spirit of an Earth-born, war-weary mercenary and pilot extraordinaire.
The Silver Scar

The Silver Scar

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Betsy Dornbusch

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When Trinidad was twelve, his Wiccan parents blew themselves up in an ecoterrorist attack that killed several Christians. Orphaned and disillusioned, he fled his home and his best friend Castile to soldier for the powerful Christian church inside the walled city of Boulder, Colorado.

Fostered by a loving priest and trained by a godless warrior, Trinidad learned the brutal art of balancing faith and war. He is the perfect archwarden, disciplined and devout. But when his Bishop turns up with a silver scar she claims is proof of angelic orders to crusade, Trinidad alone knows her story is a lie. The silver is from a mystical, ancient graveyard called the Barren, a place of healing reached only by Wiccan magic, a place that could turn Christianity on its head.

To accuse her outright would be treason, and gaining proof means committing heresy, both of which would be a death sentence for an archwarden. Instead, torn between the lure of powerful magic, his love for Castile, and his vows to defend the Church, Trinidad secretly conspires with a violent tribe of ancestor-worshipers and a Wiccan coven to stop the crusade. But as everyone he trusts is mired in betrayal and bent on vengeance, he soon realizes no amount of righteousness can stop the slaughter of thousands.
Striped Holes

Striped Holes

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Damien Broderick

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A COMIC SCIENCE FICTION MASTERPIECE!
In the spirit of Monty Python, Arthur Schopenhauer and Douglas Adams, Striped Holes is science fiction with a sense of humor.
Sopwith Hammil might be the nation’s top chat-show host but his peace of mind is shattered when a time traveling bureaucrat lands on his couch. To save his life and the human race (They’re turning the Sun off!), Sopwith must find a wife inside three hours. Turns out it’s not that easy, Soppy.
Meanwhile, popular astrologer and certified lifesaver O’Flaherty Gribble, a favorite guest on Sopwith’s show, has discovered the Callisto Effect and how to build striped holes. And in a future that makes Nineteen Eighty-Four look like Brave New World or vice versa, beautiful Hsia Shan-Yun is about to have her brain scrubbed for knitting one of those striped holes, with frightful consequences. But luckily, O’Flaherty finds himself seated on a plane next to God. Tighten your belt, it’s that kind of novel.
Space Tug

Space Tug

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Murray Leinster

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Space Tug by Murray Leinster is an independent sequel to the author’s popular Space Platform.

Joe Kenmore heard the airlock close with a sickening wheeze and then a clank. In desperation he turned toward Haney. “My God, we’ve been locked out!”
Through the transparent domes of their space helmets, Joe could see a look of horror and disbelief pass across Haney’s face. But it was true! Joe and his crew were locked out of the Space Platform.
Four thousand miles below circled the Earth. Under Joe’s feet rested the solid steel hull of his home in outer space. But without tools there was no hope of getting back inside. Joe looked at his oxygen meter. It registered thirty minutes to live.
The Judas Rose

The Judas Rose

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Suzette Haden Elgin

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£8.99
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An instant cult classic upon first publication, Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue trilogy has earned wide critical acclaim, shocking and captivating a loyal readership among science fiction and women’s literature audiences alike.

Sequel to the enormously popular Native Tongue, The Judas Rosecontinues Elgin’s gripping vision of a frightening, male-dominated world where the women of Earth are virtually enslaved. Once again, this group of women-and the nonviolent yet transformative power of language-is called upon to challenge Earth’s violent, patriarchal order. Their revolutionary tool is Laadan-a secret women’s language created to free them from men’s control and make resistance possible for all women.

In The Judas Rose, the time has come to take Laadan from underground and spread its revolutionary power to women everywhere-in part, through a group of nuns inside the Roman Catholic Church. But when a handful of horrified priests uncover the women’s sabotage they move to stamp it out with an undercover female agent of their own.
The Spirit Box

The Spirit Box

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Stephen Gallagher

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£5.99
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Rachel’s in trouble. She’s a ticking bomb. A couple of co-workers bullied her into stealing a radical new drug from their employer, and now it’s lodged inside her. They’re watching her like hawks and her time’s running out.

John Bishop runs security for the company. As a father who once lost a teenaged daughter to an accidental overdose, his drive to hunt down the thieves and rescue their victim grows more intense with every lost minute. He can never bring his own kid back. But he can save someone else’s.

Which is fine until the company realises that if the swallowed package bursts and Rachel dies, their secrets are kept safe and their problem goes away.

Though Bishop’s on the trail, he’s an easy man to cut loose and discredit. But now he’s Rachel’s only hope. Either the package will burst, or the boys will cut her open to get it. They’re so convinced it will make them rich that they’ll kill anyone who tries to take her, and hunt down anyone who succeeds.

It can’t end well. For somebody.
Spirit Fox

Spirit Fox

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Jennifer Wingert, Mickey Zucker Reichert

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Kiarda lives in a magic-laced land where peace is guarded so fiercely that those who train as warriors are outcast . . . until the arrival of a well-trained foreign army bent on conquest and determined to use everything in their power, including mages trained in the deadliest of the six magic arts: the magic of destruction.

