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Hubbard made his money in blackmail, most detestable blackmail at that. A wealthy, lisping butterfly collector, there were no special regrets when he was found dead at his desk in his own home. Yet Colonel Sanderstead felt it his duty to probe the affair, since his nephew’s best friends had very good reason to wish Hubbard dead.

His investigation, as it turns out, would never have solved the case, but it leads to an amazing confession …

An ordinary day – which turns to blackmail and murder.
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

What seemed like an ordinary phone call in the middle of the afternoon suddenly plunges its recipient, Simon Crete, into a plot of blackmail and murder.

‘Tell him it’s no use. I haven’t got it,’ the mystery woman’s voice cried desperately down the line. But who was she? And why was she ringing a man whom she had never seen?

In life, Jane Ann never had much use for a halo, but in her violent death she finally earned one. When they found a suspect, everyone relaxed except Hugh MacReedy.

Maybe he should have stayed out of it, but MacReedy owed a big debt to the patsy they were sending to the electric chair in a week. And he would have stayed out of it, if he’d known what his chances were of coming out alive …

THE BALANCE BETWEEN LAW AND CHAOS has long been maintained by the rulers of Béarn, but the death of the current king has enabled the elves to magically substitute one of their own on the throne. And, under the leadership of Dh’arlo’mé, the dark elves are preparing to claim their long-sought vengeance on mankind.
But when the small party which set out to find and bring back the last possible heir to the throne returns to Béarn, Dh’arlo’mé realizes that even magic and murder combined will not be enough to overturn the balance. Now his solution must hinge on Béarn’s burden and treasure: the Staffs of Law and Chaos. Within these plain-pieces of wood dwell the essences of Law and Chaos, each eternally seeking its Champion to destroy the other.
Lured into one Staff’s power, Dh’arlo’mé seeks to seduce the mortals into championing the other. And with all the worlds teetering on the brink of doom, it falls to Colbey Calistinsson – son of the god Thor and the greatest of Renshai warriors – to select that Champion. If he chooses wrongly, all life will come to an end. Yet even success will come at a high price. For the only way to insure that this danger can never arise again, is for both Champions and Staffs to be totally annihilated.

When a desk clerk welcomes a group of tourists into his mysterious and crumbling hotel, the last thing he ever expected was that one girl on the tour might hold the power to unravel the hidden mystery that lies in its walls.

The Grand Hotel is a horror novel by esteemed author Scott Kenemore ( Zen of Zombie, Zombie, Ohio) that takes the reader on a thrilling ride that interconnects a series of stories narrated by the desk clerk of the Grand Hotel. While it is not known whether or not the desk clerk is actually the devil reincarnated, it is strange that many of the people who come for a tour of the hotel never leave.

As the narrator takes you deeper and deeper into the heart of the hotel, he starts wondering if all the secrets that have been hiding for so long may soon start to show themselves. While he is quite ready for this experience, the real question is if the rest of the world is.

Kenemore’s incredible style and originality carry The Grand Hotel to places most people only see in their nightmares. And while we don’t know what secrets lie in the Grand Hotel, all we know is that the person who holds the secret puts fear into the narrator himself-a thought which will terrify everyone.

THE END OF HARRY POTTER is the perfect companion volume for all Harry Potter fans. Award-winning writer and Potter fan David Langford delves into the six Harry Potter books to explore J.K. Rowling’s universe and characters, and shows in detail how cleverly J.K. Rowling has woven her world.

This is the book for you if you are one of the gazillions of readers who find themselves wondering about horcruxes and Deatheaters and Dark Lords … Langford looks at questions like:

*What are the remaining horcruxes, the places He Who Shall Not Be Named has stashed his soul so he can never die?
*Does Harry himself bear a part of the Dark Lord’s soul in his scar?
*Is that why Harry understands Parseltongue – and if not, why does he speak the language of the serpentssss?
*What will happen when Harry is technically a grown-up, and no longer under the protection of his Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia?
*Is Albus Dumbledore really dead?
*Whose side is Severus Snape really on?
*Will Hogwarts survive the final, apocalyptic battle between Harry and You-Know-Who?

Don’t know the answers? Then read THE END OF HARRY POTTER!

The death-stars had come, and they had kept on coming for hundreds of thousands of years, falling upon the Earth, swept upon it by a vagrant star that had passed through the outer reaches of the solar system. They brought with them a time of unending darkness and cold. It was an event that occured every twenty-six million years, and there was no turning it aside.

