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The largest spaceship ever made is hurtling overhead, falling. Six people are trapped inside with no escape. If it strikes the Earth it will explode with the force of an atomic bomb; what can be done?

The mighty 2,000-tonne Prometheus is the largest piece of space hardware ever launched – a joint Soviet-American project to harness solar energy before the power resources of the world run out. But politically and technically the project is doomed, and the nerve-racking predicament of the crew of six shrinks to nothing beside the horrifying destruction which threatens hundreds of thousands of people if no way can be found to move the satellite from it’s ever-decreasing orbit towards Earth . . .

Skyfall is a tale of incredible terror, giving a foresight of the global disaster which could one day become reality.

One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives.

The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk – a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only have the world’s artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though they’d been in space far longer than their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, space probe reveals a bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier than inside – more than a hundred million years per day on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in our future.

Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who’s forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses.

Earth sends terraforming machines to Mars to let the onrush of time do its work, turning the planet green. Next they send humans…and immediately get back an emissary with thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars. Then Earth’s probes reveal that an identical barrier has appeared around Mars. Jason, desperate, seeds near space with self-replicating machines that will scatter copies of themselves outward from the sun – and report back on what they find.

Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.

The Penheniot Experimental Research Village was a top-secret community with an elaborate defence system to keep away prying eyes. Inside the walls men rushed ahead with practical experiments to develop a means of time travel, while outside the everyday world fell victim to more and more plagues, strikes and rioting.

The world was on the brink of chaos. Could the small band of scientists and chrononauts at Penheniot Village find a safe method of escape into the future before the violence and death outside destroyed them too?

The final chapter of humanity’s future has begun and one man, Nigel Walmsley, has been alive through it all. An ancient scientist from the distant past, Walmsley had been marooned inside an anomaly of time and space. From here he recalls Earth’s desperate struggle against the mechs, a violent artificial intelligence dedicated to total annihilation.


In a strange space-time continuum called the Esty, the last few survivors from humanity’s ravaged planets have taken refuge, readying themselves for a final stand against their ruthless executioners.


Three generations of men stand between the mechs and total oblivion for the human race: Toby Bishop, a young warrior-in-training; Killeen Bishop, Toby’s father and leader of the last remnants of humanity; and Killeen’s own father, long believed dead, but now mysteriously returned to his family.


As the mechs continue to carve their swathe of destruction through the galaxy, these three men hold the sole hope for the survival of the human race.

Thirty billion people from throughout Earth’s history have been resurrected along the great an winding waterways of Riverworld. Most began life anew – accepting without question the sustenance provided by their mysterious benefactors. But a rebellious handful burned to challenge the unseen masters who controlled their fate

Now, these adventures of Riverworld have penetrated the great tower which rises from the amazing planet’s north polar seas – and within it is the mighty computer which controls the resurrection of billions of human beings. It is inside this giant tower that Sir Richard Burton, Alice Liddell Hargreaves, Peter Frigate and Li Po meet their greatest challenge – and their deadliest foe.

The incredible secret behind the Riverworld is about to be unveiled . . .

Mindplayers are tomorrow’s psychoanalysts, linked directly to their patients using sophisticated machinery attached to the optic nerve. In one-to-one Mindplay contact, you can be inside someone else’s head, wandering the landscapes of their consciousness. Allie is a sensation-seeking young woman, obtaining illicit thrills from her shady friend Jerry Wirerammer. But Allie goes badly astray when Jerry supplies her with a “madcap” – a device that lets you temporarily and harmlessly experience psychosis. There’s something wrong with Jerry’s madcap, and the psychosis doesn’t go away when it’s disconnected. Allie ends up undergoing treatment at a “dry-cleaner”, and she is faced with a stark choice – jail, for her illegal use of the madcap; or training to become a Mindplayer herself.

