Search Results for: time-trap

A teenager in the late 21st century discovers a way to travel in time as a way to escape the dystopian world he inhabits, only to learn that time travel introduces dangers of its own.

ABE LINCOLN IN AFRICA?

He was seen – and photographed – in a Tunisian bazaar. And an ancient Spanish galleon, fully crewed with ancient Spaniard, was taken in tow off Tampa by the Coast Guard…and a few luckless people found themselves living the same day over and over and over…

Something was badly wrong with Time – but Roger Tyson didn’t know it until he met the lovely agent from elsewhen and started on a mad chase through the dimensions, plagued by a motley bunch of temporal castaways, and pursued hotly by Oob the Rhox!

A Wall Street trader leaves the bulls and bears – and comes face-to-face with hungrier dinosaurs. A Roaring ’20s gangster gets roughed up – by real cavemen. A pioneer hitches up his covered wagon on the Oregon Trail – and winds up in a modern shopping mall. And Roger Tyson, who thought the space-time continuum had finally settled down to normal, is flung helplessly from the distant past to the far future, and back again.

Superbeings from the end of time are struggling for control of the universe with aliens from another galaxy. And if a few random humans get caught in one of their time gates, they don’t much care. So Roger and his friends find themselves facing everyone from the cast of the original Mutiny on the Bounty to real pirates of the Spanish Main in a wild quest to their own time and bring everything back to insanity as usual…

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 . . .

In uncharted Caprona, a continent lost from the map of Earth, where Time had stopped and all the primeval creatures of long-gone ages still prowled, Bowen Tyler was lost.

Strange mysteries awaited the expedition that went in search of Tyler. A barbaric, warring civilization hid there, trapped between the impassable jungle on one side and an unknown menace on the other.

2018 AD. The time of the Cold Peace, worse even than the Cold War. The bureaucratic regimes that rule from Washington and Moscow are indistinguishable in their passion for total repression. But in the West, a few dedicated individuals still struggle to find a way out of the trap of human history. Behind the screen of official research their desperate project is nearing completion . . .

Former Air Force officer and NSA agent Ron Moosic thought he had been assigned to be the Security Director for a nuclear power plant – but the power plant was only a cover for a top secret project sending observers back in time.

And terrorists had taken control of the project and sent two of their own back to change the past. Moosic was sent downtime in pursuit, with two considerable handicaps: like all time travelers, he would change upon arrival into a person who was alive at the time – he could find himself changed into a young boy or a woman – and if he stayed too long, his memories would vanish and he would be trapped in the past.

But Moosic quickly discovered that both he and the terrorists were only pawns in the time game, maneuvered by warring humans and… ex-humans in a future struggle that would either conquer the Earth or destroy all life on it…

Spring fever has hit Luis Mendoza, both on the job and at home. But it hasn’t erased the LAPD’s endless caseload of bizarre crimes and difficult cases.

‘Dapper Dan’, the rapist and murderer whose dashing looks and easy charm give him the perfect ploy to trap his pretty victims; a stickup artist who has found a foolproof weapon: a ferocious Doberman; a gruesome double homicide-suicide with a weird twist; a senator’s ‘natural’ death that suddenly doesn’t appear so natural – all add up to a month of murder most strange, and Mendoza knows it’s time to finally clean house.

‘A Luis Mendoza mystery means superlative suspense’ Los Angeles Times

The hoax proposed to John Baird by a two-bit con man in a seedy Key West bar was shady but potentially profitable. With little left to lose, the struggling, middle-aged Hemingway scholar agreed to forge a manuscript and pass it off as Papa’s lost masterpiece. But Baird never realized his actions would shatter the history of his own Earth . . . and others.

Now the unsuspecting academic is trapped out of time – propelled through a series of grim parallel worlds – and pursued by an interdimensional hitman with a literary license to kill.

The third book of The Eternal Champion trilogy.

John Daker is the Eternal Champion, trapped in a dimensionless plane outside of time, defender and destroyer of justice, a hero whose quest for justice leads only further into darkness.

Haunted by the memories of too many battles waged during countless lifetimes, he searches for the beautiful Ermizhad – and for the key that will allow him to step off the wheel of infinite incarnations. His is a voyage on a dark ship piloted by a blind helmsman, through the slave stalls of the Cannibal Ghost Women and the tunnels of doom to a monstrous confrontation with the Evil that could plunge the world into the final night of oblivion.