But all that was done with now. At last the death-stars had ceased to fall, the sky had cleared of dust and cinders, the sun’s warmth again was able to break through the clouds. The glaciers relinquished their hold on the land; the Long Winter ended; the New Springtime began. The world was born anew.

Now each year was warmer than the last. The fair seasons of spring and summer, long lost from the world, came again with increasing power. And the People, having survived the dark time in their sealed cocoons, were spreading rapidly across the fertile land. But others were already there. The hjjks, the somber cold-eyed insect-folk, had never retreated, even at the time of greatest chill. The world had fallen to them by default, and they had been its sole masters for seven hundred thousand years. They were not likely to share it gladly now . . .

‘East of the sun and west of the moon…’


…you may find a freighter carrying ivory to Huy Braseal, mammoth tusks to Tartessos and Ashkelon, spices from Cathay to Lyonesse. Another world, of infinite strangeness and high adventure, yet never far from our own; round a corner, through a door into a harbourside inn and you may find yourself there.


Steve Fisher had been there once, had sailed the cloud archipelagos on a desperate quest to Hispaniola. Or had he? The memories have faded…was it only a dream? Then, in Bangkok, as he struggles to arrange a shipment of vital supplies to the endangered paradise of Bali, Steve finds himself catapulted back into that world, through the eerie gates of the Spiral – and into terrible dangers. For our there is something that wants him stopped, at any costs.

Shadows from the past, from the present – and from somewhere that is neither, where myths and legends and terrifying archetypes stalk the world. Entangles by old loves and ancient hatreds, with witches and warlocks to help him and the original Bogeyman on his trail, Steve must fight to reconcile past and present in an epic battle of wits which leads him from the sleazy sex bars of Bangkok to the mist-shrouded islands of the South Seas…

A Victorian family is left high and dry when its lord and master sails off to China to bring back the first tea of the season. Absent for six months at a time, he never ceases to dominate the lives of his wife and children.

The yearly race to be the first home with the tea is underway, with every ship vying for both kudos and the prize money. The year is 1866, and as both Ariel and Taeping are surging up the channel, Caroline, the second daughter of the oppressed family, begins her own voyage of discovery.

Sanderalee Dawson was used to being on camera, but never as a victim. When police find the sexy TV celebrity in her apartment, she is almost unrecognisable. She has been tortured and raped.

Lynne Jacobi, Bureau Chief of the DA’s office, is a brilliant, tough young lawyer who wants to be DA so badly she can taste it. She knows she can make it if she can get a conviction for this crime.

‘Top notch with a sizzling shock at the end’ Cosmopolitan

‘Crackling with New York static’ Sunday Times

The inhabitants of a planet called Iszm, a species known as the Iszic, have evolved the native giant trees into living homes, with all needs and various luxuries supplied by the trees’ own natural growth. The Iszic maintain a jealously-guarded monopoly, exporting only enough trees to keep prices high and make a great profit. The protagonist, Ailie Farr, is a human botanist who goes to Iszm (like many others before him, of many species) to steal a female tree, which might allow the propagation of the species off world and break the monopoly.

This volume includes two short novels, previously published separately – the title story, and Nopalgarth (published as The Brains of Earth). The collection is rounded out by two of his best shorter works – “The Gift of Gab” and “The Narrow Land”. “The Narrow Land” was the first of a proposed story sequence which was never completed.

Contents: The Houses of Iszm, The Gift of Gab, Nopalgarth (The Brains of Earth), The Narrow Land

All Jack Vance titles in the SFGateway use the author’s preferred texts, as restored for the Vance Integral Edition (VIE), an extensive project masterminded by an international online community of Vance’s admirers. In general, we also use the VIE titles, and have adopted the arrangement of short story collections to eliminate overlaps.

A cool girl hunt is what the blind man wanted. He was searching for a pretty young woman, soft spoken and slender, whom he’d never seen but knew had vanished, and he was willing to pay Bertha Cool anything to find her.

The whole thing seemed impossible and sounded suspicious, but the man’s money was right – even if his motives weren’t – and given the choice Bertha always followed the dollar sign.

Only this time, the dollar sign pointed to murder and fingered Bertha Cool as a red hot suspect.

Frank Wimble never doubted his ability to do anything he wanted. When he set out to commit the perfect murder he was entirely confident.

When his wife vanishes the locals all assume Wimble has done it, especially when he starts to go around with his young mistress. But with no body and no evidence the police can’t do much. They can’t do anything, in fact, until Wimble gets unlucky and a most damning piece of evidence suddenly appears. But is it enough to convict Wimble at trial?

