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In McAdam City, Kentucky, people are fed up with big government interfering with their lives, telling them what they can’t do, sticking its nose into their private business, trying to keep them from protecting their legitimate interests from Uncle Sam.
When an invisible barrier is put up to protect McAdam City, everything changes. This “silicone shell” is impervious to anything the army can throw against it. People are dying for the cause of personal freedom in this small Kentucky town, but they’ve finally found a way to fight big government with a digital technology greater than anything in the government’s vast arsenal.
Can one small town declare its independence from the United States?
With the silicone dagger poised at the throat of the republic, just maybe…

‘The entire head had been stripped of skin, creating a nightmarish sculpture in gelled blood…’
The hideous apparition that confronted John Redpath almost defied description. It was the beginning of a horrific ordeal that would cause him to question his own sanity…
A member of a telepathic research project, Redpath believes the cause to be side-effects from the experimental drugs he is taking – but then stranger things begin to happen. He wakes up to find himself in America…he is drawn to a local house occupied by a bizarre group of people leading an artificial and peculiar life…which events are really happening?
Slowly an explanation emerges, more terrifying than anything he could have imagined…

Tabaea was an ordinary thief, sneaking and prowling and stealing for a living. Then one night while burgling a house, she witnessed a wizard teaching his apprentice a spell – the creation of a magic dagger.

Tabaea decided to try the magic for herself. But even though she could feel the power rising around her as she went through the steps of the ritual, something had clearly gone wrong. The apprentice’s dagger had glowed; it had resisted attempts to pick it up; and there had been a blinding flash at the end of the ceremony.

But Tabaea’s dagger didn’t do any of those things. And it wouldn’t free her from bonds, or heal her wounds – it didn’t seem to be magical at all. It just turned black.

Then, by chance, Tabaea discovered that her dagger indeed had its own kind of unusal magic – a dark, powerful magic that promised invincibility to its bearer.

But magic can be dangerous even in the hands of an expert – and for Tabaea, magic and power could spell disaster . . .

Janey Elliott fails to return home one evening from a friend’s, and her husband John goes out looking for her car. He and the friend’s husband find Janey, brutally murdered.

The gruesome killing of beautiful but wayward Janey Elliott calls for the special services of the Metropolitan Police. Does the element of sexual violence point to a frenzied killer, or is it a cover for a more straightforward motive? Scotland Yard soon find the answer to that question, but the murderer remains elusive.

Someone is caught in the tangle of relationships that goes along with the wealth and social prestige the Elliotts and their circle enjoy …

Lucius Shepard is a grand master of dark fantasy, famed for his baroque yet utterly contemporary visions of existential subversion and hallucinatory collapse. In Dagger Key, his fifth major story collection, Shepard confronts hard-bitten loners and self-deceiving operators with the shadowy emptiness within themselves and the insinuating darkness without, to ends sardonic and terrifying. The stories in this book, including six novellas, are:


“Stars Seen Through Stone” – in a small Pennsylvania town, mediocrity suddenly blossoms into genius; but at what terrible cost?


“Emerald Street Expansions” – in near-future Seattle, echoes of the life of a medieval French poet hint at either reincarnation or a dire conspiracy.


“Limbo” – a retired criminal on the run from the Mafia encounters ghosts, and much worse, on the shores of a haunted lake.


“Liar’s House” – in the grip of the legendary dragon Griaule, destiny is a treacherous and transformative thing.


“Dead Monty” – a small-time New Orleans criminal ventures outside his proper territory, and poker and voudoun conspire to bring him down.


“Dinner at Baldassaro’s” – a gang of immortals debates the future in an Italian resort, only for events to outrun any of their expectations.


“Abimagique” – a glib college loser falls in love with a witch, becoming an involuntary part of a world-saving – or world-destroying – magical ritual.


“The Lepidopertrist” – a small boy on a Caribbean island witnesses the creation of preternatural beings by a Yankee wizard…


“Dagger Key” – off the coast of Belize, the ghost of a famous pirate seems to control a spiral of murder and intrigue; or is someone else responsible?

It was where beasts walked and talked as men, armed with swords and daggers. And it was where Clothahump, turtle and wizard, stretched his powers of sorcery to their limit, reaching out to another universe, seeking help to combat the force of evil emanating from the dreaded Greendowns.

And so Jonathan Meriweather found himself plucked from his peaceful university life and catapulted into a strange new world to become part of a very strange fellowship. Soldier and crusader, fighting with sword and song, he is the Spellsinger.

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

‘We want you to lay a ghost,’ Frances Fitzgibbon is told as she is ordered to investigate the past of her own superior, Colonel Jack Butler’s, at a decisive moment in his career. But why?

