Search Results for: time-and-again

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

Famous LAPD husband and wife sleuths Sergeant Ivor and Detective Sue Maddox return again, this time juggling half a dozen investigations at once. Balancing solving the cases of an enterprising team of daytime burglars, a scandalous sex ring and suspicious-seeming fatal accidents, they are stretched to the limit when a grandmother and her two-year-old granddaughter are discovered murdered . . .

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

New York in the days preceding the American Revolution was a dangerous place to be. Just ask sixteen-year-old James Bethune, who seems to be constantly followed by trouble. Offered a job at a newspaper, James sees out the revolution through the eyes of the paper, surviving incredible odds. When trouble finally catches up to him again, how will he get himself out of it this time?

On a winter night in a Bronx neighbourhood, a blow from a shovel fells a man in the street. From the scene flee six children, any of whom might have loosed the fatal strike. Weeks later, one of their fathers is executed for the crime.

Four decades on, the Ryer Avenue gang gathers again: Megan Magee, Charley and Eugene O’Brien, Ben Herskel and Dante D’Angelo; the group is missing only Willie Paycek, the little hanger-on who never fitted in. But now that fatal blow is about to come crashing down upon them – and this time, Willie is calling the shots.

A gunman on the run, a seventeen-year-old girl on a family vacation, a jaded working girl, a guilt-stricken widower, an abandoned mistress. All heading fast down a route to sudden death. Then for one horrifying instant their lives are frozen in time, when a Cadillac drives at speed into oncoming traffic.

Lives are lost, and those that survive must endure a violent sequence of events that ensure life will never be the same again – for any of them.

When an accident begins to look like murder…
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

On a quiet country station, Detective Arthur Crook, waiting for the train to London, witnessed a near-fatal accident. Despite the arm of her companion, Miss Imogen Garland slipped and almost fell under the train. No harm was done, and Arthur Crook might not have thought anything more about it had not a newspaper item a few weeks later caught his eye. Miss Garland had once again been involved in an accident, this time fatal. Only it was not Miss Garland who had died . . .

Young Roderick Kinsmere was a country bumpkin when he strolled into the Great Court of Charles II’s Whitehall Palace. Three days later he had lost his fortune, gained a wife, fought for – and been outwitted by – his king, and no one would ever call Rowdy Kinsmere a bumpkin again.

It was 1670 and London was a teeming, filthy, dangerous and splendiferous place. The king was in trouble and Roderick was surrounded by plots and counterplots. And somehow everything centred on the beautiful sapphire ring he had inherited from his father …

‘Mr Carr has contrived a fine, adventurous entertainment of politics and piracy, espionage and murder’ The Times

Relating Sherlock Holmes’s part in real-life crimes of the day, Donald Thomas brings the Great Detective to life once again in six narratives that display Holmes at his most determined, inventive and downright devious.

What were Holmes’s views on Dr Crippen? And what happened when Oscar Wilde visited Baker Street to seek advice? How did Holmes uncover a loving husband as one of the most dangerous psychopaths of modern times? And just what horrors await Holmes in the darkened slums of Waterloo Road?

‘Thomas’s imitation is wryly and subtly done’ Guardian

For three decades science fiction legend Alan Dean Foster has captivated readers around the world, from his debut classic The Tar-Aiym Krang and his inspired scenario for the first Star Trek movie to a host of New York Times bestsellers, including Splinter of the Mind’s Eye and Flinx in Flux.
In this collection of twenty brilliant odysseys of the imagination, Foster once again soars beyond the limits of reality – where the real thrills begin…
NASA Sending Addicts to Mars!: It was the most insane idea in the annals of space travel – and the only one that would work.
Diesel Dream: Sometimes on dark, lonely highways dreams do come true, and this trucker’s hope was the best one of all.
Sideshow: Flinx hadn’t a clue about the alien dancer, but Pip knew trouble when she saw it.
Empowered: A magnificent male discovers the not-so-super part about being a superhero.
The Question: A bold adventurer determines to solve one of life’s profound mysteries.
…and fourteen other amazing stories!

Once the world was not as it has since become. Once it worked in a way different from the way it works now…

Pierce Moffett is a teacher and historian who at midlife feels himself to be standing at a great turning point in the history of the world. As a child, Pierce was no stranger to magic, but those revelations faded with time. Now Pierce’s search for a secret history of the world – one in which magic works and angels speak to humankind – has begun again.