Not much was known about Arthur Kedby in the West End Club that he frequented. ‘He doesn’t look much like a secret agent,’ remarked one member, but in general that was what he was believed to be. But Kedby is a blackmailer, and not even a very successful one; his great success lies in the fact that he has never been caught.

Then he recognises the face of a club guest – a face he has seen before. And all at once Kedby has an opportunity to practise his skills at a level that might just furnish him with a pension …

In this thrilling second book of the Earthborn trilogy, Lucas and Asha have survived the decimation of Earth at the hands of the invading Xalans and seek safe haven with their enemy’s true foes, the Sorans. They find a lush planet inhabited by a civilization far more advanced than their own, waging a seemingly endless war against a constantly evolving enemy.

The Sorans call the pair of them the “Earthborn” and they’re welcomed as heroes, almost as gods. To an audience of billions, they swear an oath to avenge their fallen planet by aiding the Sorans in their war against Xala. But soon Lucas and Asha find Sora just as dangerous as apocalyptic Earth when they’re targeted by the Fourth Order, a rebel collective who decries them as false prophets and harbingers of further bloodshed.

Their friend and turncoat Xalan scientist Alpha believes he’s located someone who can help them turn the tide of the war for good, stranded on a conquered colony planet. But landing on the new world, Lucas and Asha find themselves hunted by a violent, mysterious beast, known only as the Desecrator, let loose by the Xalans.

Escaping Earth was only the beginning. As Lucas and Asha quickly learn, the universe has worlds and creatures far more dangerous than anything their home planet could have offered, and their continued survival hinges on gaining new allies they never could have imagined.

Xhea has no magic. Born without the power that everyone else takes for granted, Xhea is an outcast-no way to earn a living, buy food, or change the life that fate has dealt her. Yet she has a unique talent: the ability to see ghosts and the tethers that bind them to the living world, which she uses to scratch out a bare existence in the ruins beneath the City’s floating Towers.

When a rich City man comes to her with a young woman’s ghost tethered to his chest, Xhea has no idea that this ghost will change everything. The ghost, Shai, is a Radiant, a rare person who generates so much power that the Towers use it to fuel their magic, heedless of the pain such use causes. Shai’s home Tower is desperate to get the ghost back and force her into a body-any body-so that it can regain its position, while the Tower’s rivals seek the ghost to use her magic for their own ends. Caught between a multitude of enemies and desperate to save Shai, Xhea thinks herself powerless-until a strange magic wakes within her. Magic dark and slow, like rising smoke, like seeping oil. A magic whose very touch brings death.

With two extremely strong female protagonists, Radiant is a story of fighting for what you believe in and finding strength that you never thought you had.

Better to be a queen than a pawn…

Kate Mossland is an ordinary teenager in a strange and dangerous land. She has crossed the gordath, the portal between our world and Aeritan, and may never go home again. She has accepted her new life as foster daughter to Lord Terrick and is engaged to be married to his son Colar, a young noble whose life she saved and whom she loves.

But all is not easy in the House of Terrick. The servants distrust her, the men-at-arms disdain her, and learning how to be a great lady is harder than it looks. Every misstep brings her closer to ruin, and Kate must walk a fine line between independent teen and modest noblewoman.

When the youngest son of Lord Terrick is kidnapped by armed thugs, Kate and a mysterious young girl named Ossen make a daring rescue. But her unladylike courage only strengthens her enemies’ hatred.

Then in a single blow Kate learns that her life is truly not her own. As Aeritan teeters on the brink of war, and promises once made are so easily broken, Lord Terrick demands that Kate submit to a new role.

But Kate is not so easily managed. Together with Ossen and the girl’s rough and roguish brothers, she leaves the protection of the only House she has known in Aeritan to choose her own path and find her true home.

During the day a blazing and merciless sun beat down on “the boy” and at night a friendless and cold darkness enveloped him. It was a bleak and lonely countryside over which he had been wandering for ten years. A rare tree, bird or wild animal was the only life he encountered during his desolate trek through his young years of roaming. Infrequently, he was fortunate enough to find shelter and food in the shops of deserted villages; otherwise he foraged what he could from the nearly barren land. Contact with other humans was his innermost and greatest fear.

But the day came when his curiosity overcame his sensibilities of self-preservation and he was drawn to the sound of a great wailing not far from a place where he had come to rest.

Form that moment on his whole existence took on a radical change. His wanderings became a kaleidoscope of adventures, emotions, and responsibilities – never static, forever mobile, and potentially dangerous. There were moments when it would have been easier to turn his back, return to old ways, but somehow he knew this was an impossibility. He accepted his new fate, but still feared the greatest of all commitments until it was too late for him.

