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Bertha Cool was purring like a kitten. A client had just hired the agency to investigate a suspected insurance swindle and, in Bertha’s glittering eyes, that was just the sort of respectable case they needed. Donald Lam had his doubts but he began looking around for suitable bait to set the trap.

What he didn’t know was that the trap was already baIted – and more than ready to spring.

Perry Mason orders a double serving of trouble the night he and Della Street dine at an intimate restaurant after a hard day at law. In the middle of their steaks a waitress flees the premises in terror, leaving the puzzled proprietor holding her mink coat.

Why a humble working girl abandons such a pricey wrap is only the first question in a cop-killer case that traps Mason’s client with both an impossible story and the murder weapon, makes Perry himself a prime suspect, and blazes a gunpowder trail that leads straight to the heart of the police department itself.

On his return to Geneva, Brian Innes must meet Audrey Page and find a way to prevent her from joining the strangely temperamental group of people gathered around film star Eve Eden at the Villa Rosalind. With characteristic stubbornness, if not trusting naivety, she refuses to be detained and is immediately encircled by terror, while the jaws of a murder trap swing closed.

Fortunately, Dr Gideon Fell is on hand, and when the murderer strikes with an invisible weapon, Fell accepts the challenge with brilliance and wit.

‘Donald MacKenzie is a born storyteller’ Guardian

Every thief dreams of committing the perfect crime. Cameron, Thorne and Gun are convinced that the jewel robbery they have planned cannot possibly go wrong, but jealousy mistrust and fear doom the enterprise from the start.

One of them dies a slow, hideous death; the other two find they have walked into hell. Soon, a beautiful woman and two desperate men find themselves trapped by their own actions. And when the thread of tension snaps they learn that death can indeed be a friend.

A cash-in-transit raid goes pear-shaped when armed police show up. After all the smart planning and careful preparation someone must have talked – so think the relatives and friends of the jailed gang members. And it looks like the grass must have been the only raider to escape the trap.

A vengeance squad is on the prowl and Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur and his boss Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles are given the job of protecting the informant and his family. Yet all the time the lynch mob is closing in . . .

‘James’s writing dazzles with its poetic brevity’ Publishers Weekly

Two Granchester constables find a wrecked, blood-soaked car. But there’s no one in it, and no one has turned up at the nearest village. Then, miles away, a body is found on the road.

A patrolman on night duty opens an unlocked door at the shop of a dealer in gemstones, a man named White. The police want to talk to White. Meanwhile, White has talked to mobster Dixie Costello. White’s safe has been broken into, and diamonds are missing, but he hasn’t told the police what has been taken.

Granchester Police will need every strategy they can think of to trap their man …

In his seventh adventure ‘G’ man Lemmy Caution is sent to investigate the murder of a female agent and the disappearance of a prominent scientist. His search leads Lemmy to notorious gangster Enrico Pranzetti, and straight into a trap …

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

Even in the era of glasnost a defector is worth having, especially if he is a senior computer specialist in Russian military intelligence. But when the defection goes wrong, the British are left with three bodies and two inadequate clues to the nature of the information they might have been offered, and which now lies buried somewhere in the collective memories of David Audley and his one-time colleague Major Peter Richardson.

But what is the secret Audley shares with the half-Italian Richardson, now frightened into hiding somewhere in Italy? For once David Audley has no idea and the race is on to find the elusive Major. But Audley’s objective is fast being overtaken by modern political imperatives – ones very different from the black and white certainties of the old Cold War days . . .

In life, Jane Ann never had much use for a halo, but in her violent death she finally earned one. When they found a suspect, everyone relaxed except Hugh MacReedy.

Maybe he should have stayed out of it, but MacReedy owed a big debt to the patsy they were sending to the electric chair in a week. And he would have stayed out of it, if he’d known what his chances were of coming out alive …

He has been known by countless names and terrifying deeds throughout the lands of mankind-thief, magic wielder, swordsman, assassin, adventurer. But chief among those names and perhaps the most dangerous of his personae is that of Nightfall, a man-or perhaps the legendary demon himself-gifted with unique powers which any sorcerer would kill to possess.

Yet though Nightfall has always escaped his pursuers by moving on to new realms, new identities, and new enterprises, even the cleverest of beings must occasionally slip. And when this master of the night finally falls prey to a royal trap, he finds the consequences beyond even his ability to evade. Bound by sorcery and oath to guard and guide a young prince on his quest, Nightfall will need every trick and talent at his command to keep both himself and his idealistic young charge from death at the hands of unknown betrayers.