A time-traveller on an illegal trip into the past learns a chilling truth about her own destiny…


As a deadly Superflu runs rampant through a polluted, overpopulated Earth, a husband-and-wife scientific team races to scientific team races to salvage a livable future…


On a planet where the laws of physics are strangely twisted, a brilliant scientist’s work undermines an ancient faith and leads to a shattering revelation…


An ore-hauler on Mercury, desperate to save her endangered ship and career, finds a remarkable way out: a wormhole trapped in the hellish flux of magnetic fields and fiery plasma generated by the nuclear furnace of the sun…

Trapped behind walls of towering ice, First City was a prison from which no one ever escaped. The Trysts ruled with an iron fist: violent death was a common sight on the streets.

Morag MacKenzie was a mind-prostitute who gave erotic thought stimulation, without giving her body. Those who yearned for other escapes visited the Timesmiths, within those hands time could be moulded like clay as they spun dream-visions. But morag has her own dreams, of a world outside the ice walls, a world of space and freedom, and she is determined to find it.

A cash-in-transit raid goes pear-shaped when armed police show up. After all the smart planning and careful preparation someone must have talked – so think the relatives and friends of the jailed gang members. And it looks like the grass must have been the only raider to escape the trap.

A vengeance squad is on the prowl and Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur and his boss Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles are given the job of protecting the informant and his family. Yet all the time the lynch mob is closing in . . .

‘James’s writing dazzles with its poetic brevity’ Publishers Weekly

They called him the Life-Lord and the deadly milk-white elixir that his syndicate pushed was called Lifewater.

As promised, Lifewater brought youth to the old. Women who were losing their once cherished beauty, men who were losing their strength gave their life’s savings for a vial of the magic substance. What they did not know was that the powerful brew could cause sudden and violent death.

As the fatal youth epidemic spreads throughout the Solar System, Captain Future battles with time and danger to save his fellow beings from doom – only to find himself trapped in a master fiend’s plot to conquer the solar system.

From “one of the greatest writers of science fiction and fantasy who ever lived” (Stephen King) here is a masterpiece of fiction – a haunting, meaningful and at times erotic novel that describes a wonderous transformation that takes place in an American town when a charismatic, Christ-like figure mysteriously appears in its midst.
Godbody – sweetly innocent, as naked of guile as he is of worldly trappings – has returned to remind mankind of what it has lost. He will touch only a few lives before his preordained end, but they will be forever transformed. As one by one the members of a small rural town fall under Godbody’s spell, the burdens that had weighed down on them disappear, and a new vision of life as it can – and should – be suddenly reveals itself to them.

A remote, crumbling house; four sisters; and the secrets that imprison them…

‘Before Gillian Flynn, there was Lesley Glaister’ Harper’s Bazaar

‘Frightening yet eerily beautiful … Lesley Glaister is adept, original and mature’ Hilary Mantel

In a remote, crumbling house in the Fens live four sisters – Agatha, Milly, and Ellen and Esther – identical twins so closely linked as to be almost one person. They have lived there all their lives, trapped still by the fear of their dead father, who governs his daughters’ lives from beyond the grave. And then there is George, another inhabitant, imprisoned in the cellar.

Little by little, macabre events come to light: events that transform an idyllic country childhood into a world of eccentric isolation.

‘Eerie and satisfying – a horror story told with tenderness’ Sunday Times

It was just an average day for tabloid reporter Max Parker when he arrived in Malibu for a demonstration of a brand-new parallel-universe machine. But everything changed in an instant when inventor Barrington Boles succeeded in making Max the human gate to numerous parallelities.


Now Max was lost in a virtual sea of collateral worlds, confronting man-eating aliens, dinosaurs, talking frogs, dead Maxes, girl Maxes, old Maxes, even ghost Maxes. His only chance to escape the space-time continuum was to find Boles and hole the loony genius could rescue him. But how could he be sure which world was real, which Max was Max, and which Boles was the Boles who could stop the madness – or trap Max in the wrong world forever…?

‘Suddenly out of the darkness, out of the night, there swooped something with a swish like an aeroplane. The whole group of us were covered for an instant by a canopy of leathery wings, and I had a momentary vision of a long, snake-like neck, a fierce, red, greedy eye, and a great snapping beak, filled, to my amazement, with little, gleaming teeth.’

Desperate for adventure, journalist Ed Malone joins a scientific expedition to the South American jungle led by the larger than life figure of Professor Challenger. But you should be careful what you wish for. After climbing to the summit of a mysterious plateau in the Amazon rainforest the explorers find themselves trapped in a world lost in time, inhabited by carnivorous dinosaurs, giant fish-lizards and murderous ape-men.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s thrilling tale of adventure and crypto-zoology became a template for an industry of creature features that came in its wake.