During training Allie becomes familiar with the Pool – a cohesive, though shifting mental landscape jointly constructed by a number of minds; and more disturbingly encounters McFlor, who has been mind-wiped, so that his adult body is inhabited by a mind only two hours old. And as a fully-fledged Mindplayer Allie has to choose between the many specialist options open to her – Reality Affixing or Pathosfinding; Thrillseeking or Dreamfeeding.

Arpazia is the aging queen who paces the halls of a warlord’s palace. Cold as winter, she has only one passion-for the mysterious hunter who courts the outlawed old gods of the woodland. Coira is the princess raised in the shadow of her mother’s hatred. Avoided by both her parents and half forgotten by her father’s court, she grows into womanhood alone . . . until the mirror speaks, and blood is spilled, and the forest claims her.

The tragic myth of the goddess Demeter and her daughter, Persephone, stolen by the king of the underworld, is woven together with the tale of Snow White to create a powerful story of mothers and daughters and the blood that binds them together, for good or ill. Black queen. White maid. Royal huntsman. Seven little folk who live in the forest. Come inside, sit by the fire, and listen to this fairy tale as you’ve never heard it told before.

Once upon a time there was a mirror, and a girl as white as snow. . .

Yellowstone National Park sits on a hot spot: a plume of molten rock coming up from deep inside the earth capable of volcanic eruptions far greater than any that have occurred in times past. It has been silent for many years, providing false security for a nation unprepared for the full force and fury of nature unleashed.

Then explosions send lava and mud flowing far beyond Yellowstone toward populated areas. Clouds of ash drift across the country, nearly blanketing the land from coast to coast. The fall-out destroys crops and livestock, clogs machinery, and makes cities uninhabitable. Those who survive find themselves facing the dawn of a new ice age as temperatures plummet worldwide.

Colin Ferguson is a police lieutenant in a suburb of Los Angeles, where snow is falling for the first time in decades. He fears for his family, who are spread across America, refugees caught in an apocalyptic catastrophe in which humanity has no choice but to rise from the ashes and re-create the world…

In the middle-distant future, Andrew Blake, discovered on a distant planet huddled inside a capsule, is brought back to Earth suffering from total amnesia. Over 200 years old, he thinks and acts like a man but becomes frighteningly aware of two alien beings that lurk within his body – a strange biological computer and a wolf-like animal. With the latter in control he breaks out of hospital to look for his past.

Twelve thousand years in the future, mankind has survived two enigmatic, civilisation-destroying setbacks. Now a third holocaust is anticipated by the people of the island refuge of Ongladred. They fear destruction from invading barbarians of the Angromain Archipelagoes, the reappearance of a semi-mythical sea creature and the devious intervention of the neo-human Parfects.

The imminent disaster is very much the concern of Ingram Marley, a government spy sent to keep surveillance over Stonelore – a secluded haven and the centre of free thought on Ongladred – and Gabriel Elk, Stonelore’s master and resident genius. While panic and fear rage outside, deep inside Stonelore the mysteries of life are pursued – reanimation of the dead, the invention of powerful laser weapons and the secrets of ‘old earth’ knowledge.

Amidst harrowing dangers of sea battles and land invasions, beneath the shattered moons, Ingram Marley’s world is about to change beyond his wildest imaginings.

An urgent message from Pellucidar, that world of primitive men and primeval jungles that lies inside the crust of the Earth, called on Tarzan of the Apes for assistance.

Tarzan, used to the dangers of darkest Africa, heeded the call to Pellucidar, where all his skill in the jungle, all his talents with beasts and primitive men, would be put to the extreme test. For in that land at the Earth’s core, under the eternal day of the Central Sun, his terrific talents were needed just to stay alive – let alone to fulfil the mission that had called him there!

In the late twentieth century, Admiral Julian 3rd can get no rest, for he knows his future. He will be reborn as his grandson in the next century to journey through space and make an ominous discovery inside the moon; he will live again in the dark years of the twenty-second century as Julian 9th, who refuses to bow down to the victorious Moon Men; and as Julian 20th, the fierce Red Hawk, he will lead humanity’s final battle against the alien invaders in the twenty-fifth century. The Moon Maid is Edgar Rice Burroughs’s stunning epic of a world conquered by alien invaders from the moon and of the hero Julian, who champions the earth’s struggle for freedom, peace, and dignity.

