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They were trying out a new drive when a cosmic accident took them incalculable light years off course. A miracle of courage and astrogation meant than there were some survivors from the inevitable crash. The ship itself did not escape unscathed. What had been their vehicle became their prison. The buckled lock could not be opened from the inside and they had no other means of getting free. The air was slowly running out.

The planet they had hit was raw and primitive by their own standards, but it did hold intelligent life. One of the natives found the ship. Dare the trapped space travellers hope for a miracle? If they go out what kind of strange life forms would they be involved with? Could they hope to find the kind of raw materials which would get their crippled ship into space again? If not, could they face life sentences on this strange, unknown, primitive world . . . ?

Faced by a thousand fantastic difficulties the astronauts battled untiringly for their right to survive.

The world of 2165 needed co-ordinators to link the liaison officers from different broad fields. Natasha was a trained nexus officer who became curious about Building 297.

All her enquiries reached a blank wall . . . literally. Nobody seemed to know what went on inside the tall glass and concrete tower. An important security project of some sort . . . but what?

At last she found a way to enter the building nobody understood only to find a project that had gone unbelievably wrong. The original purpose of Building 297 had long since been forgotten. The operators no longer directed the research in the bleak laboratories, they were in the grip of an unknown power.

The menace in the sinister tower had reached a crucial stage. It threatened to leak through the concrete and engulf the city . . . perhaps far more than the city. Natasha had to understand the incredible new force, to escape from its citadel and rouse the sceptical, complacent population before it was too late.

The arrival of the Stranger offered her a terrible choice. Was he her one hope as a potential ally, or had he in some way engineered the menace in the tower?

Servius had always been a faithful servant of the goddess Diana. As a gladiator he had given her thanks for his victories, as a Centurion he had prayed to her on the eve of every battle. When at last the tide of war turned against him he fled to her sanctuary on the shore of Lake Nemi. Here he killed the Priest in order to become the Priest and ever after he lived in fear of being killed himself by the next aspirant for the office. When the fatal battle was fought the dying Servius had a vision of Diana, who made him a strange promise. He would die, yet he would not die. He would live, yet he would not live. When he found himself he would be lost, and when he was lost he would be found.

Servius closed his eyes by the shorts of Lake Nemi and opened them in a strange, frightening world where chariots ran without horses and where men flew inside iron birds. His first problem was to survive. His second was to find his way home!

One morning in 1995, Jonah Ransom, clothier, is going about his everyday business when he meets a beautiful demon in his storecupboard. At around the same time, the King of England with his entire court, vanishes abruptly before the astonished eyes of his public as he prepares to attend Mass. Even in an England where the Reformation failed, and magic has become a commonplace tool of the all-powerful Catholic Church, such events could be described as unusual.

Before long, it is apparent that something very different is abroad – magic ceases to work in its accustomed way, instability and political unrest threaten to disrupt a society used to order and rigid social obedience. Eventually the Pope is sufficiently perturbed to send one of his beloved (by him) and dreaded (by the public in general) Sicarii to investigate the disturbance. Arriving late on the scene, Adam (he has no other name), Sicarii extraordinaire, sometime spy, sometime security officer, sometime assassin, discovers a mystifying, malicious power at work, a power that can twist not only souls, but his entire world inside out.

The gun straps to the inside of my leg with Velcro. It’s not the absolute zenith of fashion to do this anymore, but girls who wear theirs with leather straps and buckles aren’t serious: with Velcro you can get at the thing when you need it.

I also have a pink ammo belt. It’s heavy, but who said fashion was easy?’

In a mall like any other, a gang of teenage girls are suddenly caught up in a maelstrom of shopping and violence. But – as the designer bullets fly – it is not only their own lives they are fighting for. Unknown to them they are battling for the life of a man trapped in another place, in a different world, and with very different enemies.
He is a man they have never met, but who represents the future of the human race … or could destroy it.

A series of accidents? Or is it Murder in the library…?

A wonderfully entertaining classic from the Golden Age of crime fiction

At first, for the staff of the university library, it’s easy enough to dismiss the death of a woman who fell from a rolling ladder as nothing more than an unfortunate accident. It’s more difficult, however, to explain away the strangled corpse of a man found inside a locked room, surrounded by rare and obscure erotica.

