Search Results for: hunted

While hunting in the English countryside, Ben Selby stumbles upon the murdered body of Peter Gaston, a friend of some twenty years earlier. As they had both been agents in a clandestine organisation, he is convinced that Peter was killed to prevent their meeting and sets out to question his widow.

What she tells him is the beginning of a perilous and exasperating search for something buried long ago on a remote island headland.

The Hon. Vernon Lethaby is a flamboyant, headline-seeking exhibitionist with extravagant tastes and an allowance that barely covers his racing debts. In an unlikely partnership with middle-aged Canadian adventurer Joe ‘Digger’ Henderson, he strikes out for the Highlands of Scotland to hunt for Prince Charlie’s treasure, which, according to legend, is interred on the isle of Erran.

But Lathaby doesn’t trust his partner, and has taken out insurance to cover him against being swindled. Enter Miles Bredon, who is sent by his employer to ensure than neither of them defrauds the Indescribable Insurance Company.

An unidentified body burned in a garage, maps, photographs and a missing key sustain this clever tale of financial skulduggery until the final pages.

By the author of Rogue Male, one of the classic thrillers of the twentieth century: a bestseller that redefined its genre Guardian

Geoffrey Household returns to the rural England of Rogue Male and Watcher in the Shadows, with the savage hunting of his two heroes from the estuaries of South Devon to the empty Marlborough Downs.

The novel reveals at last the fate of Alwyn Rory, the security officer who was believed to have taken a bribe to allow a naval spy to escape and to have defected to Russia rather than face trial. Both Rory and his new ally, Adrian Gurney, by whom the story is told, are on the run and may be killed with impunity, as they do not exist …

Continuing the saga begun in the Renshai trilogy and the Renshai Chronicles, this story follows three sons of Kevral Tainharsdatter: Saviar Ra-khirsson, Subikahn Taesson, and Calistin Ra-khirrsson.
Bearn and her allies, including the Renshai, are faced with pirates, the vanguard of an army sent from a continent across the sea. Prejudice against the Renshai is growing rapidly, fueled by their ancient enemies in the Northlands. After a questionable battle, King Griff of Bearn is reluctantly forced to banish the Renshai from the Westlands.
Shunned by Westerners and hunted by Northmen, the Renshai will face many trials, while Saviar, Subikahn, and Calistin must each take his own stand in a world where there are no longer any safe havens for their people. Yet not only the Renshai are in dire straits: without their aid, Bearn may well fall to the “pirate” army fast approaching its shores….

After his father’s interference in Irish politics ends with a band of killers arriving on Christmas night to assassinate him, young Charles Peridore finds himself master of the estate. During idyllic school holidays, Charles enjoys riding to hounds and hunting geese and snipe while his friend Tommy Marlin tells stories of Tir-nan-Og, the land of eternal youth that lies just beyond the bog. But when Progress arrives in the form of an English corporation determined to convert the landscape into factories and housing, it appears that an entire way of life is destined to vanish. Only one thing stands in the way: the sorcery of an old witch, whose curses the English workers do not even believe in. In the novel’s unforgettable conclusion, the ancient powers of the wise woman will be pitted against the machinery of modern corporate greed, with surprising and thrilling results.

Rachel’s in trouble. She’s a ticking bomb. A couple of co-workers bullied her into stealing a radical new drug from their employer, and now it’s lodged inside her. They’re watching her like hawks and her time’s running out.

John Bishop runs security for the company. As a father who once lost a teenaged daughter to an accidental overdose, his drive to hunt down the thieves and rescue their victim grows more intense with every lost minute. He can never bring his own kid back. But he can save someone else’s.

Which is fine until the company realises that if the swallowed package bursts and Rachel dies, their secrets are kept safe and their problem goes away.

Though Bishop’s on the trail, he’s an easy man to cut loose and discredit. But now he’s Rachel’s only hope. Either the package will burst, or the boys will cut her open to get it. They’re so convinced it will make them rich that they’ll kill anyone who tries to take her, and hunt down anyone who succeeds.

It can’t end well. For somebody.

