Search Results for: double,-double

Chet Logan, known as the Axe Killer, escapes from custody while being escorted to jail. Disguised as a police officer, he meets up with movie writer Perry Weston and persuades him to drive to Weston’s remote fishing lodge. Once there, and somewhat to Weston’s surprise, Logan agrees to talk about his life and how he came to murder six people.

The police become suspicious and put a watch on the lodge. Then Weston’s wayward wife visits him and promises a fresh start. Logan wants money and a chance to start again …

Can either of them deliver or will Weston and Logan share a double funeral?

On New Year’s Eve, solicitor Rosa Epton spends a pleasant evening talking to a man who seems to be finding the date he has brought with him less than satisfactory company. The next morning she receives a call from the police. Toby Nash has been charged with raping the woman with whom he attended the party, and has asked for Rosa.

Unfortunately for Nash and Rosa, the detective inspector in charge of the case is determined to get a conviction by any means.

Paul Henderson is a big time jewel thief on a run of bad luck. He has a seven-year-old daughter to support, so when he’s offered a partnership in the biggest heist of all time he decides to try to take the baubles and run.

He reaches Switzerland, where the crime is to take place, and wangles an invitation to a gala only to be confronted by a double threat, a double cross and a kidnapping. And all this is before the night of the burglary arrives . . .

‘Donald MacKenzie is a born storyteller’ Guardian

Kit Hendry has several criminal convictions, but now he is given the choice of a twelve-year sentence or a government mission to trace the security leakage from a Dusseldorf installation. Kit can crack safes – he can also speak German.

Under the vigilant surveillance of Gaunt and also of Bernadette, with whom he is infatuated, he crosses the channel and is exposed to a smallpox victim, but the film he secures becomes the final double take . . .

When Meg Jeacock let out the furnished cottage next to her house she did not care that her new tenant had certain rather sinister characteristics – he’d paid three months’ rent in advance. But Meg’s husband Marcus sensed he was a crook.
And when the stranger shows an inexplicable interest in Shandon Priory, the big house nearby, whose elderly owner has recently died, it becomes clear that there is trouble brewing – which, when it comes, takes the form of double murder . . .

A police officer needs the quickness and guile of a bookmaker, the ingenuity of a psychiatrist and the physical reserves of a Marine, or so it seems to Detective Chief Superintendent Manton, who is called in to investigate a huge bullion robbery and its possible link with the death of a solicitor in a car crash.

But even when a supposed double murderer is charged and tried there is still a taunting question mark over the case. Whose was the brain that planned the audacious gold robbery and does Manton know enough about the criminal mind to find out?

On the face of it, the double homicide of Arnold and Marie Robbins looks like just another brutal Miami Beach murder – except that teenage Cathy Robbins is lying between the bodies, traumatised but unharmed. Is she a silent witness to murder, or is she a killer?

‘An absorbing, cleverly constructed thriller by an ever-popular British writer’ Books Magazine

Perry Mason orders a double serving of trouble the night he and Della Street dine at an intimate restaurant after a hard day at law. In the middle of their steaks a waitress flees the premises in terror, leaving the puzzled proprietor holding her mink coat.

Why a humble working girl abandons such a pricey wrap is only the first question in a cop-killer case that traps Mason’s client with both an impossible story and the murder weapon, makes Perry himself a prime suspect, and blazes a gunpowder trail that leads straight to the heart of the police department itself.

Bertha Cool has just been released from a sanitarium where she has been recovering from flu and pneumonia, but soon she and Donald Lam are on the hunt for a missing bride-to-be.

They become tangled in case filled with slot-machine skullduggery, a double-crossing client, murder and a spot of financial finagling before they eventually achieve their goal.

Roberta Fenn was every man’s dream – a clinging climber with photogenic features and a phenomenal body. She had what it took to get what she wanted, and she wanted a lot.

But one thing she wasn’t looking for was an early grave, and that was where she was heading – unless the redoubtable Bertha Cool and the inimitable Donald Lam jumped in, guessed right, and moved fast to save this bedevilled dream girl from a nightmare of blackmail, double cross and murder.

Blackmail was a dirty business and Donald Lam liked to stay clear of it. But for his partner, Bertha Cool, no business was too dirty to handle at the right price. And the price for this job was certainly right.

What was wrong, though, was a payoff for pictures that weren’t worth a dime, a free dinner that cost the blackmailer his life, and more than a couple of double-crosses that framed Donald Lam quite neatly for a charge of murder …

If you ever need my help, I’ll be there. But by the time he arrived, she had already disappeared…
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club


Arthur Crook and Miss Pinnegar meet by accident and take to each other on sight, parting with mutual appreciation and an invitation by the detective to call on him professionally should she ever need help – unlikely as that may be.

