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Space Tug by Murray Leinster is an independent sequel to the author’s popular Space Platform.

Joe Kenmore heard the airlock close with a sickening wheeze and then a clank. In desperation he turned toward Haney. “My God, we’ve been locked out!”
Through the transparent domes of their space helmets, Joe could see a look of horror and disbelief pass across Haney’s face. But it was true! Joe and his crew were locked out of the Space Platform.
Four thousand miles below circled the Earth. Under Joe’s feet rested the solid steel hull of his home in outer space. But without tools there was no hope of getting back inside. Joe looked at his oxygen meter. It registered thirty minutes to live.

In the Well-Built City, Master Drachton Below’s power is absolute, and he will not hesitate to use it. His primary method of control is through his physiognomists, who are trained to read a person’s face and body, perceiving that person’s past and secrets-and even events yet to come. These seers are the judges and jury. Now Drachton has found something that could extend his reign for eternity: a fruit that bestows immortality. To investigate its whereabouts, Below sends cold, collected physiognomist Cley to the remote mining town of Anamasobia. One at a time Cley interrogates the townspeople, performing his usual fact finding without issue. That is, until he meets the beautiful and bright Arla, who harbors a secret that could potentially turn Cley’s world upside down-and topple the Well-Built City itself.

A Kafkaesque journey into the unknown, The Physiognomy is an award-winning trip through a land where the line between reality and imagination is constantly blurred.

It was the party of a lifetime – but she never arrived…

‘Vera Caspary is an expert at suspense and suspicion’ New York Times

When popular young schoolteacher Nina Redfield reports to police the whereabouts of Bushie Neal, a criminal on the run, she sets off a chain of events over which she has no control.

Nina is about to leave for a Hallowe’en party at a friend’s house. An escort is sent to collect her, so it’s no surprise to Nina when a masked man in a Harlequin costume calls for her. But Nina and her escort never reach the party . . .

Could her past association with Bushie’s sworn enemy Nick Brazza have any connection to her disappearance? And has she been spirited to safety – or further into danger?

John Ansell, the new editor of Truth and Crime magazine, takes his appointment, and the title of the magazine, at face value. Until his boss, President of Barclay-Truth Inc., Noble Barclay, rejects his ‘Unsolved Mystery of the Month’ article, an investigation into the death of Warren G. Wilson, household name in correspondence courses, who was found dead in his hotel room with a bullet in his back.

Noble Barclay, it turns out, is anything but noble, and a dangerous man to boot. But how will his employee face the dilemma of exposing the father of the woman he loves? And at what cost?

The eleventh novel in Craig Johnson’s bestselling Longmire series – now a hit TV drama.

Sheriff Walt Longmire has handled some cold cases in his time, but none as cold as the sixty-five million-year-old death of a Tyrannosaurus rex. The discovery of the most complete T rex skeleton ever found appears to be a windfall for the local High Plains Dinosaur Museum, until the body of Danny Lone Elk, the Cheyenne rancher on whose land the remains were discovered, is found floating face down in a turtle pond.

Walt is on a mission to determine who would benefit from Danny’s death, but first he must disentangle the interests of numerous factions including the palaeontologists, Danny’s family, Wyoming’s Acting Deputy Attorney – and the FBI.

And then, in the thick of the investigation, Walt’s daughter, Cady, arrives with her baby, bringing tragedy in their wake . . .

The exciting original of the Hitchcock film classic.

Iris Carr was young, wealthy, attractive – and bored. Despairing of her society friends, tired of skiing with the crowd, she decides to return to England alone by train. But she hadn’t bargained for the extraordinary Miss Froy – a lively, gossipy spinster who is determined to befriend her, nor had she expected Miss Froy’s sudden disappearance.

Certain that she has not imagined so bizarre a character, and outraged by the blank faces of the passengers who deny her existence, Iris vows to find her companion, unaware of the terrifying trail ahead, so wildly different from her notion of a comfortable journey home.

Convicted armed robber Jimmy ‘Spotter’ Gould is shot dead within seconds of emerging from London’s Stone Mill Prison at the end of an eight-year sentence, and Brock and DS Poole are faced with yet anther baffling crime.

s enquiries continue, an embezzling solicitor’s clerk, a dodgy undertaker and a dubious motor trader all enter the frame.