Pierce finds clues offered to him in the unfinished last novel of a writer named Fellowes Kraft and in the real-life histories of the doomed Renaissance heretic Giordano Bruno and the Elizabethan magus John Dee. He will also find the secret history pervading his present in his involvement with two Roses: Rosie Rasmussen, guardian of the dead Kraft’s legacy, and Rose Ryder, who will soon become his lover.

The sequel to Last and First Men, Olaf Stapledon’s great classic work of science fiction.


In Last Men in London the author follows up the themes of his earlier masterpiece in presenting a Neptunian ‘last man’s’ views on our twentieth-century world, views informed by the huge dimensions of space and time which separate him from our tiny contemporary world. Once again, Olaf Stapledon has been totally successful in creating a work of such stunning imagination and brilliance that it has taken its place amongst the classics of science fiction.

Asher Sutton has a book in his hands – a book that would change the history of the galaxy, a book by himself…that he had never written.
Or had he?
Or would he?

In the real world, the Mediterranean basin dried up several times, only to refill again. If it hadn’t, what’s really sea bottom would have become the most savage desert in the world. Mild-mannered Radnal vez Krobir likes it that way. When his kingdom’s enemies try to shake down the Barrier Mountains and let the Atlantic in, he has to stop them – or else drown along with everything he holds dear.

Rhavas is a good, holy, and pious man, as befits a member of the clergy. He is also the cousin of the Avtokrator, ruler of the Empire. Hoping someday to become ecumenical patriarch of Videssos, he was reluctantly willing to bide his time in one of the smaller cities on the outskirts of the Empire.

Then civil war broke out, and the Avtokrator had to pull back the troops guarding the borders as he struggled for control of the Empire. Rhavas had to flee for his life as the fierce Khamorth nomads took advantage of the chaos and sacked the city he had come to love. He only survived because he accidentally discovered that he had an unsuspected power: Men often cursed each other – but Rhavas’s curse had the power to kill!

Rhavas had always followed Phos, the god of light and goodness, Videssos’ own god, just as he had always despised Phos’ evil rival Skotos. Those who fall off the Bridge of the Separator during judgment in the afterlife are doomed to dwell in Skotos’ ice and darkness forevermore. But Rhavas has reverenced logic as well as goodness, and knows the power to kill with a curse cannot be an attribute of Phos. As evil swallows up the world, Rhavas, ever the logician, decided that Skotos is actually the more powerful god, and becomes determind to change the official religion of Videssos. But in the end, it is he who will be changed, and neither the world nor he will ever be the same again…

Ever since the devastating Werenight that spelled the end of the Elabonian Empire, Aragis the Archer has been saying he doesn’t want war with Gerin the Fox, also called King of the North. But the Archer is ambitious and feels that his time is slipping by. So he makes one tiny little threat that turns out to have not such tiny consequences. Because the Fox must respond to this threat, and the Archer must again riposte.

Then, just as things are getting “interesting”, the Empire knocks with great authority on the door to the Northlands. “Submit or die” is the message, and suddenly the Archer and the King in the North are allies once again…

It’s jang to be wild and sexy and reckless and teen-age.

It’s jang to do daredevil tricks and even get killed a few times…you could always come alive again.

It’s jang to change your body, to switch your sex, to do anything you want to keep up with the crowd.

But there comes a time when you begin to think about serious things, to want to do something valid. And that’s when you find out there are rules beyond the rules and that the world is something else than all they’d taught you.

Set in a post-apocalyptic England, RIDDLEY WALKER tells the tale of one twelve year old boy and his journey through the ruins of civilisation. After the death of his father in an accident, Riddley must become a man. But his inquiring mind and strange ways set him apart from his people, and when he discovers a relic of the old time, he sets in motion a chain of events that may well lead to the end of the world (again).

Written in a remarkable and rewarding language, RIDDLEY WALKER is a tour-de-force of imagination, history and psychology. Challenging and rewarding, this is a book that repays rereading again and again. There’s a reason why the reviews were so good, and why so many authors cite it as an inspiration. It is, quite frankly, a masterpiece.

In the remote West Country the farms around a small town are suddenly haunted by ghostly presences – not all in human form. But when a ghost-hunter is called in to eliminate the hauntings, a greater terror is unleashed upon the land.

For, below the dark woods, the deserted tunnels of an ancient mine have become the focus of primeval supernatural forces – summoned by Arachne and now growing in strength.

And when the shrine’s hideous guardian is released, the time comes for Dan Brady to challenge again the occult power that snatched away his family.

The World Next Door.

