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THE DAUGHTER OF KAIFENG

The world was haunted. Every sunset the natives went home, locked their doors, and pulled down the window blinds. Ghosts didn’t scare Kennedy. As an agent of FATE, it took more than superstition to shake him. But Epidoris was the real thing. Monsters did appear in the darkness, people did vanish at night – a whole MALACA barracks had vanished, garrison, weapons and building.

That’s what brought Kennedy to Epidoris. That and one thing more – a creature of the infamous Dr. Kaifeng had turned up. A beautiful woman, a princess she called herself – but Kennedy had seen her before – lying in a processing vat on a Kaifeng planetoid of warped genetics. Between the scientific machinations of the galaxy’s most perverted mind and the spectral realities of a disputed world there had to be a meaning that boded no good for Terra – and that’s where Kennedy came in.

In his fourth short-story collection, Watson again demonstrates the extraordinary scope of his imagination. The title story has ancient witchcraft meeting complacent modern suburbia in a tale of spine-chilling horror, while ‘When the Timegate Failed’ casts an unexpected light in the dangers of space travel and man’s powers of self-delusion. Alien matters of a different kind crop up in ‘Windows’, in which mysterious artefacts found on Mars prove to be something of a problem for their chic human owners. Evil Water is a highly inventive collection which is a delight to read.

Expressway to an Uncharted Sphere

“Theyre about!” the woman whispered, and Crane abruptly saw a strange light shining through the heavy black curtains that shrouded the house. He crossed to the window and before anyone could stop him he drew the curtain back.

At first he did not understand what he saw: a round gleaming, colour-running orb stared unwinkingly back into his face. It was an eye. An immense sad eye staring at him through the chink of the curtains, an eye surrounded by a living whorl of flame that he had last seen engulfing poor Barney in the parking lot.

At least three others had disappeared into the strange world from which those aliens had come, and a girl had been driven insane by them. And before Crane’s quest to unravel the secret of the Map Country was complete, the fate of two worlds would hang in the balance.

Rod was a television reporter with the ultimate gimmick. Thanks to the marvels of microsurgery, TV cameras were implanted in his eyes. He could broadcast people’s actions without them even knowing it. But when he was forced to spy on a dying woman, he deliberately blinded himself by overloading his sensitive circuits.

Rod thought that he could opt out of the tough choice that society was forcing him to make. He was wrong, of course. Dead wrong . . .

‘A fine craftsman’ Ellery Queen

The man in the yellow robe had put the ancient curse of the Nine Times Nine on Wolfe Harrigan. And when Matt Duncan looked up from the croquet lawn that afternoon, he saw the man in the yellow robe in Wolfe Harrigan’s study.

When Matt got there, all the doors and windows were locked from the inside. But when the door was broken down, there was no man in a yellow robe in the room, and Wolfe Harrigan lay murdered on the floor. But at the time of the murder the man in the yellow robe was nowhere near the room.

Who better to explain this miracle than Sister Ursula, a nun, whose childhood ambition was to become a policewoman?

Welcome to a haunted world; the world of Keith Roberts’ powerful and unique imagination. These stories show Roberts’ fascination for the curious and unclassifiable; and as ever, his mastery of character and detail. ‘Susan’ introduces the reader to a schoolgirl with awesome psychic powers; but the sensitive treatment turns a shock situation into a brilliant fable, while ‘The Scarlet Lady’, predating Stephen King’s Christine, has the genuine stench of petrol, oil and demons. ‘The Eastern Windows’ chillingly continues the theme; by contrast, ‘Winderwood’ introduces us to a fearsome locale that Roberts insists is real. ‘Mrs. Cibber’ transports the reader, with complete conviction, to the smog-ridden London of the fifties and unfolds the strange tale of a young graphic designer haunted by a woman from the eighteenth century. ‘The Snake Princess’, equally atmospheric, tells the story of a boy’s doomed, bizarre love, while ‘Everything in the Garden’ presents the tour de force of a haunting within a haunting.