Rescued from the morgue and a bizarre and unpleasant end, Louisiana detective John Lafcadio owes his life to the Cult Crime Co-ordinators. Known also as the Voodoo Cops, their job is to dispel superstition and nail crimes of ignorance.
There’s a growing need for their services. A new kind of predator is on the loose. When the middle classes began to adopt vodoun as a lifestyle fad, their doors were opened to a ruthless white male with a command of the religion’s darker practical secrets.
Hunting down Lafcadio’s would-be killer will be no easy task. His victims are also his protectors. And how can Lafcadio hope to identify a man whose eyes he once stared into, but whose face he can’t remember?

The first in a new series from the master of heroic fantasy

Born in the storm that doomed his father, Connavar grows to manhood among the mist-covered mountains of Caer Druagh, where the Rigante tribe dwell in harmony with the land and its gods.

But beyond the border, across the water, an evil force is gathering strength, an unstoppable force that will change the world beyond all recognition.

Haunted by malevolent spirits and hunted by evil men, Connavar sets out on a spectacular mission to save his people.

In this latest tale of love and honour, friendship and courage, from the master of the genre, Gemmell explores the intriguing worlds of Celtic myth and earth magic.

Read by Adjoa Andoh
(p) 2017 Orion Publishing Group

The world lay frozen under a thousand feet of ice. Only in the Eight Cities of the Matto Grosso did men still live, hunting the wary ice whales for meat and oil, and following the creed of the Ice Mother which foretold the end of all life in ultimate cold.
But legend told of a city far to the north – fabled New York – whose towers rose above the ice, whose crypts held the forgotten lore that might bring warmth to Earth once again. In the best ice ship in the Eight Cities, Konrad Arflane embarked on the impossible voyable to New York – an odyssey of incredible peril and adventure with a shattering discovery at the journey’s end…

When his wife is murdered on his wedding day, Lucas Trask launches himself on a quest for revenge. Using his personal fortune, he buys a spaceship and becomes a Space Viking, raiding worlds while hunting for his wife’s killer. But raiding is not his destiny, and he gradually becomes a trader, starting to build a galactic empire. Before he can achieve his new goals, however, he must still deal with his wife’s killer.

The Iralians were humanoid and techically free citizens of the Galactic Empire. But as slaves they were prized above all others, for they had the unique capacity to transmit acquired knowledge through heredity. And so when the space mercenary Wanderer was hired by GLASS (Galactic League for the Abolition and Supression of Slavery) to take a cargo of Iralians home it was going to be a simple task!

For one thing, they’d be hunted by interstellar slavers for their priceless passengers.

For another, the Iralians themselves had other ideas which included mutiny and high treason.

And for the third and worst, they were too close to the Horsehead Nebula, whose capacity for warping time, space and the dimensions was a permanent Red Alert for all spacecraft.

‘TWAS BORING IN ARTESIA

…or so thought Sir Lafayette O’Leary, ex-craftsman from Earth, and now seemingly ex-interdimensional swashbuckler extraordinaire as well. His battles were all won, his dragons all slain and life was just the same boring round of riches, royal hunts and regatas. Boring, boring, boring; until he walked past the azalia…

Suddenly Artesia was gone, and O’Leary was trapped in Melange, a world of giants and pirates, karate-chopping hags and electronic flying carpets, a world where goons and harlots are the spitting images (literally!) of his own aristocratic Artesian associates. And because they think he’s his double, lots of his new friends want O’Leary dead.

Unless he can get through the interdimensional gate and find the continuum path back home, O’Leary’s life will never be boring again. Just short.

Against a raging backdrop of interplanetary intrigue.

This time the resourceful officer of the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne must deal with horrors unknown as he hunts the universe for a stolen ballet theatre.

The courageous Terran must fight the five-eyed Groaci, outwit the ferocious Tsuggs, and reason with the talking flowers he finds in the midst of his dangerous mission.

But in spite of all this, in the face of the vagaries of alien plots and the wild ambitions of his superiors, Retief remains strong and unshakable – and in peaceful and just control of the galaxy!

They came out of the star-strewn wilderness around Sol, these alien creatures. And their object was the vicious, total destruction of the Federation of Worlds.

Earth was one of the last pf the planets to be attacked and here they were opposed by the Earth Council: six men who held the destinies of a hundred billion people in their hands.