After rescuing Marianne Cadogan from an incoming tide on a lonely and forgotten part of Britain’s coast, ex-con Ryan O’Donnell is cornered into helping her escape a supposedly abusive father to reach the safety of her mother.

Too late, he finds himself compromised, the subject of a trans-European manhunt while he struggles to deliver the child and prove his motives pure/

The deeper in he gets, the more trapped he will become.

When Shadow received a message that Shylar needed his aid, the master thief and his three companions, Allerum – now an elf swordsman but once a twentieth century American soldier – and the two Dragonmages, Silme and Astryd, immediately set out for Shadow’s hometown of Cullinsberg. For Shylar, town madam and high in the thieves’ underground, was all the family Shadow had. But Cullinsberg was an armed trap waiting to close on the four adventurers. For they had slain the Chaos Dragon, and in so doing unleashed a force of pure Chaos, a force which then bonded with the single greatest surviving Dragonmage. Driven by Chaos-induced madness, this master of powers far beyond those of Silme and Astryd would now use anyone and any means to take his deadly revenge on those four warriors of Law.

His father wrongly executed when he was a child, Taziar Medakan had turned to stealing for his survival. He was the Shadow Climber, skilled at remaining one with the shadows, unseen in the midst of his enemies. And he stole not for profit, but for the challenge of it, donating most of his booty to those in need. But though Taz could defeat any trap, he wasn’t prepared for the treachery of Ilyrian, a cunning politician ready to sacrifice the Shadow Climber to gain power himself. So Taz found himself in the baron’s dreaded dungeons from which even a master thief’s only escape might be death! There he met Moonbear, a prince among barbarians, a swordsman beyond compare, and Taz’s last hope for salvation. Together the two sought their pathway to freedom. But it was a pathway that would set a whole kingdom on their trail in a pursuit led by Ilyrian and a Dragonrank sorcerer on his own mission of magical revenge.

Tamison is a flightless falcon: a worthless man who cannot even work to feed his family. Once a miner like the rest of his family, he lost his nerve after a cave-in trapped him and killed his father and brother. Discovering his wife and children have vanished, stolen away by the Brotherhood, he renames himself in their image: Sueldan. A ratty stray dog joins him, then a fortune teller with a magical ability, a guard whose own sister was lost to the Brotherhood and a mysterious conman who knows more than he¿s letting on. But if Tamison/Sueldan is to rescue them from slavery, he must discover his own wings and take flight.
A man with nothing left to lose must discover his own hidden strengths if he is to save all those he holds dear

The third book of The Eternal Champion trilogy.

John Daker is the Eternal Champion, trapped in a dimensionless plane outside of time, defender and destroyer of justice, a hero whose quest for justice leads only further into darkness.

Haunted by the memories of too many battles waged during countless lifetimes, he searches for the beautiful Ermizhad – and for the key that will allow him to step off the wheel of infinite incarnations. His is a voyage on a dark ship piloted by a blind helmsman, through the slave stalls of the Cannibal Ghost Women and the tunnels of doom to a monstrous confrontation with the Evil that could plunge the world into the final night of oblivion.

Sweetly are the secrets told
wrapt in crystal,
limned in gold . . .

On a planet of barren beauty near the edge of the civilized galaxy, two religions are practiced. Both sects worship the same goddess – the Triumphantes in joy and splendour, the Fideles in solemnity and selflessness. As different as day and night, sun and shadow, joy and grief, the two sects are now bound together in death . . .

A serial killer is stalking the priestesses, killing first a Triumphante, then a Fidele, in turn. Six women are now dead, and the planetary authorities are at a loss. Enter Interfed Agent Cowen Drake. A cunning professional, he must immerse himself in an unfamiliar world of stark spirituality to catch the killer. A world that will trap him between opulence and sacrifice, between duty and desire and between two extraordinary women – one who could become the killer’s ultimate victim . . .

In a galactic culture that extends from quasi-Utopian worlds like New Alexandria to vermin-infested slums like Old Earth, the Star-Pilots that link the cosmos are the great heroes of the day, and Grainger has become a legend in his own lifetime. The atmosphere of Mormyr is so dense that the surface is unreachable, which made it the ideal place for the alien Gallacellans to hide an ancient spaceship. Now they want it back. Grainger refuses, but when the Hooded Swan answers a mayday call, Grainger and his crew are trapped by a madman, who forces them to pursue the salvage anyway. Success will mean Grainger’s freedom from Titus Charlot, owner of the Hooded Swan; failure will mean the death of the inhabitants of an entire planet. And then the Gallacellans appear!

