Search Results for: in-the-beginning

Earth, can you spare a city?

The town of Superior, Ohio, certainly was living up to its name! In what was undoubtedly the most spectacular feat of the century, it simply picked itself up one night and rose two full miles above Earth! Radio messages stated simply that Superior had seceded from Earth. But Don Cort, stranded on that rising town, was beginning to suspect that nothing was simple about Superior except its citizens. Calmly they accepted their rise in the world as being due to one of their local townspeople, a crackpot professor. But after a couple of weeks of floating around, it began to be obvious that the professor had no idea how to get them down. So then it was up to Cort: either find a way to anchor Superior, or spend the rest of his days on the smallest-and the nuttiest-planet in the galaxy!

Ganelon Silvermane, the genetically designed superhero of the Earth’s fabulous final age, has offered himself as hostage to the worst band of barbarians to roam the plains. As a captive of the Horde, Ganelon rises to greater heights of heroism than ever before . . . and begins to assume the full power of his mighty being!

Prince Zarkon is back! This thrilling new case from the top-secret files of the crime-fighting organization known as Omega begins in London with a strangely simple and bewildering crime. It’s just a warehouse robbery, but the perpetrators are no ordinary criminals. They are the diabolical Blue Men.

Sinister, invulnerable to conventional weaponry, and entirely blue, these evildoers can walk unharmed through clouds of deadly gases. Even gunfire doesn’t stop them – bullets bounce off their bodies as though they’d struck the steel side of a battleship. Bold and brazen, the chilling culprits carry out their crimes again and again, making headlines around the world. London is panicked . . . and Scotland Yard is stumped.

Straight from Knickerbocker City comes Prince Zarkon and the Omega Men to the rescue. The lord of the unknown and nemesis of all villains, Zarkon soon discovers the malignant mastermind behind the mysterious Blue Men. It is the aptly-named Vulture, a brilliant but deranged, unscrupulous, and embittered scientist who is determined to leave the bloody stain of his extraordinary genius upon the world. As the band of Blue Men multiplies, until it terrifyingly outnumbers the Omega Team, it looks as if our superhero has finally met his match.

Filled with electrifying suspense, this is a Zarkon adventure beyond compare . . . and one of the strangest pursuits in the annals of criminology.

A child in danger, an isolated house in the depths of winter – and a killer on the loose…
‘Don’t miss … guaranteed unputdownable’ Observer

Snow-covered fields and moors stretch away on all sides of Herondale House. Despite rumours of an escaped killer on the run, Deborah Lindsay knows that she must control her fear – she has a young charge, 13-year-old prodigy Carreen, to care for.

But the isolated Yorkshire farmhouse already holds the terrible secret of one death – and after an increasing number of sinister ‘accidents’, Deborah begins to wonder how long it will be before evil strikes again…

‘A splendidly romantic first thriller’ Times Literary Supplement

The country of Lescar was carved out of the collapse of the Old Tormalin Empire. Every generation has seen the land laid waste by rival dukes fighting for the High King’s empty crown. Tathrin’s parents sent him to the distant city of Vanam to escape the recurrent skirmishes. He meets Aremil, another Lescari, whose parents have their own reasons for sending him so far away. These two young men cannot forget their homeland. Can they persuade other exiles with Lescari blood to help relieve their kinfolk’s misery? If they can persuade Branca, the down-to-earth scholar, to share the ancient lore which she has studied, then this mismatched band of commoners, merchants and nobles can begin plotting a revolution.

PLANET OF SAND: A world literally bald, completely covered by sand and devoid of life – or so the stranded spaceman thought until he saw the huge menacing girders whose origin and purpose he could not begin to fathom.

WHITE SPOT: A gold locket containing a picture of a girl, found in millennia-old ruins on a planet some hundreds of light-years from Earth, threatens the existence of the entire human race.