But in the end, there remained only one man out of the six to fight. Velga Dorne, Earth Councillor and Member of the Triumvirate of Worlds. And he himself was a hunted man. Death and terrible destruction followed him across the wastes of space in the search for the crazy, nightmare planet that had spawned these creatures. Fear and terror were his only companions.

Until he reached the nameless planet of a still more insignificant sun and learned that there were others to join him in the struggle against the black, inhuman monsters. These were the Hheroni, scientists whose achievements had progressed along a slightly different path of research to humanity. And Astraea, the girl who went with him on the suicidal mission to where the Aliens originated: on a world that no one in their wildest dreams had thought possible to exist, one which even science said was impossible.

Under the cover of darkness and a violent storm, electrical engineer Sidney Cassell thought he’d committed the perfect murder. But immediately after pushing his rival to his death from atop a pylon, he himself is struck by a live high-voltage cable. Cassell survives the accident, only to discover that the electrical shock has affected his body, causing him to glow with a strange inner light. Soon he becomes sucked into a vortex of murders and treachery, hunted by the police and unscrupulous scientists seeking the secret of his weird affliction.

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!

Occupation of Earth is now in its 27th year, and relations between humanity and the dictatorial Hefn have never seemed shakier. The aliens mission is to save the planet from its human abusers; and the Baby Ban imposed by mass hypnosis has made Earth a cleaner, wilder, less crowded place. But the Ban has now lasted so long, and provoked such hatred, that when a spark is struck the situation explodes into worldwide riots on one side and retaliatory mindwipings on the other. Years of effort by the eco-spiritual Gaians, who mediate between humans and Hefn, have been destroyed.

While the Gaians regroup and brainstorm frantically in an atmosphere of doubt and danger, one obsessed Hefn and one young woman begin a radical experiment. Pam Pruitt has discovered a growing ability to acquire information by non-rational means. Childhood suffering has empowered her, in a way once understood by hunting and gathering peoples – an understanding lost with that lost lifeway – to communicate with mysterious forces through strong dreaming: to function as a shaman on behalf of her community, the human race.

One star-chained evening in a Manhattan bathroom, Carl Schirmer spontaneously combusts! His body transforms into light, mysteriously snatched from his banal life by an alien intelligence 130 billion years in the future. There, all spacetime is collapsing into a cosmic black hole, the Big Crunch – and a bold, cosmic destiny awaits Carl. Rebuilt from the remnants of his light by extraterrestrials for a cryptic purpose, he awakens in time’s last world, the strangest of all – the Werld.

At the edge of infinity, Carl discovers the Foke, nomadic humans who travel among the floating islands of the Werld. The Foke teach him how to live – and love – at the end of time, and he loses his heart to his plucky guide, the beautiful Evoë. Their life together in this blissful kingdom that knows no aging or disease brings them to rapture – until Evoë falls prey to the zotl, a spidery intelligence who hunt the Foke and eat the chemical by-products of their pain. In order to save his beloved from a gruesome death, Carl must return to Earth – 130 billion years earlier – where he is shocked to discover that the Earth he’s come back to is not the one he left.

Can he meet the harsh demands of his task before the zotl find him and begin ravishing the Earth?

Author’s Note: The volumes of this series can each be read independently of the others. The feature that unifies them is their individual observations of science fiction’s sub-genre: “space opera,” which the editors David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer define as “colorful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character and plot action, and usually set in the relatively distant future, and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone. It often deals with war, piracy, military virtues, and very large-scale action, large stakes.”

Artemesia is the daughter of a pirate queen, and she’s sick of practising deportment at the Angels Academy for Young Maidens. Escaping from the school, she hunts up her mother’s crew and breezily commands them out to sea in a leaky boat. Unfortunately, Art’s memories of her early life may not be accurate-her seasick crew are actors, and Art’s infamous mother was the darling of the stage in a pirate drama. But fiery, pistol-proof Art soon shapes her men into the cleverest pirate crew afloat. And when they meet the dread ship Enemy and her beautiful, treacherous captain, Goldie Girl, Art is certain that her memories are real. The Seven Seas aren’t large enough for two pirate queens: Art will have the battle of her life to win her mother’s title – and the race for the most fabulous treasure in pirate lore.

