Search Results for: no-way-back

Who killed Louie Lepetino?

Was it Barby, with her silvery sheen of hair, looking like a top model and acting like a woman madly in love?

Or the beautiful Toni, who is hiding some strange secrets?

Could it be Otto, a handsome refugee, nicknamed Blue Eyes and an object of attraction for Barby?

Kit, a cop’s son, has come back to New York to track down his best buddy’s killer. It had to be murder: Louie wasn’t the suicidal type. One person stands in the way of his revenge – The Wobblefoot, his unseen nemesis from two terrible years spent in captivity during the Spanish Civil War. He is watching. One false step will mean curtains for Kit. But Kit is willing to take any risk for a friend – even murder in cold blood.

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

Private eye Bill Crane is back, in his fifth and final case, working and drinking as usual with his old sidekick, Doc Williams, and a new member of the gang, Ann Fortune, who is posing as his girlfriend – and disapproves of his carousing.

The trio has been sent to a Chicago suburb to investigate a murder and death threats made to the family of an industrial magnate. Alternately impeded and abetted by the many attractive women of the family, Crane cracks the case in his own inimitable way, following a trail of clues including the perfume of gardenias, the lipstick marks on the dead man’s face and the crimson cat.

Six men have failed to appear in a West End court, so it’s time for Scotland Yard to make a few undercover enquiries. They enlist the help of Detective-Constable Cordari, who leads them to a mysterious organisation smuggling criminals out of the country.

There ensues a relentless chase that moves to Algeria and back to London. In the meantime, Cordari has vanished in the same horribly mysterious way as others before him.

‘A plot that grows to grim and sinister proportions. An ingenious story with plenty of excitement’ Manchester Evening News

Keith Devery, burdened with a criminal record, arrives in Wicksteed, a prosperous little town on the Pacific coast. He is looking for any job that will provide eating money. It is when he meets Beth Marshall – whose husband, a local drunk, is to inherit $1,000,000 – that he realises there’s a way to get back in the big league.

Together they ruthlessly plot the perfect murder, but Keith soon finds himself at the centre of a double-bluff. Beth has plans of her own once the money is hers …

It looks like a trivial enough incident: a would-be petty thief makes his escape before he has stolen anything. But when the beat constable arrives to look for damage, he finds something he hasn’t been expecting – a dead man, with a wound in his back made by a broad blade … possibly a spearhead.

Scotland Yard get to work, following what turns out to be a very complicated business, especially when they find they are on the trail of smuggled diamonds leading all the way to South Africa …

By the time Jim Gilruth returns to Pakistan, twenty years after he served as a law officer in a small village near Lahore, colonial rule has given way to Pakistani officialdom. His strange and enigmatic mission is painfully involved in the brutal clash of the old and the new – but why has he been chosen as the instrument of coercion?

Then the details of a half-forgotten murder that he had long ago adjudicated begin to come back in all their bewildering nuances, and Gilruth, in an eerie repetition of the circumstances of a generation ago, is powerless to save the life of a good man, or bring a murderer to justice.

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

The evacuation of Philip Masson’s body near Mrs Griffin’s cottage resurrects several old ghosts that send the newshounds scurrying to dig in their clippings archives. Rumours, matured with the passing years since Masson’s ‘disappearance’ way back in 1978, once more abound.

But the investigative team of Ian Robinson and Jenny Fielding are already on a trail of discovery that leads back to the end of the Wilson/Callaghan era. Jenny has overheard a snatch of gossip at an embassy party which seems to implicate British Intelligence’s David Audley in the original cover-up of Masson’s death . . . and Jenny has a personal interest in that affair.

But it is not until the labyrinthine trails come together on a Spanish battlefield that Jenny learns why it is that Philip Masson had to die….

She called herself Reee and she was the last human being on Earth. This was the one thing she was sure of. Because Earth was not a dead planet, not by a long way. There were all manner of strange plants and bizarre animals, and there were the blue boys who insisted they were human – but she always set fire to them.



There was however Indigo, the all-devouring protoplasmic ocean that was literally gobbling up everything in the world. And there was the enigmatic Emeroo to whom she owed her continued existence. There were also the so-called Martians – humans who had fled to Mars and only came back to Earth to scout for survivors and vent their futile furies on the inhospitable homeworld.

The sun shone brightly on this fateful morning, bringing to its planets warmth and life-giving rays. The brightness increased sharply as the morning grew older. The glare was blinding; the radiation not life-giving, but deadly. By mid-afternoon the brilliant, intense sun shone on barren space. It had blasted each of its four planets out of existence.

Someone had found a way to poison a star.

And someone had to be found who could prevent the takeover – or destruction – of the entire universe. Who? Johnny Kettrick, as improbable a hero there never was. Johnny Kettrick who was banned from the Cluster World for his not-too-honest dealings was sent back there with his three equally unholy partners to search out the Doomstar…to find the Doomstar before it burned out another world.