Pip and Flinx: Book Ten.

Never have the cares of the universe lain so heavily on Flinx’s shoulders, nor the forces against him seemed so invincible. Pursued by a newly revealed sect of doomsday fanatics and hunted by factions inside and outside the Commonwealth, he is expected to single-handedly avert a looming galactic crisis (or bear responsibility for the consequences.) Flinx can be forgiven for feeling a slight touch of melancholy.

According to his ship’s Al, there’s only one solution for what ails Flinx – a vacation. But with increasing number of enemies chasing him with ever greater enthusiasm, Flinx must find a getaway shrouded in obscurity. It seems that Jast, a planet smack in the middle of nowhere, is prefect, but trouble can find Flinx anywhere. What he doesn’t know is that his vacation paradise is a danger zone of the highest magnitude. And by the time he learns the truth, it may be too late.

For over 100 years, the machine called Colligatarch had ruled the Earth. Its predictions of the future have proved so accurate that humans accepted its recommendations as the best course of action – until a young engineer in Phoenix begins to travel without authorization, enter secret places, assume aliases, and display super-human feats of strength. Is it because he has fallen in love? Or has he instead fallen into an interplanetary plot?

Bron is a chaos catalyst. He wreaks havoc and destruction as surely as a hurricane wherever he goes. Commando Central has planted an electrode transmitter-receiver deep inside his brain and infiltrated him into the Destroyer Spacefleet to prevent it from gaining absolute mastery of the galaxy. But Bron’s own brand of chaos is lethally unpredictable. And when whole planets are annihilated by monster hellburner bombs set on course seven hundred million years ago from distant Andromeda, aimed directly at Bron himself, both sides realise something more colossal, more threatening and infinitely more powerful is taking a hand in Bron’s weird destiny . . .

In the late 1930’s as the threat of war is building in Germany, twelve year old Julia arrives to spend the summer with her famous playwright father, only to find herself alone with Trudl, her Austrian stepmother. With Trudl preoccupied by the plight of her fellow countrymen in Europe, Julia retreats into the scary Gothic novels left behind by her older siblings, and becomes haunted by dreams of Joshua Harken, the notorious alchemist who built the 17th century house, and then disappeared, accused of murder. Even after she joins forces with local boy Tim Bellyap to investigate the stories of Joshua’s ghost, she is afraid to tell anybody about the terrifying voices coming unbidden from somewhere inside her chest…

In a compelling exploration of loneliness and adolescent insecurities, peopled by ghosts from the old house, this is the powerful story of Julia’s awakening from her nightmare world.

Also published as Voices, and set in Joan Aiken’s own supposedly haunted childhood home, Jeake’s House in Rye, Sussex, this Y.A. ghost story draws on some of her own childhood memories to create an unusual thriller.

“When reduced to its essence, Julia’s story may not be so very different from that of Aiken’s Wolves Chronicles heroine Dido Twite: each girl must cope with a distant, unreliable father and learn to survive in a world peopled with self-absorbed adults. It is the exploration of these issues, even more than the fine storytelling, which makes this novel so compelling” Publisher’s Weekly
“Joan Aiken is the godsend to children who are at the age when they read as if there were no tomorrow” Washington Post

“An entertaining read, for readers who like to read suspenseful ghost stories with a hint of real menace. The ghostly elements of this story are nicely mirrored by the historical menace of the times, as Julia ruminates on the dangers of Hitler, whom she sees as a sort of spider, spreading his web out over Europe” Goodreads reviewer

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

Two KGB rivals, General Zarubin and Professor Nikolai Andrievich Panin, confront each other on a point overlooking the British Channel. Meanwhile, Henry Jaggard of British Intelligence has two pressing problems. He knows the Soviets are mounting a defensive program against a Polish dissident group in Britain, but he cannot intervene without jeopardizing his best inside agents.