Sir Robert D’Arcy, High Sheriff of Brackenshire, harbours a painful memory of what he considers his shameful surrender to the Germans in 1916. Gradually he realises nothing is known of the incident and his confidence returns, and he gains in honour and responsibility in the county.

Then, out of the blue, a man appears who threatens to reveal the incident – or to keep it hidden, at a price. D’Arcy resists this new enemy, but is handicapped by his own view of his position, his past deed, his family pride. A tragedy occurs, and the Brackenshire police investigate, but are themselves hampered by reluctance to muddy distinguished waters.

How is the ageing Chief Constable to face the problem?

Two threats from a newly released convict – a poacher framed on a murder charge – put Captain Scole, Chief Constable of Brodshire, on his guard. Special men are assigned to protect him.

But four days later, Captain Scole is found shot through the head at his desk in Police Headquarters.

A full week later, young Inspector Poole of Scotland Yard is called in to follow a cold trail in the face of open hostility from the local police. And the further he explores the murder, the more baffling it becomes.

Could Scole’s First World War past be catching up with him – or something much closer to home?

At first it seems that Lord Henry Grayle has taken an overdose of sleeping medicine, but the autopsy reveals a tiny amount of scopolamine along with the draught – harmless in itself, but fatal when mixed . . .

A poisoner with apparently expert knowledge is at work in the great house at Tassart. But from what motive, and how? Before he can find an answer to these questions, Detective Inspector John Poole is faced with a second, more horrible murder.

And when there are shocking revelations both above and below stairs, Poole starts to see light breaking on the horizon.

The small Hebridean island of Alsaig is facing a crisis. It is famous for its only export, a particularly fine malt whisky, upon which most of the islanders depend for their livelihood. But the distillery is threatened with a takeover by an American firm, which would not only make many of the workforce redundant but also adulterate the product.

But owner Alisdair Matheson is refusing to sell, despite threats of sabotage and an attempt on his life. The situation is complicated further by an actual murder on the island, which the locals believe to have been committed by American Mike MacDonald. Tension mounts as storms lash the island, isolating it from the outside world and locking the killer in with the islanders.

When a young chambermaid is found dead, bitten by a cobra concealed in the bed of notorious libertine Armand de Périgord, Inspector Jean-Paul Gautier is certain that she was not the intended victim. The charismatic de Périgord is very wealthy and has never married, and some very salacious stories circulate regarding his many affairs. Could the cobra have been planted by a jealous husband or a jilted lover?

When Gautier is put in touch with the widowed Catriona Becker to tutor him in English, he soon discovers that she has fallen victim to a ruthless blackmailer. The tale she tells him provides another insight into the shady activities of de Périgord and Gautier is soon facing more than one case of blackmail . . . and murder.

‘The English should confine their murders to their own country’ is the view held by Parisians when Lady Dorothy Strathy, sister of the Earl of Tain, is discovered stabbed in her hotel room. This opinion is held by none more strongly than Courtrand, the head of the Sûreté, an outrageous snob who regards the case as closed when it is discovered that Lady Strathy’s paid companion, Miss Newbolt, was the first on the scene.

However, Inspector Gautier is not so easily swayed and comes up with a number of awkward clues which throw doubt on Courtrand’s theory, facing in the process the shady underworld of male prostitution and back-street throat-cutting – alongside more personal troubles including the death of his ex-wife – in a case with a startling dénouement.

Two dramatically contrasting episodes face Inspector Gautier in his latest mystery: the death by stabbing of the vicar of the fashionable church of Saint Clothilde in the confessional box; and the theft of the Duchesse de Paiva’s diamond necklace during the extravagant fête thrown by Armand de Saules to celebrate the eighteenth birthday of his daughter, Marie-Thérèse.

As the inspector investigates Marie-Thérèse’s clandestine affair with a somewhat discreditable Italian poet, Daniele Pontana, and her rejection of her parents’ choice for a husband, Gautier discovers the two crimes are strangely connected. As is a third, the murder of Pontana’s valet Ponzi . . .

Tiger Mann is faced with one of the most frightening challenges of his career: to avert the imminent destruction of the defence system of the United States. An engineer has disappeared, taking with him the secret of the device he created: a method to by-pass the buttons which activate America’s most deadly missiles – and render the system inoperative.

The Communists want more than anything else to discover the workings of the by-pass control, and Tiger is equally determined to see that they don’t. But to prevent them, Tiger has to find the missing man first …

And that’s a job in itself.