The ties of home were strong. In a few years man gets attached to bricks and mortar, and scenery. In a hundred years roots are so deep that no one wants to tear them up. In a thousand years it is quite unthinkable. In a million years, only a lunatic would want to leave…
Then came the alien, presenting an impossible choice… Humanity must leave the Earth – or die! Behind them was everything they had known. In front of them, an unknown to-morrow.
Which were the greater – the hazards remaining or the dangers of the infinite void ahead?
Could they trust the alien?
He said there was another world, a safe world, that would be a new home – but was it all a trap?
There were dangers out there. The dangers of a population confined in ships for a half a life-time; the dangers of cosmic radiation; danger of attacks by the ‘Others’!
Only men of the highest courage and the greatest integrity could hope to survive in the raw, searing savagery of the unknown…

HAUNTED BY THE PAST, JOHN PETERSEN WOULD GIVE ANYTHING TO TURN BACK THE CLOCK…OR WOULD HE?

When Lightning blasts off without him, Second Officer John Petersen is finished as far as Trans-Galactic Clippers are concerned. Branded a deserter, stranded on Carinthia and desperate for a job, there are very few places left to go. The Rim Runners would have him – they’ll have anyone who’s still warm and can flash some kind of certificate. But there may be a less than unpleasant alternative…

Private detective Steve Vynalek needs Petersen. Has a fanatical scientist on the planet Wenceslaus really found a way to beat the time travel problem, a way to bring back yesterday? The Presidents of Carinthia and Vynalek are convinced that Petersen is the only man for the job. In the airless wastes of Wenceslaus, Petersen finds himself reliving the past, trapped in a terrible cycle of familiarity – a cycle that only he can break.

A young artist is searching for the truth about her past – but does she really want to know…?

With an introduction by A J Finn, bestselling author of THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW

Superb classic crime from ‘the mistress of day-lit terror!’ NEW YORK TIMES

‘Psychologically rich, intricately plotted and full of dark surprises’ Megan Abbott

When Amanda Garth was born, a nearly-disastrous mix-up caused the hospital to briefly hand her over to the prestigious Garrison family instead of to her birth parents. The error was quickly fixed, Amanda was never told, and the secret was forgotten for twenty-three years … until her aunt thoughtlessly revealed it in casual conversation.

But what if the real accident was Amanda being returned to the wrong parents? After all, she seems much more like the painter Tobias Garrison. Amanda is determined to discover the truth within her aunt’s bizarre anecdote, but soon is trapped in a web of lies, suspicions and deadly secrets …

Jessica Raven’s brother is going to die.

She dreams of finding a cure for Adam’s illness, but that isn’t going to happen.

While on holiday in France, she encounters a strange band of children, mysterious and ragged, who seem to urgently want HER help. Who are they? And who is Jean-Luc, their leader?

As she learns more, Jessica realises that the game they’re playing isn’t a game, that Jean-Luc is a prisoner, and the children aren’t children but nightmares, guarding a priceless treasure. Adam is the only one who could help them, but Adam is dying.

And his cure is trapped in the ghosts of a horrifying past . . .

Award-winning author Gwyneth Jones, writing as Ann Halam, delivers another terrifying story for teens that raises the dead and spans time, from the modern day back to WWII. You can find more information on the writing Gwyneth did as Ann Halam on her website: http://www.gwynethjones.uk/HALAM.htm

Empath Kayla John Reed’s rebel forces, the War Minstrels, had struck a crucial blow at the heart of Yates Keller’s empire, conquering the Alliance capital, Vardalia. It should have been Kayla’s moment of triumph. But Vardalia was a shambles, and not only had Yates himself escaped, he claimed to have her friends and shipmates in his clutches.



Kayla had no choice but to agree to the terms he’d left in a holographic message. Meet him on their home world, the mining colony Styx, surrender the fabled Mindstone to him, and Keller would release her friends. Yet even as she set off for the rendezvous point, trouble was brewing among the War Minstrels – trouble that could transform their successful revolution into the deadliest kind of anarchy if she didn’t make it back in time. And what Kayla had no way of know foreseeing was that Styx itself hid a peril far greater than any trap Keller had planned for her…

George Sanford has a gift for guessing right the first time and very little else going for him. When Ahmed and his other friends graduate school and got jobs in The City, George finds himself left behind. He never wanted to sign his name, let alone fill out applications and reports.

Then George bumps into the Rescue Squad and is swept up in the excitement of a hunt for a trapped girl. It is George who finds her with his special talent for guessing right … and it is George who suddenly becomes the pride of the Rescue Squad. With a friend running interference for him with the bureaucracy, George lands a place for himself as a “consultant” – and the more he works, the more his strange talents grow.

With each success George begins to change. Using his special talents to rescue a computer technician from a gang of revolutionaries, he finds he has become a pawn in a mad iconoclastic game. A game where his own talents pose the greatest threat to The City – and the world!