Empath Kayla John Reed’s rebel forces, the War Minstrels, had struck a crucial blow at the heart of Yates Keller’s empire, conquering the Alliance capital, Vardalia. It should have been Kayla’s moment of triumph. But Vardalia was a shambles, and not only had Yates himself escaped, he claimed to have her friends and shipmates in his clutches.



Kayla had no choice but to agree to the terms he’d left in a holographic message. Meet him on their home world, the mining colony Styx, surrender the fabled Mindstone to him, and Keller would release her friends. Yet even as she set off for the rendezvous point, trouble was brewing among the War Minstrels – trouble that could transform their successful revolution into the deadliest kind of anarchy if she didn’t make it back in time. And what Kayla had no way of know foreseeing was that Styx itself hid a peril far greater than any trap Keller had planned for her…

Marcus Walker, a former hotshot commodities broker, and a wisecracking dog named George, who has been speech-enhanced to increase his market value, have escaped their alien Vilenjji captors, who saw the two as cuddly extra-terrestrial “pets” to be sold for a hefty sum. But Walker hasn’t a clue which way will lead him back home to Chicago. With the Vilenjji hot on his trail, Walker must pull off the impossible and pinpoint his needle of a solar system in the universal haystack. Will the unrelenting Vilenjji get to him before he reaches Wrigley Field? Yep, it’s a wide-open universe out there, bursting with possibilities – and Walker’s going to get hit with all of them.

Abducted by aliens to be sold as pets in a more civilized part of the galaxy, earthlings Marcus Walker and a scruffy dog named George (speech-enhanced to increase his market value) have managed to escape their captors. Walker loves being humankind’s first galactic traveller – until he remembers he hasn’t a clue where his home is or how to get there. So the erstwhile commodities broker becomes a chef, whipping up delicacies for demanding alien palates. Of course he never imagined that the way back to Chicago would involve swapping his easy-living adopted planet for an all-out, age-old war many parsecs away. But hey, it’s all for a good cause, h has George and their two fellow escapees for company, and what else is there to do, besides avoid nasty aliens? Plenty, it turns out.

There’s no place like home…

It was a pretty good life for a spellsinger from L.A. He’d battled demons, fought deadly Plated Folk, even met a socialist dragon and survived. Now Jon-Tom was quite happy to settle into domestic bliss with the fiery Talea, study magic, and practice spellsinging on his duar. But the magic instrument is broken when Jon-Tom protects the wizard Clothahump from thieves and he must set out across the Glittergeist Sea to find the one person who can fix it. With the irrepressible Mudge the Otter as a travelling companion, only the unexpected can happen. But cannibal muskrats, ogres, and a fierce pirate king parrot must seem ordinary indeed when Jon-Tom finds a way back to Earth – and he must choose which world is home.

In The Moment of the Magician Alan Dean Foster continues the adventures of Jon Thomas Meriweather, the Spellsinger, in a land where magic and constant danger combine against a background of beauty and individual courage.

Jon-Tom (as he is known in the land), in his quest to find a way back to his own world, discovers that there exists in the land another human from Earth who may hold the secret he so desperately seeks. This individual, however, is reputedly evil and has strange powers.

Jon-Tom’s adventures in seeking out this mysterious and dangerous human make this sequel to The Day of Dissonance a suspenseful and exciting saga in the Spellsinger epoch.

The Humanx Commonwealth: Book Five.

He was smart. He was good. He was backed by the Commonwealth’s best equipment. So what could possibly go wrong?

‘In the midst of life…’ thought Evan Orgel.

A whole lot of life. Alien life-form upon alien life-form, crawling, floating, wriggling, darting and oozing. The entire unexplored surface of the planet Prism was unimaginably alive.

‘…we are in death.’

His death. His Mobile Hostile World suit – the very latest, state-of-the-art, off-world protection gear – had just failed. Attacked in just about the only way its proud makers hadn’t thought of.

So there he lay, a hermit crab trapped in his own armour, while the myriad alien life-forms of prism crawled, floated, wriggled, darted and oozed about him, getting ready to open him up like a tin of upmarket cat food.

Evan Orgell was full of misery.

Dr. Joanna Lander is a psychologist specializing in near-death experiences. She is about to get help from a new doctor with the power to give her the chance to get as close to death as anyone can.

A brilliant young neurologist, Dr. Richard Wright has come up with a way to manufacture the near-death experience using a psychoactive drug. Joanna’s first NDE is as fascinating as she imagined – so astounding that she knows she must go back, if only to find out why that place is so hauntingly familiar.

But each time Joanna goes under, her sense of dread begins to grow, because part of her already knows why the experience is so familiar, and why she has every reason to be afraid.

Yet just when Joanna thinks she understands, she’s in for the biggest surprise of all – a shattering scenario that will keep you feverishly reading until the final climactic page.