For as Colonel Butler pursues an elusive IRA/KGB assassin, Frances finds herself confronting dangerous questions as more than one spectre is raised from the dark past.

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

In the rural peace of modern England a war game recreates the slaughter of the Civil War. But when the battle ends, a real corpse is left it the Swine Brook; and an aristocratic but impoverished revolutionary claims to have found a cache of ‘Cromwell’s Gold’.

When David Audley is called in, seventeenth-century secrets and the deadly game of modern espionage clash in a brilliantly intricate thriller of bluff and counter-bluff.

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

What does the chairman of the new Atlantic Defence Committee have to do with the American Civil War? And why was a top CIA trouble-shooter needed as a middleman? And why was that middleman looking for David Audley, senior analyst for British Intelligence?

It all seemed very wrong to Oliver St John Latimer, but it did present an interesting opportunity. Unfortunately for the ambitious, and usually desk-bound, Latimer, the opportunity was twice as deadly as it was intriguing.

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

24 May 1940. Why did Hitler stop the Panzers and allow the British army to escape to Dunkirk?

Anthony Price provides an answer in this brilliant, compulsively readable thriller of two young officers pitchforked into the chaos of war. The German advance strands them behind enemy lines, where they witness an extraordinary scene: a high-ranking British officer consorting with Nazis. The possible explanations are shattering – not only for them but for the fate of the whole British Expeditionary Force.

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

In the fourth title of Anthony Price’s gripping spy series, British Intelligence officer David Audley slips away to Italy without authorisation, taking his wife with him. Immediately the suspicion arises that he may have defected, and the head of Italian security is also interested in his arrival, particularly as it has flushed from cover a rogue communist.

But Audley has his own reasons for leaving Britain, in an investigation that becomes a matter of life or death.

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

An innocent enough advertisement, placed by General Maxwell, retired war hero and beloved squire of Duntisbury Royal, equally innocent hamlet nestled in the English countryside. But the results are explosive…

Although it seems obvious that the IRA’s stars are rising, there’s a more global type of conspiracy in the country air. The CIA and the KGB are suddenly sniffing around, along with British Intelligence Chief Dr David Audley – whose intuition for mischief and espionage puts him right in the midst of the action.

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

Anthony Price ingeniously combines the machinations of British Intelligence with the legend of King Arthur in an extraordinary thriller that crackles with suspense from start to finish.

A US Air Force plane mysteriously vanishes on a flight from its base in Britain, and its ace pilot with it. The CIA investigates the missing pilot, and makes some odd findings – finding that will take British Intelligence officer David Audley back to the sixth century in an absorbing battle of wits with the Soviet secret police.

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

The Russians are looking for a few good men, and they’re doing most of their looking within the British University system. It’s a ploy which has served them well in the past, but now there’s a difference. As Dr David Audley discovers very quickly, the aim of the Soviets is not simply to recruit, but to lay the groundwork for destruction.

From the dim, comfortable reading rooms of Oxford to the bleak moors stretching away from Hadrian’s Wall, Audley searches for the Russian wolf in don’s clothing. What Audley can’t know is that the agent has been forbidden to fail . . . on pain of death.

Who was that masked woman?

That was the question plaguing Perry Mason. No one loves a good mystery more than Mason – but being asked to represent a client who is concealing her identity, not to mention the particulars of her case, has given even the legendary legal eagle a case of ruffled feathers.

Yet the intriguing cloak-and-dagger tactics have Perry hopelessly hooked. As for the silent siren behind the mask, is she heiress Byrl Gailord or penniless Adelle Hastings? Both women have ties to a man named Tidings, a man who may be a protector or predator. A man who could answer a lot of tough questions – if only he hadn’t been murdered.

Superb, classic thriller from the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory, rated ‘alongside Le Carre and Deighton’ GUARDIAN

A brilliant young electronics expert is killed by a car bomb seemingly meant for the head of the Foreign Office’s Middle-Eastern Section. Intelligence officer Hugh Roskill is sent by David Audley on an investigation that takes him from London clubland to the Hampshire countryside, and deep into the complexities of Middle Eastern politics, to find the answer to two questions: who was the real target of the bomb? And what is Alamut?

Against the backdrop of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the period before the Camp David Accords, Dr Audley and Colonel Butler are confronted with an assassin capable of turning the Middle Eastern conflict into Armageddon.

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

When ex-Major Ed Parker of the US Army is pushed over a cliff at Pointe du Hoc following the D-Day anniversary, a crisis is sparked off in British Intelligence. The cream of the Secret Service gather: Dr Audley, Oliver St John Latimer, Commander Cable, Dr Paul Mitchell. But none will take on the case.

Why is the investigation left to inexperienced Elizabeth Loftus? Is there any truth in the old rumour that Parker was a KGB double agent?

