Search Results for: out-of-the-night

It was a quiet night in Albuquerque, New Mexico.


But then they mostly are.


Seeth, token punk for the territory, was bored, bored, bored. Which was why he went ten pin bowling. Not for the bowling, you understand – it was Ladies’ League Night – but to spread a little outrage among the upright, mostly overweight citizenry.

And so it was he came upon the alien, playing lane 36, saved him from arrest by the pseudo-cops from outer space, found himself in a stolen van, along with Kerwin the nerd and Miranda the born-to-shop, Miss Teen America lookalike, driven by a green-skinned, tentacled shape changer and about to be space chased clean out of the galaxy…

Blood was what they called that mountain town and the forbidding land around it – and the name was significant. Folks there knew a secret that would have shocked the world…but nobody was ever going to get out of Blood to tell. Not even when Portia Clark arrived, hot on a news story for a national magazine. Especially not her…

Clint Breen, who had been in the outside world, tried to save her. But he had to fight a tradition that drove men and women to unspeakable lusts and that ruled secretly the lives and afterlives of everything being in the county. Blood was the place where more men and women walked the night than were ever seen by day. Horror was their heritage, for they were the people that the census dared not count!

Classic police procedural by a ‘born storyteller’ (Sunday Times), who combined natural flair with his experience in the police to truly authentic effect.

There was an extra body in the morgue – a body stripped of all identification and with its face badly battered. But when Inspector Martineau was called to the scene he had a pretty good idea whose it was.

That was, however, just the beginning. A big payroll robbery, a group of out-of-town mobsters and some odd behaviour in a local night spot all attract Inspector Martineau’s attention. While, at a funeral parlour, the quick are considerably more active and dangerous a problem than the dead.

The XXC mob is giving Scotland Yard a run for its money, but the police have no idea who they are. As the gang is London-based, Granchester’s Chief Inspector Martineau is not overly concerned.

Then London gets too hot even for this gang. Cain, one of its members, decides they’ll slip out of London one by one, so that Scotland Yard will think they’ve been done for.

Then Martineau gets a 999 call early one Sunday morning: a safe has been broken into during the night.

Martineau and team start to investigate, but they haven’t got very far when there’s another Granchester robbery. Martineau realises he’s got the XXC gang on his hands – and that things are going to get pretty tough.

When schoolboy Jason Cutler is killed late one night in a hit-and-run, the police are puzzled by the presence of a letter in his locker, to which is attached a five-pound note. They are unable to identify its author, nor can they ascertain why the boy was out so late at night.

Solicitor Rosa Epton has followed the case with interest, but when a client she has recently defended on a drugs charge turns up dead in the grounds of the school, her involvement becomes professional. It seems unlikely that the two cases are connected, but why does Jason’s brother deny having seen him in the days leading up to his death? And who was the girl seated opposite Rosa on the train and behaving erratically on the day news of the accident came out?

John Raven and his wife Kirstie are holidaying in Lisbon at Ilona Szecheyi’s villa when Ilona’s father Stephen reveals his well-guarded secret: shortly before the communist occupation of Hungary in 1945, he was entrusted with 17 million in government gold bullion. Now, thirty-seven years later, the courts have awarded him full ownership of the money – and the current Hungarian regime is not pleased.

They will stop at nothing to get it back, and when blackmail and murder strike, Raven can’t pull out fast enough before he becomes the main suspect . . .

‘Donald MacKenzie is a born storyteller’ Guardian

It is no ordinary murder case that brings the famed French detective Monsieur Bencolin out of retirement, but one that involves a midnight rendezvous on a steamy Paris night, a broken love affair, and four different murder weapons found in the secret villa where the body is discovered.

Rose Klonec, whose corpse bears the mark of a particularly horrible wound, had connections – and old lovers – throughout Paris, and soon the number of suspects grows to match the number of possible weapons …

One October night in the middle of the twentieth century Detective Inspector John Cheviot got into a taxi, bound for New Scotland Yard. When he stepped out it was from a horse-drawn cab, the year was 1829, and a beautiful woman was beckoning him in front of Old Scotland Yard.

There were things Cheviot remembered but couldn’t use – like how to analyse fingerprints; and things he didn’t know that he could have used – like how advanced his romance with Lady Flora really was. And there wasn’t even time to learn, because in the midst of helping Robert Peel establish the respectability and competence of his new police force, Cheviot suddenly finds himself and his lady accused of cruel murder.

