Search Results for: city

The ruins of the Well-Built City and the village of Wenau are not all the world has to offer-there is also the Beyond, a dark land between life and death, populated by flying demons, restless ghosts, invisible terrors, and ravenous trees. Cast out by the people of Wenau after finding a cure for their sickness, former physiognomist Cley sets out to brave the dark mountains and seas of the Beyond in order to find the woman he doomed on his quest to destroy the Well-Built City. As Cley journeys deeper into the unknown, he is accompanied by an invisible companion-the demon Misrix, who is searching for his own humanity.

After beholding the destruction of the Well-Built City, physiognomist Cley is now a simple healer seeking peace and atonement in the happy village of survivors. When the town falls into a deadly sleeping sickness, Cley must make a dangerous trip to the ruins of City – now beset by mechanical birds and werewolves – to seek out an antidote.

The evil Master Below is still alive, but an accidental exposure to the sickness that he created has put him into a coma. With the help of Below’s adopted demon son, found in the wreckage of the laboratory, Cley ventures into the mind and intricate memories of Below to search for a cure.

Cley will encounter wonders and dangers undreamed of in the second installment of this classic trilogy.

In the Well-Built City, Master Drachton Below’s power is absolute, and he will not hesitate to use it. His primary method of control is through his physiognomists, who are trained to read a person’s face and body, perceiving that person’s past and secrets-and even events yet to come. These seers are the judges and jury. Now Drachton has found something that could extend his reign for eternity: a fruit that bestows immortality. To investigate its whereabouts, Below sends cold, collected physiognomist Cley to the remote mining town of Anamasobia. One at a time Cley interrogates the townspeople, performing his usual fact finding without issue. That is, until he meets the beautiful and bright Arla, who harbors a secret that could potentially turn Cley’s world upside down-and topple the Well-Built City itself.

A Kafkaesque journey into the unknown, The Physiognomy is an award-winning trip through a land where the line between reality and imagination is constantly blurred.

The One-Eyed Jack and the Suicide King: personifications of the city of Las Vegas-its history, mystery, mystical power, and heart . . .

When the Suicide King vanishes-possibly killed-in the middle of a magic-rights turf war started by the avatars of Los Angeles, a notorious fictional assassin, and the mutilated ghost of Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, the King’s partner, the One-Eyed Jack, must seek the aid of a bizarre band of legendary and undead allies: the ghosts of Doc Holliday and John Henry the steel-driving man; the echoes of several imaginary super spies, decades displaced in time; and a vampire named Tribute, who bears a striking resemblance to a certain long-lost icon of popular music.

All stories are true, but some stories are truer than others.

Several years ago, Matthew the Magician ended an age-old war. It only cost him everything – and everyone – he knew and loved. Turning against his mentor, Jane Andraste, in the realm of Faerie left him physically crippled and his power shattered.

But Matthew remains the protector of New York City. So when he finds a young woman brutally murdered by a Fae creature, he must bring her killer to justice before Jane uses the crime to justify more war-and before he confronts an even larger threat in the greatest Adversary of all . . .

Harborough is a large seaside town on the north-east coast of England, whose local paper, the Harborough Post, mounts a campaign against the city’s funfairs. Soon the proprietor of the newspaper, Herbert Litmore, gets two anonymous threatening letters, which he takes to the Chief Constable. Then Litmore’s ten-year-old son, Ben, is kidnapped on his way home from the city Youth Club.

Another letter to Litmore follows, demanding a £10,000 ransom . . .

A search is begun to locate Litmore’s mysterious enemy, and the police investigation starts to unravel a web of greed, jealousy, adultery and blackmail that has formed beneath Harborough’s quiet surface.

Laura Chance, wife of Borford’s prospective Lord Mayor, becomes infatuated with her young hairdresser, Pierre, who resembles her dead son. Pierre is utterly selfish, unscrupulous and sees in the wealthy, middle-aged woman a dupe who can give him some of the material possessions he covets.

Despite her innate intelligence, Laura deceives herself that their relationship has a basis of real affection. But the trouble really starts when James Chance discovers what is happening and determines to ruin Pierre by using his influence in the city. Pierre, in his turn, plans a violent revenge . . .