Engineered by the mysterious Hypotheticals to support human life, it’s connected to Earth by way of the Arch that towers hundreds of miles over the Indian ocean. Humans are colonizing this new world – and, predictably, exploiting its resources, chiefly large deposits of oil in the western deserts of the continent of Equatoria.

Lise Adams is a young woman attempting to uncover the mystery of her father’s disappearance ten years ago. Turk Findley is an ex-sailor and sometime drifter. They come together when an infall of cometary dust seeds the planet with tiny Hypothetical machines.

Now Lise, Turk, a Martian woman, and a boy who has been engineered to communicate with the Hypotheticals, are drawn to a place in the desert where this seemingly hospitable world has become suddenly very alien indeed – and the nature of time is being once again twisted by entities unknown.

Someone was tampering with time, altering the past to eliminate the present, fading people out of existence into a timeless limbo.

One of the victims was Angelina, the lovely, lethal wife of James Bolivar di Griz – better known as the Stainless Steel Rat. That put Slippery Jim on the trail of the villains, a trail that went back to 1984 and an ancient nation called the United States of America. The Stainless Steel Rat was determined to rescue his wife. And before he was through he’d thrown dozens of centuries through time in both directions. But then he didn’t have much choice: to save Angelina he had to save the world. Again.

In another world, somewhere in space and time, two countries – Bellogard and Chorny – are locked in perpetual war, conducted by magic. Each of the main members of the two countries’ courts – king, queen, prince, bishop, knight and squire – has their own form of magic, and special ways of moving magically. A war may continue for centuries, until one side succeeds in killing the other side’s king, at which point the whole world vanishes, only to reappear and have the cycle begin again. . .

Pedino is a young Bellogardian who becomes the queen’s squire and, as part of his training, is sent into a seedier part of the city to uncover a Chornian spy. During his adventures he meets and falls in love with a whore, Sara, who turns out to be a Chornian bishop’s squire. Pedino succeeds in killing the other Chornian bishop – a remarkable achievement for a mere squire; but in the manoeuvres which follow Chorny proves to have outwitted its rival, and Pedino’s whole world is threatened with extinction.

There have been many stories modelled on chess games, but none so ingenious and enjoyable as Ian Watson’s latest novel. And, as one would expect from Watson, the story of Bellogard and Chorny is only the beginning. When Pedino and Sara manage to escape the destruction of their universe, they find themselves in a series of even more bizarre worlds operating under still stranger rules, as they seek to discover the purpose of their existence, and the meaning of their universe. Queenmagic, Kingmagic is Ian Watson in sparkling, exuberant form.

Baron Jim is in the thick of it again. Somehow he’s found himself taking on England’s oldest enemy – the French – who have entered into an unholy alliance with a most fearsome horror: the mighty serpents of the deep underseas. Nobody has battled them before; nobody even realised they could leave the sea. And with the serpents as their allies it’s only a matter of time before the French invasion succeeds – unless Baron Jim can stop them.

More even than space travel, the Stileman Process had altered twenty-first century life. The most complex of medical miracles, it ensured that every ten years or so, the ailing aging body could be restored to youthful vigour and health.

There was a catch of course. The cost. Every ten years or so you have to come up with £1,000,000 minimum or die.

For Dallas Barr, one of the oldest men on earth, it was that time again. It was while he was casting around for that vital next million that he came across Maria, a woman from – literally – a previous life. And made two major discoveries.

Not all Stileman ‘immortals’ were born – or created – the same. And someone is trying to kill them. All of them.

Earth and Firma were twin planets – mirror worlds in a single time-track. Now Firma was halted in its rotation around the sun by the Aliens. Unless Denning and Liston, twin humans, could destroy the Aliens and get Firma moving again, Earth would some day repeat Firma’s tragedy and be burned to a cinder.

The Aliens had an incredible array of weapons at their disposal.

Denning and Liston had only their courage and their brains.

Time was running out for Bob Kinnaird. Without much warning, the Hunter – the green protoplasmic alien that lived inside him and cured all his ills – had suddenly become his destroyer. Day by day Bob grew weaker and weaker, but only specialists from the Hunter’s distant world would know what was wrong with him and, more importantly, how to save him.

But the only way searchers from his planet could find him was to locate his missing spaceship . . . a spaceship that had crashed beneath the ocean years before, its location still very much a mystery. Once again leading an investigation against time – as he had done so many years before – the Hunter knew he had to find comrades and find them fast . . . before someone murdered his best friend.