Search Results for: trapped

An American diplomat, trapped in a world he never made…

At first Brion Bayard was relieved to discover that his kidnappers were very apologetic and very British. Then he learned that they were not from Earth…

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.

Pel Brown has troubles in his basement. But it’s not water leaking in – it’s magic. Sword-carrying barbarians are spilling through, demanding that Pel help them defeat Shadow, a dark force taking over their world.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, a spaceship has crashed in Amy Jewell’s backyard, and the aliens want Amy’s help against the Shadow seeking to conquer their world. When Pel and Amy go through the basement portal into the world of magic, the Shadow attacks and traps them inside.

Now Pel and Amy find themselves entangled in escapades that will make them into heroes … or corpses.

The Gliding Wraith: If he was really asleep in his chair why did he glide across the street?

Twilight Ancestor: Her evil power held the tribe in terror … only the stranger dared to oppose her.

The Man Who Never Smiled: The stranger never parted his lips, as though afraid of what he would reveal.

Fangs in the Night: Something evil and dangerous lurked in the shadows below the window.

An Eye for an Eye: He had forgotten about the hare in the trap … until his own life was in danger.

The Colony on Rigel IV had been founded seven hundred years earlier but for the past six centuries, they had been forced to exist on the bottoms of the great oceans of the planet, kept there by the tremendously potent weapons of the alien star-race which had swept down out of space and wiped them off the land masses of the new world.

Kerrel Stevens found himself trapped in one of the Shells, unable to remember how he came to be there, aware only that for some strange reason, he held the secret which could release these people from their terrible existence, but that his memory and all of the knowledge which could help in the struggle against the aliens had been erased from his mind.

In the Shells, he finds what he is seeking – others like himself, different from the people who had become used to this life on the sea bottom, where science had gradually given way to superstition and witchcraft – and this chance meeting provides the key which unlocked the amnesia in his mind. For him, it opened the doorway to the surface of this strange, impossible planet, plunging him breathlessly towards the stars- and the unbelievable secret which spelt destruction for the alien star-race.

George Sanford has a gift for guessing right the first time and very little else going for him. When Ahmed and his other friends graduate school and got jobs in The City, George finds himself left behind. He never wanted to sign his name, let alone fill out applications and reports.

Then George bumps into the Rescue Squad and is swept up in the excitement of a hunt for a trapped girl. It is George who finds her with his special talent for guessing right … and it is George who suddenly becomes the pride of the Rescue Squad. With a friend running interference for him with the bureaucracy, George lands a place for himself as a “consultant” – and the more he works, the more his strange talents grow.

With each success George begins to change. Using his special talents to rescue a computer technician from a gang of revolutionaries, he finds he has become a pawn in a mad iconoclastic game. A game where his own talents pose the greatest threat to The City – and the world!

Earth’s last hope?

The Arc, a being of immense power, trapped within a continuum too small, fights for its freedom. Its monumental struggle will touch a few select individuals on Earth – and in doing so, change their lives forever. The Arc may also be the last hope for humanity’s survival.

Author’s Note: The volumes of this series can each be read independently of the others. The feature that unifies them is their individual observations of science fiction’s sub-genre: “space opera,” which the editors David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer define as “colorful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character and plot action, and usually set in the relatively distant future, and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone. It often deals with war, piracy, military virtues, and very large-scale action, large stakes.”

Six stories from Phillip Mann, taken from his long and varied career.

Includes stories from the Out of Time Cafe, a very unusual refuge from reality. It attracts people afflicted with a deep malaise. It offers what seems from the outside to be sanctuary, but it can be subversive too, for on entering the cafe, one gives up a certain amount of independence, and before one knows it one is trapped. There is no escape… save one: the lift which services the cellars descends… but no one who has used the lift has ever returned. On a brighter note, the cafe has a will of its own, and travels different dimensions with ease and every journey is a new beginning.

Also featured are The Gospel According to Mickey Mouse, originally produced as a hugely successful radio play; Maestro;Lux in Tenebris, a cautionary tale about a medieval stonemason’s encounter with an anachronism and the effect it has on his culture; and An Old Fashioned Story, wherein Jody is having problems with his Sythno companion Elizabeth, who head butted him without warning. He is attempting to repair her. Then Elizabeth and her Sythno Joseph from next door drop in…

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.