And Dr David Audley, of the Intelligence R&D Department, has been playing clever politics again. Jaggard sees his opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. The Professor has requested a meeting with Audley, his old adversary. And, with one of Jaggard’s own men to abet him, Audley can be safely relied upon to overstep the mark in his attempts to frustrate the KGB . . .

Gifford knows that he must get away. London, his office job, his suburban home and his older wife have become unendurable. Then comes the answer in Callender, whom he meets in a pub and who offers him the job of handyman on a remote island. But once there doubts began to creep in. What has become of his predecessor, Mackie? Why has all the furniture been moved out of Mackie’s cottage and into the one he now occupies? What secret lies inside the power house, which he has been forbidden to enter?

There is some dreadful mystery behind the isolated community on the island, and he realises that his own safety depends on remaining ignorant of the truth: that Mackie disappeared because he knew too much …

A millionaire’s sage-green Rolls Royce has been discovered, empty, beside a graveyard, and a little later the murdered body of the millionaire is discovered inside the graveyard – above ground.

The hunt for the murderer is complicated by the behaviour of the dead man’s family, including his pretty second wife. And the members of a very different family, seemingly far less respectable, appear to be connected to this complex case.

But Inspector Martineau and the Granchester police have handled difficult cases before …

One Saturday, DC Brabant walks into the CID office of Granchester City Police. He has been at the football, looking for pickpockets, and has had his own wallet stolen. His boss, DCI Martineau, is amused, until Brabant reveals that his police warrant card was inside.

The missing warrant investigation soon picks up momentum: an elderly businessman goes missing, and his secretary turns out to have much wider interests, that extend to Granchester City Football Club and a knot of conflict over money, greed and love to untangle …

A houseful of paintings is stolen and the body of a finely dressed stranger is discovered at the home of art-loving drug dealer Mansel Shale. Meanwhile Detective Chief Inspector Colin Harpur and his boss, Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles, find their domain descending into bloody chaos as villain drug firms fight for dominance.

Luckily Iles has done some illicit phone-tapping and has inside information on which way the battle will go. In this fast-paced thriller, there’s no telling who will catch the next bullet.

‘Shrewd, savage, funny enough to give you an injury’ Literary Review

‘A fine craftsman’ Ellery Queen

The man in the yellow robe had put the ancient curse of the Nine Times Nine on Wolfe Harrigan. And when Matt Duncan looked up from the croquet lawn that afternoon, he saw the man in the yellow robe in Wolfe Harrigan’s study.

When Matt got there, all the doors and windows were locked from the inside. But when the door was broken down, there was no man in a yellow robe in the room, and Wolfe Harrigan lay murdered on the floor. But at the time of the murder the man in the yellow robe was nowhere near the room.

Who better to explain this miracle than Sister Ursula, a nun, whose childhood ambition was to become a policewoman?

When Chet Carson broke jail he thought he’d found a safe hideout in a lonely filling station. But instead he finds himself caught up in a dangerous threesome – an elderly owner, his gorgeous wife, Lola, and a safe with a fortune inside, which Lola wants. Her chance comes when she uncovers Chet’s identity and threatens him with jail unless he opens the safe.

Chet is in dead trouble. If he lands in prison again he’ll be crucified, but if he opens the safe Lola will pin the rap on him anyway. Somehow there has to be a third way …

Kidnapping has become a national pastime in Italy – but is there another reason why billionaire Carlo Grandi has put his beautiful daughter behind an electric fence, guarded by killer dogs and two fast-shooting guards?

Mike Frost, always on the look-out for big money and beautiful women, gets the job as second gun – and soon realises he is guarding a hell cat. When kidnappers sold him the idea of being the inside man, Frost hadn’t known which he wanted most – that beautiful body or the $5,000,000 it could bring him.