But when Miss Pinnegar receives a visit, it threatens to shake her life to the very foundations. She sends Crook an SOS and he comes at the double, but by then Miss Pinnegar has already disappeared . . .

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

A choice collection of seven short stories by one of America’s foremost storytellers and the author of the best-selling Travis McGee series.

Featuring ‘Dear Old Friend’, ‘The Annex’, Quarrel’, ‘Double Hannenframis’, ‘The Random Noise of Love’, The Willow Pool and ‘Woodchuck’, this collection displays MacDonald at his classic best. Starring a cast of immoral broads, hedonistic thrill-seekers, naïve victims and profligate playboys, these seven short stories showcase the writing that propelled John D MacDonald to success.

Lieutenant Luis Mendoza is tasked with solving a double murder, shrouded in strange rites. Acting on one of his famous hunches, he is drawn into the world behind the glitter of Hollywood and into the Temple of Mystic Truth.

There he finds cultists Martin and Cara Kingman, who turn out to be less than spiritual . . .

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

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

Lieutenant Mendoza seems to be beset on all sides: at home, his wife Alison is convinced she is having twins; at the office his worry is a man called Francis Ingram, prime suspect for a murder Mendoza does not think he has committed.

Yet the fact remains that someone has murdered Mendoza’s wife, Arabella, and the evidence points straight at him. But as the case progresses it becomes clear that everyone has a grudge against her and a consuming interest in her will . . .

Two men involved in a heist are wanted for double homicide; the body of a young punk is found in an alley; the corpse of a girl lies in the dry riverbed. Everything is, in fact, more or less routine for Lieutenant Luis Mendoza and his colleagues in the Los Angeles Police Department. Then they get the news: the murdered girl was a police officer of fine standing – one of their very own.

‘Convincing, compelling reading’ Sun

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 night watchman at Hallams, the long-established Bond Street jewellers, is found dead with his head battered in, and a number of display cases have been rifled. Chief Inspector Burr picks up the trail, with the young Inspector Poole as his assistant.

But before long, the crime at Hallams is overshadowed by a mystery which stirs Scotland Yard into a frenzy of activity. Even the great Superintendent Fraser is aroused from his customary Olympian calm; but it is the detailed work of young Poole which eventually solves the double problem, links mystery to mystery and brings the clear light of day . . .

‘For fans of classic hard-boiled whodunits, this is a time machine back to an exuberant era of snappy patter, stakeouts, and double-crosses’ LA Times

‘Kingpin among the mystery writers’ New York Times

Muriell Gilman left her father at the breakfast table while she cooked seconds of sausage and eggs. When she returned, he had disappeared.
She searched the house from cellar to attic. Then she went out to the workshop . . . there, scattered on the floor, were hundred-dollar bills, an overturned chair, and a spreading, crimson stain. That’s when she telephoned Perry Mason.

Perry Mason has so many questions: why did she call him? Why didn’t she want her step-sister to talk to him? And why was Gillman’s wife being blackmailed – by a female private investigator . . . ?

When shy, psychic bookworm ‘Cookie’ Orbach watches television, she sees things. But not the things that you or I would see. Cookie sees The Grid – a strange, shifting landscape where human forces battle against an enemy they dare not kill. Her employer, the mysterious Dataplex Corporation, pays her well to watch this war, and asks only that she report her observations but take no direct action, which suits her passive demeanour just fine.
But Cookie’s quiet life is about to be shattered. Her two very different worlds are threatening to merge in a way that shouldn’t really be possible. Everything is about to change. And we do mean everything…

These are the heroes of the Starry Rift, a dark river of night that flows between the arms of our galaxy: a headstrong teenaged runaway who makes first contact with a strange alien race; a young officer on a deep-space salvage mission who discovers an exact double of a woman he thought he’d lost; and the crew of an exploration ship who must plead for the human race to avert an interstellar war.

Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t even look at them. The life of Roy Phipps can be summed up in a paragraph: He’s fifty, leads an uneventful, well-organised existence in the house inherited from his parents, earns a modest income writing formulaic detective novels, and remembers, sometimes, his encounters with women. Roy’s only aberration is the other novel he has been secretively also writing for years, the sprawling and florid story of the mad poet Vilmos, a study of murder, angst and alchemic magic. Then one evening Roy meets Vilmos, face to face. Of course, handsome Vilmos’s double, Joseph Traskul, is only a coincidental look-alike. But in those fatal minutes a terrible bond is formed. For Traskul is, at the very least, insane – charismatic, predatory, lawless – a sort of human demon – whose almost supernatural powers, once provoked, will prove unstoppable. As the fiery shadows close in on him, Roy soon understands that he is now fighting for his own sanity. And probably for his life.