The Vampyre: A Tale is based on a fragment written by Lord Byron in 1816 during a gathering of author friends who, trapped inside due to bad weather, decided to write ghost stories. It was the first vampire story in English prose, and as such had a wide-ranging influence, almost single-handedly creating the now-popular image of the vampire as an aristocratic seducer.

‘Suddenly out of the darkness, out of the night, there swooped something with a swish like an aeroplane. The whole group of us were covered for an instant by a canopy of leathery wings, and I had a momentary vision of a long, snake-like neck, a fierce, red, greedy eye, and a great snapping beak, filled, to my amazement, with little, gleaming teeth.’

Desperate for adventure, journalist Ed Malone joins a scientific expedition to the South American jungle led by the larger than life figure of Professor Challenger. But you should be careful what you wish for. After climbing to the summit of a mysterious plateau in the Amazon rainforest the explorers find themselves trapped in a world lost in time, inhabited by carnivorous dinosaurs, giant fish-lizards and murderous ape-men.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s thrilling tale of adventure and crypto-zoology became a template for an industry of creature features that came in its wake.

HAUNTED BY THE PAST, JOHN PETERSEN WOULD GIVE ANYTHING TO TURN BACK THE CLOCK…OR WOULD HE?

When Lightning blasts off without him, Second Officer John Petersen is finished as far as Trans-Galactic Clippers are concerned. Branded a deserter, stranded on Carinthia and desperate for a job, there are very few places left to go. The Rim Runners would have him – they’ll have anyone who’s still warm and can flash some kind of certificate. But there may be a less than unpleasant alternative…

Private detective Steve Vynalek needs Petersen. Has a fanatical scientist on the planet Wenceslaus really found a way to beat the time travel problem, a way to bring back yesterday? The Presidents of Carinthia and Vynalek are convinced that Petersen is the only man for the job. In the airless wastes of Wenceslaus, Petersen finds himself reliving the past, trapped in a terrible cycle of familiarity – a cycle that only he can break.

THE DEMONS HAD TO STOP JOHN BRAVAIS

His secret assignment was simply – to save mankind from the savage dog-like ‘things’ that used their hands like men. Yet an unknown number of apparently ‘human’ beings were against him too.

First transformed by surgery into a superman, John Bravais probes ever more deeply into the secret nightmare world of the ‘things’. At last, when only his mind remains – trapped in a vast robot war machine on the moon – only by an immense act of will-power can he give humanity a future.

A Wall Street trader leaves the bulls and bears – and comes face-to-face with hungrier dinosaurs. A Roaring ’20s gangster gets roughed up – by real cavemen. A pioneer hitches up his covered wagon on the Oregon Trail – and winds up in a modern shopping mall. And Roger Tyson, who thought the space-time continuum had finally settled down to normal, is flung helplessly from the distant past to the far future, and back again.

Superbeings from the end of time are struggling for control of the universe with aliens from another galaxy. And if a few random humans get caught in one of their time gates, they don’t much care. So Roger and his friends find themselves facing everyone from the cast of the original Mutiny on the Bounty to real pirates of the Spanish Main in a wild quest to their own time and bring everything back to insanity as usual…

ABE LINCOLN IN AFRICA?

He was seen – and photographed – in a Tunisian bazaar. And an ancient Spanish galleon, fully crewed with ancient Spaniard, was taken in tow off Tampa by the Coast Guard…and a few luckless people found themselves living the same day over and over and over…

Something was badly wrong with Time – but Roger Tyson didn’t know it until he met the lovely agent from elsewhen and started on a mad chase through the dimensions, plagued by a motley bunch of temporal castaways, and pursued hotly by Oob the Rhox!

‘TWAS BORING IN ARTESIA

…or so thought Sir Lafayette O’Leary, ex-craftsman from Earth, and now seemingly ex-interdimensional swashbuckler extraordinaire as well. His battles were all won, his dragons all slain and life was just the same boring round of riches, royal hunts and regatas. Boring, boring, boring; until he walked past the azalia…

Suddenly Artesia was gone, and O’Leary was trapped in Melange, a world of giants and pirates, karate-chopping hags and electronic flying carpets, a world where goons and harlots are the spitting images (literally!) of his own aristocratic Artesian associates. And because they think he’s his double, lots of his new friends want O’Leary dead.

Unless he can get through the interdimensional gate and find the continuum path back home, O’Leary’s life will never be boring again. Just short.