‘Mr J. J. Connington is a name revered by all specialists on detective fiction’ Spectator

When a locum doctor is called out one foggy night to a case of scarlet fever, he mistakes one house for another and discovers a young man lying in a pool of blood, who manages to choke out a dying message.

This intriguing clue-laden third case for Sir Clinton Driffield has its origin in a dark scheme that reveals as much about the means for murder as its motivation.

Detective Christie Opara arrests a man on the subway for indecent exposure. Within hours, Murray Rogoff, a burly giant, is out on bail. Soon after, the body of a young dancer is found stashed behind the stairway of a Bronx apartment building. The girl was brutally raped and strangled, and a clue links her with two previous murders. The killer takes a signature trophy: a hacked-off lock of the victim’s hair.
When Christie starts to get strange, late-night phone calls her instincts tell her that Rogoff’s the serial killer they’re hunting. With the reluctant approval of her boss, Assistant District Attorney Casey Reardon, Christie prepares to become the bait of a deadly psychopath.

When Toby Dyke and his companion, George, get caught in torrential rain one night, they are surprised to find that they are not the only ones out in such a fierce storm: Edgar Prees, aging botanist of prestige and reputation, is attempting to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff top.

The two men drive Edgar home, collapsed and shaken. When he is then found the following morning shot dead with his own revolver, it seems that his attempt at suicide has succeeded – but is the case really as clear-cut as it appears?

She pulled herself out of the water and into a canoe and gasped, ‘I don’t know who you are … but you’d better paddle like hell!’ Flashlights appeared on the shore. Someone shouted ‘There she is!’ but Perry Mason was doing as he was told for a change, paddling into the night, with a strange girl, towards the hottest water he had ever been in.

By morning, Mason was in all the papers – wanted for robbery. By afternoon, he had a second client – in jail. Then murder arrived and he was precipitated into the tensest battle of his career.

Lydia Grey, an American returning to London after many years, is woken by footsteps in the night. There is someone in her room – of that she is sure. But that is also impossible. There is only one door and it is bolted shut. The windows are eight floors up, and are locked against the winter night.

As the noise recedes she switches on her bedside lamp. No one is there. Was it a dream? An illusion of a half-awakened state? Or is someone out to get her?

Behind the ominous walls of Jamaica Court, Anthea Vine rules as a provincial Queen Elizabeth, imperious and wealthy, vain and pathetic.

But Anthea holds chained to her in financial dependence five discontented souls, all with a motive for murder. Her tentacles reach beyond her three wards and draw into their clutches her secretary, Sally Morgan, and the sardonically charming local doctor.

Anthea’s charms prove fatal to none but her. For, while people set their watches by the light in her bedroom window, Florence Pye reads death in the cards. Her prophecy comes true, silently, violently in the depths of the night.

What Miss Pye has not foreseen, though, is that she will be first to find the body . . .

Griselda and Con Satterlee are spending a second honeymoon in a cottage on Long Beach, and it’s not going well. To cap it all, Con picks up a blonde in the Bamboo Bar one night and walks out with her, leaving Griselda on her own.

Con comes back, saying that he took the blonde outside to try to stop her from shooting herself, but the police find her body the next morning and Con is arrested for her murder.

Then Con disappears, and Griselda is alone in their beach house with a door that can’t keep out the Major, who frightens her; Kew, whom Con distrusts; Kathie, who is lovely, and so strange; or Dare, who has caused trouble before . . .

Griselda must work quickly to save Con – and their marriage.

Out in the Rolls-Royce, Emmy Arkwright nearly collides with Nat Volck in Beverly Hills. Emmy and Nat are neighbours, yet belong to separate worlds: she is a wealthy, successful fashion designer; he is a doctor who trained during World War Two. But when Nat gets a call one night telling him Emmy has attempted suicide, they become inexorably linked.

Nat – bitter and uncomfortable in his California Cadillac practice – attends Emmy, and watches over her return to memory and to her old life, offering her the stability and security she badly needs.

But was it really attempted suicide – or is someone trying to kill Emmy?