Alone in New York City, Lizanne Steffasson comes face to face with reality when her dream of acting on Broadway collapses.

Now she just needs to pay her rent. So she answers an unusual ad in the paper, for ‘a beautiful girl. One not afraid to look on danger’s bright face’.

Lizanne is neither beautiful nor fearless, yet she is certainly about to look danger in the face. A New York estate lawyer wants her help to track down a young man who has vanished into the wilds of the city on the eve of inheriting a vast sum of money from his billionaire late father, a Swedish man known as the Cross-Eyed Bear.

It turns out that Lizanne is the perfect person for the job, as she knows more about the story than her employer has bargained for . . .

‘Waiting for her, he was on edge with expectation. He had never planned a murder before … Only sheer necessity was making him do it now …’

Coincidence couldn’t explain the three accidental deaths. It had to be something more – something sinister? One old lady had fallen and broken her neck; the others had died in hit-and-run accidents. And now beautiful young Caroline Conroy, who has returned to her poisonous family after a mysterious tragedy abroad, must face the enemy: a smiling stranger who is calmly and ruthlessly planning her destruction.

‘Terrifyingly enclosed spine-chiller’ Sunday Telegraph

A nice young man is helping little old ladies with their groceries . . . then stealing their Social Security; an enormous ‘ape man’ with a face like King Kong is robbing liquor stores; ‘Jack the Stripper’ is leaving gas-station registers empty . . . and the attendants naked; a pretty Hispanic woman is killed and ethnic tensions are ready to explode; a little girl is mutilated; a cop is fatally shot.

Between the weather and the crime wave, Lieutenant Luis Mendoza – the family-man cop – finds shelter at home, knowing that even violence on the streets of Los Angeles eases up . . . eventually.

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

September is the worst month for heat in Southern California, and LAPD lieutenant Luis Mendoza is feeling the burn as the sweltering temperatures raise tempers and violence.

Heading the list is the bizarre murder of a young French girl – which eventually leads Mendoza to Paris. An old man smothered in his hospital bed; a polite holdup artist nicknamed Baby Face; a Hollywood matron who disappears while visiting a sick friend and the grisly murder of a family who has just moved from Wisconsin keep the skilful Mendoza and his force pounding the scorching pavements in a crime wave that, like the heat, offers no sign of relief.

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

Lawyer Jesse Falkenstein thought his secretary Miss Williams was a remarkably efficient typist, but he felt she had drawbacks as a legal secretary. She had an earnest face, unfashionable tight curls and she irritated him very much. Jesse wished he could fire her.

But she’d been his secretary for nine years, so even when, on a particularly busy day, she called to say that an urgent matter would keep her away from the office, Jesse didn’t fire her. He also didn’t realise how urgent the matter was until it was almost too late . . .

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

Lieutenant Luis Mendoza is faced with a crime close to home when his four-year-old twins are kidnapped. Not even Mendoza’s crystal ball can help him while his colleagues explore every possible theory and lead.

Are the twins being held for ransom? Or is the kidnapping a form of revenge? Mendoza has never been more human as a husband and father and more severely taxed as a detective . . .

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

Beautiful Nell Varney was a newcomer to Contera – and to murder.

Suddenly she found herself in a strange courtroom faced with seven pairs of hate-ridden, accusing eyes. Seven witnesses had identified her as the murderer who had caused the death of two women by performing illegal abortions.

Why would anyone in this strange town believe Nell was innocent? Could anyone help her? One man, a dedicated lawyer named Jesse Falkenstein, was determined to try . . .

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

Mystery writer Brendan Monroe is tormented by the fear that his flamboyant fictional detective P. I. Roy Barron has come to life. Is the author losing his mind? Or is someone making it seem that way?

When Barron is found dead, Sergeant Dan Valentine of the Santa Monica police focuses his investigation on the local chapter of the Mystery Writers of America, where he faces the fascinating challenge of trying to trap a murderer whose profession is devising diabolical plots.

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

Ivor Maddox and his men of the Hollywood police department face, as ever, a formidable load of tricky and puzzling cases.

An unknown woman walks into a lawyer’s office and shoots him dead: who is she and what is her motive? A housewife in a reputable neighbourhood is found slaughtered. And, perhaps oddest of all, a woman uses her alleged psychic powers to reveal that a missing schoolgirl is being held captive in the Hollywood area.

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