Francis Simnel was a pathetic old man who lived in a strange world of his own, a world of puppets and marionettes. His sister Agnes was a demoness incarnate, a female fiend in human form, a relentless, ruthless, driving force urging the old man to a macabre destiny. There was something different about Simnel’s Puppets. They had personality and a realism that was uncanny. They bore a sinister resemblance to the newly-dead.

What began as the wildest and most improbable suspicion, crystallised into near certainty in the mind of Josephine Starr. She began asking questions, and the Satanists scented danger. She fell into a trap that had been set with diabolical cunning. Her life was balanced on a razor edge, with all the macabre resources of the Black Magicians weighing against her.

Nadia was a girl who had everything except real happiness. She was tired of trying to buy it, and she had just about matured to the point where she knew that nothing was to be gained by deliberately hunting happiness.

She saw the strange Asian in a Paris street market. His inscrutable features were dominated by a pair of mysterious eyes. He was incredible old.

Without knowing why, Nadia purchased a curiously carved wooden casket. The casket contained an oriental miniature, a scroll of curious characters and a phial of glowing blue elixir.

Nadia consulted a number of experts about these strange objects, but not until a psychometric boy handled them did she begin to guess at the terrible truth. She was trapped in a vortex of evil power and 20th-century science seemed unable to save her…

The ties of home were strong. In a few years man gets attached to bricks and mortar, and scenery. In a hundred years roots are so deep that no one wants to tear them up. In a thousand years it is quite unthinkable. In a million years, only a lunatic would want to leave…
Then came the alien, presenting an impossible choice… Humanity must leave the Earth – or die! Behind them was everything they had known. In front of them, an unknown to-morrow.
Which were the greater – the hazards remaining or the dangers of the infinite void ahead?
Could they trust the alien?
He said there was another world, a safe world, that would be a new home – but was it all a trap?
There were dangers out there. The dangers of a population confined in ships for a half a life-time; the dangers of cosmic radiation; danger of attacks by the ‘Others’!
Only men of the highest courage and the greatest integrity could hope to survive in the raw, searing savagery of the unknown…

Psychology recognises the existence of multiple personalities inhabiting the same mind. To the ancients such strange transformations were evidence of demonic possession, and even today there are reputable experts who would not rule out the possibility that something else can take over a human mind.

To the victim of such personality change there are long periods for which the memory cannot account, periods during which the secret enemy is in charge.

Walter Hamilton was a perfectly normal, well-adjusted man in early middle age when strange gaps in his memory first began to worry him. At first he tried to ignore the tell-tale symptoms of schizophrenia but other clues presented themselves.

The face in the crowd scene on a telerecorded film vaguely familiar. It wasn’t his fave… but there were undeniable similarities. A picture in a newspaper worried him more…

Before he could extricate himself he was trapped in a tangled web of interwoven personalities, unable to find himself, powerless to break away from the sinister complications of his two other lives.

“If you run round the church seven times in an anti-clockwise direction, you’ll wake the Seven Sleepers. Then, if you look through the keyhole of the church door, you’ll see the Devil walking up the aisle towards you…”

When David Wisher’s mother inherits a house in the peaceful Yorkshire village of Longbarrow, David feels he is coming home. For he’s seen the house in his dreams. And when he eventually arrives in Longbarrow, he finds a place touched by the stories and beliefs of the past. There’s old Jonas Dyer, whose mystical visions have driven him to the verge of madness; Mr Toot, who uses magic to cure all ills; the little men, too small to be human, who are said to come out of the river; and Black Shuck, a ghostly dog with glowing eyes, whose appearance heralds approaching death. Most extraordinary of all, there’s the legend of the Seven Sleepers, defeated in an ancient battle and trapped throughout the centuries, their evil powers dormant.

Redcap, Uther, Vinegar Tom, Gerennius, Shuck, Pyewackett and Cullen. Together they spread terror, pestilence and destruction. And now, because of David’s unwitting actions, they are stirring once more…

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 young artist is searching for the truth about her past – but does she really want to know…?

With an introduction by A J Finn, bestselling author of THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW

Superb classic crime from ‘the mistress of day-lit terror!’ NEW YORK TIMES

‘Psychologically rich, intricately plotted and full of dark surprises’ Megan Abbott

When Amanda Garth was born, a nearly-disastrous mix-up caused the hospital to briefly hand her over to the prestigious Garrison family instead of to her birth parents. The error was quickly fixed, Amanda was never told, and the secret was forgotten for twenty-three years … until her aunt thoughtlessly revealed it in casual conversation.