SECOND LANDING: A lost space team lands on a deserted planet, entirely unprepared for the strange world’s one citizen; a great white amoeboid monster, hiding in wait to wreak its fury on any intruders.

Tony Gregg was just an ordinary everyday American until the day he came into possession of an old Barkut coin. He knew it was more than just a collector’s curio because there was no such place on any map of Earth, past or present. He learned then that it could be used as a key – a key to a GATEWAY TO ELSEWHERE.

That was the beginning of one of the most fabulous and fantastic adventures that ever befell a young man looking for excitement. For Gregg plunged forthwith into a fourth-dimensional world of the Arabian Nights, where the djinns of Aladdin’s Lamp were rampaging realities, and a lovely princess was waiting to be rescued!

A mysterious and richly evocative novel, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque tells the story of portraitist Piero Piambo, who is offered a commission unlike any other. The client is Mrs. Charbuque, a wealthy and elusive woman who asks Piambo to paint her portrait, though with one bizarre twist: he may question her at length on any topic, but he may not, under any circumstances, see her. So begins an astonishing journey into Mrs. Charbuque’s world and the world of 1893 New York society in this hypnotically compelling literary thriller.

Charles Rathlyn has everything – a benefactress, a rich wife and a comfortable country life. But while riding to hounds one day he takes a terrible spill, and, on reviving, finds himself looking into a pair of beautiful brown eyes. He knows he has fallen once again . . . in love.

But are his fall and those soft brown eyes linked to another fall – the fatal plunge his wife, Kate takes over the banister to the parquet floor below, supposedly while sleepwalking?

Did she fall or was she pushed? Kate Rathlyn’s death begins an investigation into blackmail and murder among the sporting set.

Returning to Paris, Inspector Gautier is devastated to learn that his Dutch mistress Ingrid has been brutally murdered. Before he can begin to investigate, the British Ambassador informs Gautier that his daughter has been abducted in England. With the help of Sylvie, a secretary at the French Embassy, the inspector follows the trail to Edinburgh to track down the ambassador’s daughter.

Back in Paris, influential people are being murdered, and the wife of the Minister for War is abducted. Out of these shocking events a political motive begins to emerge, and Gautier, with Sylvie’s help, starts to unravel the conspiracies under the looming threat of war.

When both his holiday plans and love affair collapse, London doctor Charles Mackinnon agrees to act as locum in Skye, looking forward to a peaceful stay. However, within hours of his arrival he witnesses someone being thrown off a distant cliff into the sea.

When the body of Jamie Gillespie is discovered in the water, the police remain sceptical of his report, and he begins to doubt what he saw. Then a pregnant, disabled woman disappears, and Charles finds himself drawn into a primitive ritual of superstition and violence.

A skilfully planned murder in Portugal; a clever con-game in Texas; a body washed up on the Galloway coast. What have these far-flung events in common? In a word: whisky. And not any kind of whisky, but a fine malt.

Bruce Sanderson is on a ten-day holiday in the Highlands when he encounters Iain MacNair, who begins to teach him the mysteries of blending noble malts. He soon embarks on a relationship with MacNair’s daughter Katriona but, shortly after, Macnair is murdered. Bruce begins to investigate the murder and soon finds that both he and Katriona are in the sights of a dangerous killer who will go to any lengths to protect an ingenious fraud.

When car trouble forces private detective John Bryant to spend the night in the small village of Foxall, he is immediately struck by the antagonism and secrecy of the locals. Why was there so much hostility and fear? And why were the streets deserted after dark?

Next morning the murdered body of Andrew Woodside is discovered on a nearby hill, beginning an investigation that takes Bryant to the dingy industrial town of Castington, where an atmosphere of jealousy, suspicion and intrigue prevails . . .

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.

PI Mike Hammer is moving through the dark streets of New York City when he hears a child’s terrible scream. When he finds the child, he also discovers the naked body of a beautiful woman who has been beaten to death with a whip.