A collection of short stories from the award-winning author, Kate Wilhelm. Contains the following:
The Mile-Long Spaceship Fear Is a Cold Black Jenny with Wings A Is for Automation Gift from the Stars No Light in the Window One for the Road Andover and the Android The Man without a Planet The Apostolic Travelers The Last Days of the Captain

Garry Kilworth’s first collection shows him to be one of the most original and enjoyable writers in the field. The thirteen stories in The Songbirds of Pain mix science fiction and fantasy, with a dash of unclassifiable strangeness. Kilworth is particularly adept at evoking colourful and exotic locales in distant parts of the world, as in ‘The Dissemblers’, a story set in the Arabian deserts, about a man resorting to bizarre self-torture in his attempts to see beyond the veil of death. ‘Blind Windows’ is an adventure set in the Far East, reminiscent of an updated Rider Haggard: a group of Westerners searching for some fabled crystals find their way into a hidden underground world. ‘Scarlet Fever’ is about an artist in a sterile future society who gives himself the disease in an attempt to stimulate creativity. And the titled story tells of a woman who undergoes a strange and painful series of treatments in order to achieve perfect beauty.

Forget The Girl on the Train – meet the woman who watches from her window, and finds herself caught up in murder…
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club


‘Watching, fascinated and horrified, he saw thin fingers creep around the edge of the black curtain. Someone from inside was tugging to loosen it . . .’

Miss Janet Martin, a 74-year-old spinster, enjoys her daily habit of watching passers-by from her window. When she strikes up a friendship with one of them – the golden-haired Pamela – she has no inkling that the innocence of her fading years is about to be turned upside down.

The little old lady becomes inextricably involved in the child’s fate, and when she calls in private eye Arthur Crook to help, a plot of abduction, fraud and murder unfolds . . .

When Sergeant Brian O’Malley’s prostitute lover pushes him from a window, his friends in the police cover up the details and give him a hero’s funeral.

His eldest son is encouraged to join the boys in the force, but as he rises through the ranks he realises that all favours must be repaid, whatever the repercussions . . .

‘Rough and tough and authentic’ New York Times
‘This riveting blockbuster has everything’ Publishers Weekly

Graham Shipley has come to the Cotswolds to take up a new teaching appointment and to make a fresh start after the break-up of his marriage. He is made welcome by the head of the school and by his new neighbour in Upper Benbury, crime writer Melissa Craig.

But shortly after his arrival a young girl is found drowned. Foul play is suspected and when Graham’s past threatens to catch up with him, he turns to Melissa for help. She soon discovers that this is not a simple case of murder – there are other, more complex and sinister influences at work in the village.

‘Astute characterisation and good local colour . . . engaging and sensitive’ Oxford Times

Two petrol bombs thrown on the Cakewalk promenade, a sports reporter and his bike rammed off a cliff, a policeman thrown through a plate-glass display window in the city centre and left to die. All this is ‘a quiet summer weekend’ in the dockland city of Canton and its Art Deco resort town of Ocean Beach.

Chief Inspector Sam Hoskins links the investigation of these crimes, but political chicanery hampers him on both sides: on the left is ambitious young Eve Ricard riding to national fame and fortune on ‘women’s issues, media bias, and insensitive policing’; to the right is the monstrously corrupt councillor and aged razor-boy Carmel Cooney, with his girls and clubs and rackets …

‘Strong on city life and the interplay between policemen and local politics’ Independent

The second book in the Urban Nucleus series, containing the following:

Prelude: The Domes (1978)
If a Flower Could Eclipse (1970)
Interlude: The Testimony of Leland Turner (1979)
Old Folks at Home (1978)
Interlude: The City Takes Care of Its Own (1979)
The Windows in Dante’s Hell (1973)
Interlude: Volplaning Heroes (1979)
The Samurai and the Willows (1976)
Interlude: First Councilor Lesser (1979)
Allegiances (1975)
Interlude: The Cradle Begins to Rock (1979)
At the Dixie-Apple with the Shoofly-Pie Kid (1977)
Interlude: The Fall of Saganella Lesser (1979)
Death Rehearsals (1979)

Short-tempered Enid Marley had a foolproof system for answering queries from the many fans of her advice column in You magazine, but she had no sense at all when it came to solving her own problems.

When her latest husband strays, she decides to get his attention with a fake suicide attempt, but her plan misfires horribly. While she’s teetering on the window ledge outside her office waiting to be noticed, hands reach out for her, causing her to lose her balance. She survives, thanks to a well-placed awning and an unfortunate passer-by, leaving everyone to wonder: did she fall, or was she pushed?

‘Incomparable Pamela Branch’ Carolyn G Hart

It started as a routine tail – shadowing an oily hustler who’d been courting a well-healed matron. But the assignment soon led Donald Lam to a sleazy hotel room with a sexy barfly.