Shon knew that the Taken must die. Death had touched them, and the evil spirits which issued from Death’s Place to the east beyond the valley Took away the souls of the living. It was the law of Shon’s people, who seldom ventured far from their simple huthouses in Pine Walk, except to hunt boar in the forest. And even the forest was not completely safe, for across the river at its eastern edge lay Crow Mork, Death’s Place, and in the stories Crow himself, who was Death, rode there with Crow’s People, Death’s children, on strange four-legged beasts shod with white metal and swift as the wind.

Lost in the dark forest, Shon encountered Death’s Children. ‘Don’t go home,’ the dead girl told him – he was almost sure it was a girl, though her face was a black void in the night. But there was nowhere else to go. They would kill him, of course; being Taken, they would have to.

Yet Shon escaped that death – though he was to meet Death in Death’s Place, and learn the extraordinary truth about it.

‘The Night Walker’ began as an ordinary country legend. No two stories agreed on the details and Paul Donovan’s attempts to sift out the facts seemed doomed to failure. He was on the verge of omitting it from his new series of articles on East Anglian Folklore when a sudden, sinister coincidence brought the old story sharply back into focus. An eccentric old wildfowler was taken to hospital where he babbled incoherently about “the man in the stove-pipe hat” before dying of inexplicable injuries. Donovan restarted his enquiries and found an unexpectedly determined ally in Shelia Morrison, an outcast from her village, who had been befriended by the dead wildfowler. together they hunted for intangible clues across the lonely reed beds and slow mysterious rivers of Broadland – the areas holiday-makers rarely see. Piece by piece the puzzle fitted together to reveal a chain of horror linking the past and present…connecting the mid-1960s with the ghoulish outbreak of body-snatching at the start of the Nineteenth Century. Not all the victims had gone for medical research…

‘The Night Walker’ is abroad again and fear treads beside him.

Kerrigan was a legend of his own life-time. He was the kind of electric personality around whom strange stories accumulate like iron filings dancing towards a magnet. When Kerrigan failed to return from a special mission in 2178 the stories grew wilder. Some of his crew refused to believe he was dead, others went to look for him. By 2180 it was as fashionable to go to Lunar Base to look for Kerrigan as it had been fashionable to hunt monsters in Loch Ness two centuries before.

His brother Harry was open minded about the stories, even a little sickened by the transport companies who were cashing in on Kerrigan’s disappearance. Then Harry met Susan Croft and his opinions of the transport companies changed a little. Susan was a telepath and she believed that Kerrigan was trying to contact her. Lunar, however, is a big, empty, dusty place and it was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. Then one day they saw Kerrigan, or something that looked like Kerrigan…

Nadia was a girl who had everything except real happiness. She was tired of trying to buy it, and she had just about matured to the point where she knew that nothing was to be gained by deliberately hunting happiness.

She saw the strange Asian in a Paris street market. His inscrutable features were dominated by a pair of mysterious eyes. He was incredible old.

Without knowing why, Nadia purchased a curiously carved wooden casket. The casket contained an oriental miniature, a scroll of curious characters and a phial of glowing blue elixir.

Nadia consulted a number of experts about these strange objects, but not until a psychometric boy handled them did she begin to guess at the terrible truth. She was trapped in a vortex of evil power and 20th-century science seemed unable to save her…

Nick Walker can pass for eighteen, which comes in useful while living on the streets. But Nick isn’t eighteen. He’s fourteen. He’s been fourteen for years . . .

A chance encounter with Manta, an exceedingly powerful witch, sees Nick cursed with changelessness. Not only will he never age, but, more usefully to Manta, broken bones and sliced flesh, while excruciatingly painful, will mend themselves in a short space of time – making Nick the perfect weapon against the demonic assassins sent by the evil Cartel. Constantly hunted, Nick is forced to run – evading his enemy when he can and facing gruesome and bloody battles when he can’t.

But, help comes from a surprising source – April, a young girl Nick rescues from some occult enthusiasts intent on sacrificing her, has powers beyond her control or understanding. Together, might they be a match for the sinister forces that stalk them?