Elizabeth must ponder these and many other questions as she prises the lid off a can of worms forty years old – and suspicion begins to fall on her most respected colleagues.

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

David Roche, a young double agent, is assigned to recruit British Intelligence Chief Dr David Audley into Soviet service. It isn’t long before Roche begins to doubt the information he has been given . . . and it isn’t long before he sees how he might use than information to free himself of his obligations to both sides.

Roche joins Audley and two friends at an ancient tower in the French countryside, and also meets with Lady Alexandra Champeney-Perowne – who shows him why it is so vital that he get out.

And out he goes, in an exciting denouement involving the KGB, British Intelligence and – out of the blue – a team of Algerian terrorists.

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

A New Kind of War takes us back to the Greece and Germany of 1945 – as the old kind of war comes to its official end. Why has David Audley broken the British-Greek truce? And furthermore, why did his brigadier order his actions? Is it just coincidence that Audley is surprised near Delphi by Captain Fattorini of the Royal Engineers? As a result of that unfortunate encounter, Fattorini finds himself in occupied Germany as the newest member of TRR-2: a special Intelligence unit engaged in a dangerous and brutal game. It is not until he at last meets Audley’s mysterious brigadier that Fattorini learns the full truth about his own assignment in the ill-omened Teutoburg Forest.

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

The evacuation of Philip Masson’s body near Mrs Griffin’s cottage resurrects several old ghosts that send the newshounds scurrying to dig in their clippings archives. Rumours, matured with the passing years since Masson’s ‘disappearance’ way back in 1978, once more abound.

But the investigative team of Ian Robinson and Jenny Fielding are already on a trail of discovery that leads back to the end of the Wilson/Callaghan era. Jenny has overheard a snatch of gossip at an embassy party which seems to implicate British Intelligence’s David Audley in the original cover-up of Masson’s death . . . and Jenny has a personal interest in that affair.

But it is not until the labyrinthine trails come together on a Spanish battlefield that Jenny learns why it is that Philip Masson had to die….

‘A star in our galaxy of crime writers’ FINANCIAL TIMES

Superb crime fiction from the CWA Diamond Dagger Award Winner

‘Yorke practised deception artfully and with style’ GUARDIAN

‘Mistress of the skilfully spun suspense novel’ SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Nesta Falconer, an attractive widow, lives with her fifteen-year-old daughter Philippa, managing brother-in-law Charles Falconer’s household after the breakdown of his marriage. Nesta’s comfortable position is threatened when her sister Claire, returning from America, comes to stay at her cottage.

Charles realises that Nesta is a menace to Philippa’s happiness, and that she has been responsible for much distress. His mother, a formidable old lady, plays a part in revealing Nesta not only to her family but to herself as a negative person who contributes little to the happiness of others.

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

Even in the era of glasnost a defector is worth having, especially if he is a senior computer specialist in Russian military intelligence. But when the defection goes wrong, the British are left with three bodies and two inadequate clues to the nature of the information they might have been offered, and which now lies buried somewhere in the collective memories of David Audley and his one-time colleague Major Peter Richardson.

But what is the secret Audley shares with the half-Italian Richardson, now frightened into hiding somewhere in Italy? For once David Audley has no idea and the race is on to find the elusive Major. But Audley’s objective is fast being overtaken by modern political imperatives – ones very different from the black and white certainties of the old Cold War days . . .

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

Two KGB rivals, General Zarubin and Professor Nikolai Andrievich Panin, confront each other on a point overlooking the British Channel. Meanwhile, Henry Jaggard of British Intelligence has two pressing problems. He knows the Soviets are mounting a defensive program against a Polish dissident group in Britain, but he cannot intervene without jeopardizing his best inside agents.

And Dr David Audley, of the Intelligence R&D Department, has been playing clever politics again. Jaggard sees his opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. The Professor has requested a meeting with Audley, his old adversary. And, with one of Jaggard’s own men to abet him, Audley can be safely relied upon to overstep the mark in his attempts to frustrate the KGB . . .

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

A few weeks after D-day the German army in the West is retreating, with the British and the Americans in hot pursuit. But Major O’Conor, ex-liaison officer with the Yugoslav Partisans, is conducting his own private war. As he leads his hand-picked team of ruthless fighters deep behind the German lines, it becomes clear that he regards French Resistance units and British Intelligence agents as more dangerous to his mission than the Germans.

So it is unfortunate for him that two interpreters attached to his task force happen to be Second-Lieutenant Audley and Corporal Butler, already revealing the cunning and resourcefulness that, in earlier novels, has taken them to the very top of their field.

Major O’Conor’s startling objective remains unknown to everyone except himself until the final pages – where a shattering surprise lies in store.