And now she’s left him high and dry with a pair of corpses dumped in his lap. Suddenly he’s the cops’ prime suspect. And it’ll take some fancy footwork to sidestep the law – and the real killer, who intends to leave Bertha Cool partnerless.

Dick Darwent brooded in a dark cell of Newgate Prison – waiting to be hanged. Lady Caroline Ross, rich, cold and beautiful, prepared a champagne breakfast to celebrate her marriage. How were the fates of these two people intertwined? And how were their lives changed by a shot through a bathroom window, a riot at the opera, a pistol duel at dawn, and a mysterious coachman whose cloak was stained with graveyard mold?

The scene is a fashionable French seaside resort; the witness, Eve Neill, is looking out of her window in the early hours of the morning when she sees the battered body of her prospective father-in-law in the room opposite.

By Eve’s side is her ex-husband, who has attempted to force his unwelcome attentions on her. How can Eve tell the police what she saw when disclosing whom she was with might jeopardise her own impending marriage?

Suspicion falls on casual thieves, on the family and on various acquaintances, but the complicated ‘locked-room’ case is eventually solved by Dr Dermot Kinross, a detective who becomes emotionally involved …

Drug dealer Ralph Ember stumbles on a ghastly surprise when he and sidekick Beau Derek arrive at the house of yachtsman Barney Coss, his bulk supplier. Barney and his two women have been savagely murdered and the murderers, three drug rivals from London, are still in the house.

Beau dies quickly at their hands, and although they let Ralph go, he’s a marked man. But when Melanie, Beau’s alluring, ruthless widow, learns what has happened, she is bent on revenge and wants Ralph as her partner all the way.

‘Bill James is a frontrunner among those who have turned the police procedural on its head’ Sunday Times

Lydia Grey, an American returning to London after many years, is woken by footsteps in the night. There is someone in her room – of that she is sure. But that is also impossible. There is only one door and it is bolted shut. The windows are eight floors up, and are locked against the winter night.

As the noise recedes she switches on her bedside lamp. No one is there. Was it a dream? An illusion of a half-awakened state? Or is someone out to get her?

Even for a redhead, Helen Dester was wild – she’d driven one guy to drink and made another jump out of a top-floor window.

Glyn Nash realises that to tangle with her will be dangerous. But he has no option if he wants a share of the $750,000 insurance money Helen stands to gain if her husband dies accidentally – or even if he is murdered.

An escaped convict, a mysterious deserted house, and murder in the Lake District..
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

The shades of night were falling fast when Arthur Crook drove the old Superb over the Lakeland Fells and into the valley, to stop at a mysterious house where, though a light burned in an upper window, no one answered the bell.

Here opens a double murder mystery in which Crook acts in the defence of a young prisoner on the run, whose guilt appears evident.

‘The usual gusto, racy prose, good plotting and up-to-the-minute social observation’ Sunday Times

‘The best American police procedural of the year’ Anthony Boucher

Sergeant Ivor Maddox and the Wilcox Street precinct do not have time to rest on their laurels. Currently there is a curious wave of shoplifting among teenagers, an elderly pensioner has been shot dead from the window of a passing car, a six-month-old baby has disappeared from his pram and a pregnant fifteen-year-old has died of an overdose of an unusual drug – a terrible accident or murder?

She lost her memory – will she lose her life?

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

‘The mistress of unease’ DAILY TELEGRAPH

Mrs Anderson is starting to forget where she has put things, what she has bought, or even eaten. Living alone in a rambling mansion, she is isolated from the town.

But Mrs Anderson has a visitor. A young man comes every night, through the dining room window. He helps himself to food and money, and has even made himself comfortable in the attic. A young man who enjoys power, he might take over the whole house and make it his. It’s a place where no one will think to look for him, where no one will find him – no matter what he’s done.

Behind the ominous walls of Jamaica Court, Anthea Vine rules as a provincial Queen Elizabeth, imperious and wealthy, vain and pathetic.

But Anthea holds chained to her in financial dependence five discontented souls, all with a motive for murder. Her tentacles reach beyond her three wards and draw into their clutches her secretary, Sally Morgan, and the sardonically charming local doctor.

Anthea’s charms prove fatal to none but her. For, while people set their watches by the light in her bedroom window, Florence Pye reads death in the cards. Her prophecy comes true, silently, violently in the depths of the night.

What Miss Pye has not foreseen, though, is that she will be first to find the body . . .