The daughter of rich but neglectful parents, Terisa Morgan lives alone in a New York City apartment, a young woman who has grown to doubt her own existence. Surrounded by the flat reassurance of mirrors, she leads an unfulfilled life-until the night a strange man named Geraden comes crashing through one of her mirrors, on a quest to find a champion to save his kingdom of Mordant from a pervasive evil that threatens the land. Terisa is no champion. She wields neither magic nor power. And yet, much to her own surprise, when Geraden begs her to come back with him, she agrees.Now, in a culture where women are little more than the playthings of powerful men, in a castle honeycombed with secret passages and clever traps, in a kingdom threatened from without and within by enemies able to appear and vanish out of thin air, Terisa must become more than the pale reflection of a person. For the way back to Earth is closed to her. And the enemies of Mordant will stop at nothing to see her dead.

It all began simply enough. A client had vanished, and Jay Corcoran went to investigate the man’s empty hotel suite. But Corcoran’s trick vision spotted the room-sized box stuck to the outside wall of the suite. There was no way to get into the box, so Corcoran cabled his long-time pal Tom Boone.

Boone had a talent. When threatened he could “step around a corner” into some otherwhere. Boone stepped into the box, taking Corcoran with him. The box turned out to be a time traveler machine that transported them back to 1745 England, where they found a family of refugees from a million years in the future. In that far future, alien Infinites were converting humanity to incorporeal form. When the family had refused conversion, they had to flee. For more than a century, the family had lain hidden in their time bubble.

Suddenly, the Infinites’ killer monster broke through–and things grew complicated as the family fled to the distant past and the farther future.

The hill below the fortress of Taurovinda, stronghold of Urtha, High King of the Cornovidi, is coming alive: the Otherworldly realm of the Shadows of Heroes are claiming the land as their own. But this time their actions are driven by a force that is darker and older than even the oldest among the ghosts. Who or what is raising the Dead? Merlin, a temporary resident in the fortress, must answer that question if this time of kings and lovers is to be saved. Jason’s wonderful ship, Argo, has returned, drawn back by her own guilty past, and a dreadful secret that she will reveal only to Merlin. Argo holds the key to the mystery. And Niiv, the bewitching, beautiful Northlands enchantress, is working her way even closer into Merlin’s charms.

This is a journey that will take Merlin back in history, and to a fabled island of legend. Love is in the air. But at a price.

During the day a blazing and merciless sun beat down on “the boy” and at night a friendless and cold darkness enveloped him. It was a bleak and lonely countryside over which he had been wandering for ten years. A rare tree, bird or wild animal was the only life he encountered during his desolate trek through his young years of roaming. Infrequently, he was fortunate enough to find shelter and food in the shops of deserted villages; otherwise he foraged what he could from the nearly barren land. Contact with other humans was his innermost and greatest fear.

But the day came when his curiosity overcame his sensibilities of self-preservation and he was drawn to the sound of a great wailing not far from a place where he had come to rest.

Form that moment on his whole existence took on a radical change. His wanderings became a kaleidoscope of adventures, emotions, and responsibilities – never static, forever mobile, and potentially dangerous. There were moments when it would have been easier to turn his back, return to old ways, but somehow he knew this was an impossibility. He accepted his new fate, but still feared the greatest of all commitments until it was too late for him.

This fantasy adventure will not fail to excite and stir in every reader memories and emotions of seemingly forgotten times and moments.

The spaceship landed on the planet Earth to bring it the message of a new religion and a new way of life that would fit the terrestrial barbarians to take their place in the great community of the Galaxy.

Their motives were beyond reproach. Their objectives were honourable. It was not their fault that humanity distrusted their motives, repudiated their objectives – and did its best to drive the missionaries back into space . . .

Slippery Jim diGriz is in the process of robbing the new Mint on Paskonjak when the heist goes terribly wrong. Threatened with a horrific death, Slippery Jim is allowed to cut a deal with the Galactic League: voyage to the planet Liokukae and bring back a missing artifact – the only known evidence of alien life-forms found in 32,000 years of galactic exploration.

For diGriz there are a few catches. One is Liokukae itself – a dumping ground for the League’s misfits, murderers, maniacs, and the incurably obnoxious. Another is a little matter of life and death. To ensure the utterly untrustworthy diGriz’s cooperation, the League has given him a slow-acting poison, allowing him thirty days in which to succeed . . . or die.

Now the Stainless Steel Rat is on his way to a world that is hurtling backward down the evolutionary scale – a land of fanatic, goat-herding Fundamentaloids, murderous Machmen, and a rusty guru named Iron John. DiGriz has developed an almost perfect cover: a four-member rock band that has a way of giving its audiences what they want to hear.

But while the days tick away and diGriz’s life expectancy lowers, the mission evolves from finding an artifact to liberating a planet . . . which is a tune the Stainless Steel Rat most certainly knows how to sing.

The megalomaniac Godmind is still planning to use all the minds in creation to make a vast ‘lens’, and if necessary it will burn out all life in the process.

Back beside the river and literally born again, Yaleen represents to the guild of riverwomen the perfect proof of salvation, of life after death. In fact, she is desperately searching for a way to save the whole universe from imminent destruction.