So begins a complicated and baffling case, involving the deaths of other women and a newspaper reporter, who was tracking aspects of the case as well as following the lives of the city’s prostitutes. Mike uncovers a sadistic ring of international figures, where women risk their lives for a fortune in an attempt to pull themselves out of despair.

Can Mike, with the help of his beloved Velda, break the ring that is crushing the lives of vulnerable women?

On what trivialities the big things in life hang.

From the moment when, dining alone in her Brussels hotel, Georgia Yeo, celebrated writer of detective thrillers, opens her cigarette case and the Count comes into her life with the polite offer of a light, she realises that here is fate.

In that moment too begins the strange and inimitable spell of Georgia’s story. It is an enthralling story, of a woman successful in her career, yet timid and hesitant in making a decision which might have a far-reaching effect on her private life.

It’s truly a step in the dark …

‘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

Marion is lost on a dark and lonely road; she’s tired and hungry and afraid. She thinks she’s dreaming when she sees a motel sign shining in the darkness: Bates Motel. But for Marion the nightmare is just beginning …

To most people Psycho needs no introduction, but although Alfred Hitchcock’s film was largely faithful to the book, in the novel itself you will find a story more nuanced and – if possible – even darker.

Dick Tredgold has spent seven years in jail for a murder he insists he did not commit. Now eligible for parole, he refuses to apply, because he feels that by doing so he would acknowledge his guilt. His family, at their wit’s end, appeal to Jesse Falkenstein for help.

Falkenstein realises the only way of getting Tredgold to leave prison is to identify the real murderer – no easy task in an eight-year-old investigation. And when Jesse re-examines the case he begins to discover that not all the witnesses were as reliable as they had seemed. . .

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

The bodies of three young children, abandoned on a bleak hillside, are discovered by Lieutenant O’Connor’s Afghan hound, and so begins another long and tough investigation for the Glendale Police Department.

Vic Varallo, O’Connor and team are also tasked with a serial rapist, the murder of a respectable accountant, and a baby kidnapped during an armed robbery gone wrong. With both their wives expecting a baby soon, it’s a wonder Varallo and O’Connor have any time for murder.

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

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

Things begin to heat up in the Los Angeles Police Department when Lieutenant Luis Mendoza’s stolid and good-natured colleague Sergeant Higgins is kidnapped by three dangerous escaped prisoners.

A manhunt is launched but no one expects Higgins to be seen alive again. Can Mendoza’s team ever recover, or is the officer’s return just around the corner?

The neighbours all said ten-year-old Paul Brandon would grow up to be a detective: he was remarkably observant and inquisitive. But Paul doesn’t grow up to be a detective; after failing to return one night, his body is found buried under a road excavation site. A tragic, unnecessary accident it seems.

But after the foreman insists that no child could move that amount of earth, Vic Varallo begins to suspect foul play and follows the leads to Paul’s reticent playmate Gordon, who may have witnessed something terrible that night.

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

To the California police the murder of Lilian Blake seems an open-and-shut case. In less than twenty-four hours they have arrested and charged Harry Nielsen, a mentally disabled youth. At first only Harry’s mother believes his innocence, insisting he is too kind-hearted to kill anything. She begs Jesse Falkenstein to accept the case, which he does reluctantly, sure the police have the right man.

But as Jesse starts to dig around, curious scraps of evidence begin to accumulate. He formulates an alternate theory of the crime, and his conclusions expose both Jesse and his wife to a situation of extreme danger . . .

‘Her best book’ New York Times

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

The Wilcox Street precinct is as busy as ever. Sergeant Maddox and his team face three tricky murder cases, with motives that turn out to be as strange and bizarre as the crimes themselves.

But it is not only murder that is occupying Maddox. When policewoman Carstairs, who has vainly adored him for so long, begins to show interest in newcomer Sergeant O’Neill, Maddox discovers to his astonishment that he is jealous and will have to balance his time between romance and murder.