This fantasy adventure will not fail to excite and stir in every reader memories and emotions of seemingly forgotten times and moments.

Omega: an apocalyptic rumour from the Eastern Front. Omega: something that will alter all the strategic calculations of the Earth’s great military blocs. Omega: the code name for a weapon that may well bring doomsday with it. But if Omega is indeed the agent that will destroy the world, that world is not our own. For this is a timeline in which World War Two never truly ended: a timeline in which Hitler died in a plane crash, Britain joined Germany in its battle against Communist Russia, and the present is an age of intermittent, but deadly, armed conflict between the USSR, the European Alliance, and the USA.

The frontier regions are radioactive wastelands, nuclear winter threatens catastrophe, global confrontation could erupt again any time – and that’s before Omega is taken into account…This is the reality experienced by Owen Meredith when an accident forces his consciousness from the England we know into the mind of his cognate self in that other darker, Europe.

Switching back and forth between being plain Owen Meredith and troubled Major Owain Maredudd, Owen is faced not only with a Cold War going Hot, but with a deep crisis of identity. Who is he? Whose twisted destiny is he treading? Did the ordinary domestic life he remembers ever even take place? Perhaps the universe of Owain and Omega is merely a symptom of mental illness – but if so, why is it so urgently tangible?

When it was originally published, the Discontinuity Guide was the first attempt to bring together all of the various fictional information seen in BBC TV’s DOCTOR WHO, and then present it in a coherent narrative. Often copied but never matched, this is the perfect guide to the ‘classic’ Doctors.

Fulffs, goofs, double entendres, fashion victims, technobabble, dialogue disasters: these are just some of the headings under which every story in the Doctor’s first twenty-seven years of his career is analysed.

Despite its humorous tone, the book has a serious purpose. Apart from drawing attention to the errors and absurdities that are among the most loveable features of DOCTOR WHO, this reference book provides a complete analysis of the story-by-story creation of the Doctor Who Universe.

One sample story, Pyramids of Mars, yields the following gems:

TECHNOBABBLE: a crytonic particle accelerator, a relative continuum stabiliser, and triobiphysics.

DIALOGUE TRIUMPHS: ‘I’m a Time Lord… You don’t understand the implications. I’m not a human being. I walk in eternity.’

CONTINUITY: the doctor is about 750 years old at this point, and has apparently aged 300 years since Tomb of the Cybermen. He ages about another 300 years between this story and the seventh’ Doctor’s Time and the Rani.

An absolute must for every Doctor Who fan, this new edition of the classic reference guide has not been updated at all for the 50th anniversary.

‘No one writes a better crime novel than Charles Willeford’ Elmore Leonard

Amoral, sexy and brutal, Wild Wives was written in a sleazy San Francisco hotel in the early 1950s while Willeford was on leave from the army. This tale of deception features crooked detective Jacob C. Blake and his nemesis: a beautiful, insane young woman who is the wife of a socially prominent San Francisco architect.

Blake becomes entangled in a web of deceit, intrigue and multiple murders in this exciting period tale.

‘Mr Willeford never puts a foot wrong, and this is truly an entertainment to relish’ New Yorker

Glamorous TV star Jan Warden is found gruesomely murdered in her bed. In her climb to fame, she has made plenty of enemies and the police are not short of suspects. It has fallen to Ivor and Sue Maddox and their LAPD colleagues to solve the murder, which they must do under intense media pressure.

Crime never sleeps in LA though, and alongside this high-profile case they must investigate a rapist attacking solitary women, two girls kidnapped into prostitution and a knife fight at a wedding reception.

‘My favourite American crime-writer’ New York Herald Tribune

When Sara Dacre comes across a large red pendant at a twenty cent jewellery stall she is tempted to buy it – especially when she bumps into her friend Gerry Hone, who persuades her that it will brighten up her old grey taffeta.

But soon she finds herself at the centre of some strange events. On leaving the shop she and Gerry witness the scene of an accident – but nobody can agree what happened. And when Gerry takes her to an automat for coffee he goes to the counter to order – and never comes back …

‘Explosive’ Birmingham Post

On a winter night in a Bronx neighbourhood, a blow from a shovel fells a man in the street. From the scene flee six children, any of whom might have loosed the fatal strike. Weeks later, one of their fathers is executed for the crime.

Four decades on, the Ryer Avenue gang gathers again: Megan Magee, Charley and Eugene O’Brien, Ben Herskel and Dante D’Angelo; the group is missing only Willie Paycek, the little hanger-on who never fitted in. But now that fatal blow is about to come crashing down upon them – and this time, Willie is calling the shots.