Agnes receives few compliments, and Henry Preble is not so bad-looking even if he does have a reputation for cornering girls at work. In the eyes of the world, knowing that you’re on the shelf at twenty-four can do strange things to a girl. So strange that you might wake up one morning with almost no recollection of the previous night’s events . . . Published for the first time in the UK, The Gardenia, the basis for Fritz Lang’s 1953 classic Hollywood noir film The Blue Gardenia, is a gripping story of suspense and a brilliant exposé of the press sensationalism of 1950s America.

This volume also contains Out of the Blue, which was made into a comedy film in 1947 starring George Brent and Carole Landis.

A magician turned detective is caught up in the most baffling locked-room murder mystery…

‘One of the all-time greatest impossible murder mysteries’ Publishers Weekly starred review

‘Dazzling’ Saturday Review

‘A cornerstone of detective fiction’ New York Times


Master magician The Great Merlini has hung up his top hat and white gloves, and now spends his days running a magic shop in New York and his nights moonlighting as a consultant for the NYPD. When the crimes seem impossible, it is his magician’s mind they need.

So when two occultists are discovered dead in locked rooms, one spread out on a pentagram, both appearing to have been murdered under similar circumstances, Merlini is immediately called in. The list of suspects includes an escape artist, a professional medium, and a ventriloquist – and it is only too clear that this is a world Merlini knows rather too well…

A deranged killer sends a doctor on a quest for the truth – deep into the recesses of his own mind.

‘Deserves its reputation as one of the greatest mysteries of all time’ PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review

What really happened to Inis St. Erme? What was his fatal mistake? Was it when he and his bride-to-be first set out to elope in Vermont? Or did his deadly error occur later, when they picked up a terrifying hitch-hiker, or when the three stopped at ‘Dead Bridegroom’s Pond’ for a picnic?

Dr Riddle is determined to find out, but he soon uncovers a series of bizarre coincidences that leave him questioning his sanity and his innocence. After all, he too walked those wild, deserted roads the night of the murder, stranded and struggling to get home to New York City. The more he reflects, the more his own memories become increasingly uncertain, as he veers into the irrational territory of pure terror…

The sea has always been a symbol of uncontrolled power and infinite movement. Its rhythms are the rhythms of Life itself… for Life began in the primeval oceans…

Roger Adams was a man who dreamt of the untold wealth lying beneath the inscrutable waves of the Atlantic deeps. His mind filled with visions of Lost Continents, sunken galleons and the limitless possibilities of undersea farming. He same his meagre capital into a neck-or-nothing gamble and fought desperately against time and rude to turn his dreams into reality.

The unexpected stowaway added to his problems and then his diving began to pay dividends. The Atlantic Deeps gave up some of their secrets… but each enigma led to greater riddles. Then came the discovery that pointed to world-shaking consequences. Hidden beneath the great rollers lay supernatural forces so immense that the Kraken and other monsters of popular mythology were harmless toys beside it.

The force which had submerged continents was stirring once more…

‘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.

The firebird came at night – a magnificent creature whose magical cry seemed to transform objects at random. Gifted with powers of her own, Meguet tried to reach out to the bird. But at moonrise, the firebird became human, a prince cursed by dark magic. Meguet bowed to help him. But then the mystery carried her away, on alien winds, to a land far from her home…

At the edge of the world, the Luxor Desert awaits – a barren land where a sorcerer’s war rages. Where invisible dragons cast shadows over ruined castles. And where Meguet’s own fate depends upon a secret locked away in a tower for centuries…

They have lived among us for centuries-distant, separate, just out of sight. They fill our myths, our legends, and the stories we tell our children in the dark of night. They come from the air, from water, from earth, and from fire. What are these creatures that enjoin out imagination? Faeries.

Megan is an artist who draws seascapes. Jonah owns a shop devoted to treasures from the deep. Their lives, so strongly touched by the ocean, become forever intertwined when enchanting people of the sea lure them further into the underwater world-and away from each other.

Twenty years ago, the powerful mage Atrix Wolfe unleashed an uncontrollable force that killed his beloved king. Now, the Queen of the Wood has offered him one last chance for redemption. She asks him to find her daughter, who vanished into the human world during the massacre he caused. No one has seen the princess-but deep in the kitchens of the Castle of Pelucir, there is a scullery maid who appeared out of nowhere one night long ago. She cannot speak and her eyes are full of sadness. But there are those who call her beautiful.