Kiarda should have been spirit-linked to a fox, but the cub died at the moment of their birth. Now that spirit lurks deep inside her, and at the time of her greatest need, it could prove her greatest ally . . .
The Sundered Worlds

The Sundered Worlds

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Michael Moorcock

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Dorian Hawkmoon… Corum Jhaelen Irsei… Elric of Melniboné. Over the years, Michael Moorcock has captivated readers with his unending versions of the Eternal Champion, the timeless warrior who serves the Cosmic Balance in the ongoing battle that rages between Law and Chaos through the many planes and levels of the multiverse. But what is the multiverse and what are its origins? In this essential novel, Michael Moorcock provides readers these critical answers.
World War Three has come and gone, and humankind has survived its brutal past to assume its place among the stars. Yet their existence is endangered nonetheless, as their entire universe is threatening to collapse. All their hopes rest on the shoulders of Count Renark von Bek, a nobleman of extraordinary psychic abilities and carefully guarded secrets.
Aided by his companions, von Bek will delve into the Sundered Worlds, a mysterious galaxy outside the space-time continuum that has materialized on the edges of known space. Inside this roving galaxy, they will uncover the secrets of the multiverse and embark upon a last desperate gamble to save humankind.
But as they will soon discover, even survival comes laden with danger, as the solutions to their dilemma may also hold the final keys to their destruction
Asgard's Heart: Asgard 3

Asgard's Heart: Asgard 3

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Brian Stableford

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The acclaimed science fiction author Brian M. Stableford returns with the final book in his trilogy about a planet that contains thousands of worlds inside it – and the one man who will do anything to penetrate its secrets. The conflict between the Isthomi and Scarid races and the surface dwellers of Asgard had come to a halt, but not an end. Forces are at work on all sides to attempt to gain the upper hand in the struggle to control Asgard, for control of Asgard’s heart could mean total power over the planet itself, and all who live in it. At the middle of the struggle is Michael Rousseau, who must penetrate the very core of the planet itself – both in reality and in another dimension altogether – to save Asgard and all who dwell in it, before it’s too late,
Out of this World

Out of this World

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Lawrence Watt-Evans

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Pel Brown has troubles in his basement. But it’s not water leaking in – it’s magic. Sword-carrying barbarians are spilling through, demanding that Pel help them defeat Shadow, a dark force taking over their world.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, a spaceship has crashed in Amy Jewell’s backyard, and the aliens want Amy’s help against the Shadow seeking to conquer their world. When Pel and Amy go through the basement portal into the world of magic, the Shadow attacks and traps them inside.

Now Pel and Amy find themselves entangled in escapades that will make them into heroes … or corpses.
Admiralty

Admiralty

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Poul Anderson

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Poul Anderson’s stories are classics from the golden age of science fiction and beyond. A master storyteller, Anderson wrote tales ranging from the immediate to the distant future, from Earth to far-flung galaxies, from hard science fiction to fantasy – all the elements stirred and blended as only Anderson could!

ADMIRALTY is the fourth volume of The Collected Works of Poul Anderson and collects his best works from a writing career that spans over 50 years.

This volume contains 23 stories including:

Goat Song (Hugo and Nebula winner)
Operation Changeling
The Adventure of the Misplaced Hound
Delenda Est
Lodestar
The Pugilist
Marius
Inside Straight

Plus the revised version of ‘Black Bodies’ and an afterword by Poul Anderson discussing ‘Eutopia’
Kemlo and the Star Men

Kemlo and the Star Men

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E. C. Eliott

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Solid land inside a cloud of ‘star dust’ – where no solid land should be. And the weird voices – where are they coming from?

Forced down on a minor star galaxy, Kemlo and his friends of Satellite Belt K discover a secret of Space which gives scientists information for which they have been searching for years.
White as Snow

White as Snow

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Tanith Lee

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Arpazia is the aging queen who paces the halls of a warlord’s palace. Cold as winter, she has only one passion-for the mysterious hunter who courts the outlawed old gods of the woodland. Coira is the princess raised in the shadow of her mother’s hatred. Avoided by both her parents and half forgotten by her father’s court, she grows into womanhood alone . . . until the mirror speaks, and blood is spilled, and the forest claims her.

The tragic myth of the goddess Demeter and her daughter, Persephone, stolen by the king of the underworld, is woven together with the tale of Snow White to create a powerful story of mothers and daughters and the blood that binds them together, for good or ill. Black queen. White maid. Royal huntsman. Seven little folk who live in the forest. Come inside, sit by the fire, and listen to this fairy tale as you’ve never heard it told before.

Once upon a time there was a mirror, and a girl as white as snow. . .
The Broken Cycle

The Broken Cycle

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A. Bertram Chandler

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Being lost in space was no new experience to John Grimes, whose career as an interstellar officer had brought him into many such dilemmas. But being lost inside a colossal alien spacecraft had no precedent.

Complicating the matter was the discovery that the very universe was not their own but an alternate and that their captor seemed to be the omnipotent force of that entire other cosmos.
As Grime’s only companion was the comely policewoman, Una Freeman, the fate that the Alien God selected for them required the creation of a Garden of Eden. But there were two serpents in this one – both of them bicycles!
Death in Melting

Death in Melting

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Richard Grindal

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Inside the furnace was a seething pool of molten metal, bubbling with a heat great enough to destroy a man’s body so completely it would be impossible to trace. And Gerald Norris had disappeared without a trace!

In London, Julie Crocker was hunting for her brother amongst the demi-monde of unsuccessful artists. He too had disappeared, leaving no trace except an indifferent painting in a Soho restaurant.

Against the backdrop of the power and heat of the steelworks and the overcrowded bars of Soho, private detective John Bryant sets about investigating both mysteries. Mysteries that can only be solved in the consuming flames of yet another fire.
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