When a valuable manuscript disappears from the archive, it begins to look like both a killer and a thief are on the loose. It’s up to chief cataloguer Gilda Gorham to solve the crimes but, unless she’s careful, the next death in the library might just be her own.

Voted one of the top ten Best Locked Room Mysteries of all Time

‘Ellery Queen IS the American detective story’ New York Times

‘One of the most bizarre puzzles in crime fiction’ Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

The offices of publisher and renowned stamp collector Donald Kirk has seen many things – but this is the most bizarre: the murder of an unknown caller, found dead in an empty room. Nobody entered or exited – and yet everything inside the room has been manipulated, and left upside down and backwards. Stuck through the back of the corpse’s shirt are two long spears – and a tangerine is missing from the fruit bowl.

Amateur sleuth Ellery Queen arrives just in time to witness the discovery of the body – and realises that even the smallest clues could be crucial to solving this most extraordinary murder…

Helen Capel takes the position of lady-help in a remote country house owned by the Warren family and, before long, learns that a murderer is on the loose. All four of his victims were young girls, and the last of these was strangled in a lonely house just five miles away. Helen feels safe inside the house, protected, but the maniac is closer than she fears.

Inside the furnace was a seething pool of molten metal, bubbling with a heat great enough to destroy a man’s body so completely it would be impossible to trace. And Gerald Norris had disappeared without a trace!

In London, Julie Crocker was hunting for her brother amongst the demi-monde of unsuccessful artists. He too had disappeared, leaving no trace except an indifferent painting in a Soho restaurant.

Against the backdrop of the power and heat of the steelworks and the overcrowded bars of Soho, private detective John Bryant sets about investigating both mysteries. Mysteries that can only be solved in the consuming flames of yet another fire.

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

Lieutenant Luis Mendoza works with an outstanding team at the Los Angeles Police Department. They need to be. On their hands is a case of a vanished treasure of coins; drug dealers and a clutch of law-breaking brothers.

As well as the cases, though, there’s an inside view of a police department and the varied lives of the characters who work within it.

Forget The Girl on the Train – meet the woman who watches from her window, and finds herself caught up in murder…
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club


‘Watching, fascinated and horrified, he saw thin fingers creep around the edge of the black curtain. Someone from inside was tugging to loosen it . . .’

Miss Janet Martin, a 74-year-old spinster, enjoys her daily habit of watching passers-by from her window. When she strikes up a friendship with one of them – the golden-haired Pamela – she has no inkling that the innocence of her fading years is about to be turned upside down.

The little old lady becomes inextricably involved in the child’s fate, and when she calls in private eye Arthur Crook to help, a plot of abduction, fraud and murder unfolds . . .

A young woman has a new position – but will she listen to the voice warning her not to cross the threshold of that sinister house…
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club


Nora Deane, a young nurse, has been instructed to report to 12 Askew Avenue, Charlbury, to look after a new patient. As she steps from the station into an impenetrable blanket of fog, she is glad to accept the escort of a mysterious young man to the address.

Once alone in the darkness, she presses the bell and waits. She shivers. She wants to be inside, out of the dangers of the dark. Yet some inner voice persistently warns her not to cross the threshold of that sinister house . . .

Barrister Martin Ainsworth is sent to West Berlin by British Intelligence to make contact with his former lover, a suspected Communist agent, and it’s up to him to find out the truth and to spot her contacts.

As he travels through a divided Berlin, his dual role becomes emotionally tortuous, his lack of training an unforeseen hazard, and he turns more reckless than his peers had ever bargained for …

‘A more or less conventional spy story is suddenly turned inside out by a most ingenious twist’ Guardian

Christopher Kent, worth a quarter of a million pounds yet without a penny in his pocket, stands hungrily in Piccadilly one snowy morning, looking up at the huge hotel, when a piece of card bearing a number floats down to him. He enters and is served with breakfast, giving the waiter the room number. Then an unlucky chance compels him to go up to room 707. Inside a woman lies murdered in a trunk.

Kent needs to prove his innocence fast, and calls in Dr Gideon Fell to investigate – but there’s been another murder, and Dr Fell must figure out what connects them in order to find the guilty party.

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.

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 …

‘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?

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

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 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 …

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 …

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 . . .

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

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 . . .