But what if the real accident was Amanda being returned to the wrong parents? After all, she seems much more like the painter Tobias Garrison. Amanda is determined to discover the truth within her aunt’s bizarre anecdote, but soon is trapped in a web of lies, suspicions and deadly secrets …

A small village is the scene of two brutal murders – and everyone is under suspicion.
A classic of crime fiction


The village of Pennycross is the scene of two brutal child murders within a few months. The villagers’ lives are monitored by a team of police, led by Chief Inspector Hunter, as they watch and wait, piecing together the clues to trap the killer before another life is lost.

Inspector Hunter comes to learn much about the inhabitants of Pennycross – who resort to their own drastic action when a suspicious character is seen running through the woods…

They took her identity – they wanted her life – but they couldn’t take her spirit.
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

When Julia Ross, a jobless and penniless young woman, is sent to meet a prospective employer, she is oblivious to the trap that awaits her. As she rings the bell to 30 Henriques Square, the door opens on a London household ruled by a woman dressed in red with murderous intentions. For Julia is exactly what she needs – someone with no family, no connections, who will not be missed…

Two days later, Julia awakes in a different house in different clothes and with a new identity. And no one will believe anything she says.

But the woman in red hadn’t reckoned on a secret admirer even Julia didn’t know she had – and the indefatigable sleuth Arthur Crook.

Gill Burke is the toughest cop in New York, and he gets results. That is, until the mob decide he’s too dangerous and pull strings, seeing him dishonourably removed from the force.

But Gill is still the only cop who knows how the mob operate, and when their top people start to be put out of business – violently – Gill is persuaded by a DA, who’s running scared, to put his badge back on and find the killer.

Gill’s investigation has hardly begun when he becomes involved with Helen, who is on the syndicate’s payroll, and Helga, a Swedish blonde. But even with these diversions, Gill finds himself trapped in a bloody vendetta, pitted against a faceless assassin whose aim is destruction …

Anna, a young Englishwoman, is drawn to visit Russia partly out of interest, to see for herself the ‘proletarian experiment’, and partly by Otto, a glamorous but faithless newspaper editor.

With nothing left now to keep her in Russia, she prepares to leave and return to England. But she has not reckoned with the environment of that closed nation, which has already begun to work on her nerves. She wonders if she will ever get out, and when delay follows delay, it seems as if she is losing her grip, hysteria threatening.

Anna is trapped, dazed by the terrifying atmosphere of suspicion and maddening delaying tactics of the Soviet Union …

Spring fever has hit Luis Mendoza, both on the job and at home. But it hasn’t erased the LAPD’s endless caseload of bizarre crimes and difficult cases.

‘Dapper Dan’, the rapist and murderer whose dashing looks and easy charm give him the perfect ploy to trap his pretty victims; a stickup artist who has found a foolproof weapon: a ferocious Doberman; a gruesome double homicide-suicide with a weird twist; a senator’s ‘natural’ death that suddenly doesn’t appear so natural – all add up to a month of murder most strange, and Mendoza knows it’s time to finally clean house.

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

It was strictly a duty call and Pat Carroll wasn’t looking forward to it one bit. But she was in Wales and her fiance’s family lived nearby. He was dead now, killed in an accident, and Pat felt that since she was so close to his family’s home she should pay her respects to the woman who would have been her mother-in-law. It would be a bore, but it was the least she could do. And, besides, it was only for a day or two. But the day or two dragged on and Pat found herself the helpless prisoner of a fanatic madwoman. Locked in a hideous room, she was trapped in an infinite eternity of a waking nightmare . . .

‘A great suspense shocker in the icy horror tradition of Psycho‘ Boston Herald

Mystery writer Brendan Monroe is tormented by the fear that his flamboyant fictional detective P. I. Roy Barron has come to life. Is the author losing his mind? Or is someone making it seem that way?

When Barron is found dead, Sergeant Dan Valentine of the Santa Monica police focuses his investigation on the local chapter of the Mystery Writers of America, where he faces the fascinating challenge of trying to trap a murderer whose profession is devising diabolical plots.

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

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

Sergeant Ivor Maddox of the Wilcox Street precinct has more crime on his hands than even he is accustomed to: murders, con-men, a dismembered corpse, runaway teenagers and a multiple rapist.

To catch the rapist, whose victims are always attractive and respectable women, Maddox persuades his true love, policewoman Sue Carstairs, to bait the trap . . .