PI Mike Hammer is moving through the dark streets of New York City when he hears a child’s terrible scream. When he finds the child, he also discovers the naked body of a beautiful woman who has been beaten to death with a whip.

So begins a complicated and baffling case, involving the deaths of other women and a newspaper reporter, who was tracking aspects of the case as well as following the lives of the city’s prostitutes. Mike uncovers a sadistic ring of international figures, where women risk their lives for a fortune in an attempt to pull themselves out of despair.

Can Mike, with the help of his beloved Velda, break the ring that is crushing the lives of vulnerable women?

It’s 1953, and Pierce Duncan leaves college an innocent. Seeking the freedom of the road, Dunc sets off to see America. His road trip brings strange, fateful encounters: with a savage Georgia chain gang; with a killer on a lonely Texas road; and with the darker side of the Las Vegas fight game. Finally, Dunc reaches San Francisco, a city seething with the unexpected.

In the backstreets and along the freight lines, Dunc meets beautiful women, dangerous men . . . and murder. In California, home of the lost and the outcast, he joins up with the hard-nosed head of a private investigation agency, and his life changes for ever.

A violence-marked love letter to a time in America now lost, Cases is as vivid as a lightning storm over a deserted highway, as unforgettable as a first kiss, as haunting as a dead woman’s eyes.

Alone in New York City, Lizanne Steffasson comes face to face with reality when her dream of acting on Broadway collapses.

Now she just needs to pay her rent. So she answers an unusual ad in the paper, for ‘a beautiful girl. One not afraid to look on danger’s bright face’.

Lizanne is neither beautiful nor fearless, yet she is certainly about to look danger in the face. A New York estate lawyer wants her help to track down a young man who has vanished into the wilds of the city on the eve of inheriting a vast sum of money from his billionaire late father, a Swedish man known as the Cross-Eyed Bear.

It turns out that Lizanne is the perfect person for the job, as she knows more about the story than her employer has bargained for . . .

The weather in LA hasn’t been living up to its sunny reputation – the murder of an unwanted newborn and the assault of a twelve-year-old girl don’t make things pretty for the family-man cop, especially with a new baby at home.

The most puzzling crime of all is the murder of a respectable middle-aged woman from Indianapolis. A string of hit-and-runs involving a Model A Ford, and a bizarre mugger with a penchant for footwear all add up to another high-voltage month in the city of the stars for Lieutenant Luis Mendoza.

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

An early June hot spell takes its toll as it fuels a wave of bloody and bizarre crimes for Luis Mendoza of the LAPD. Grisliest by far is the psycho they call the werewolf, who gets his kicks by killing hookers before vanishing into the dark. A gorgeous teenage redhead holds up liquor stores with her boyfriend. And to make the caseload really interesting, ‘Jack the Stripper’ hits the city’s gas stations – stealing cash and his victim’s clothes . . .

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

The body of a woman from respectable, conservative Glendale is found stashed under a ramshackle house in the middle of the inner city. Detective Luis Mendoza marks the rising heat by the crime and violence raging through the sun-baked streets of Los Angeles – and it’s going to be a hot one . . .

A thug is shot to death. A mysterious string of robberies continues unabated . . . all without a clue. But the family-man cop knows that where there’s heat there’s fire – and a cold trail to nowhere promises to turn into a red-hot path leading straight to the damned.

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

It’s January in Los Angeles, and the city is experiencing a heatwave. Lieutenant Luis Mendoza’s homicide squad is depleted by the murder of one its members, and the crime-rate is rising as high as the temperature . . .

‘Intelligent, humane, well written and continuously absorbing’ Sunday Times

The third book in the New York Times bestselling Longmire series, featuring Sheriff Walt Longmire.

Walt Longmire has been the Sheriff in Wyoming’s Absaroka County for 25 years, but nothing could have prepared him for the savage attack on his daughter, Cady, a Philadelphia lawyer who has unwittingly become embroiled in a political cover-up.

As Walt and his best friend, Henry Standing Bear, scour the city for clues, he gets help from his deputy Victoria Moretti and her family of Philly police. But Longmire wasn’t born yesterday. He’s willing to pull out all the stops to find Cady’s attacker and show the big city that this old-timer has a few moves left in his saddlebag of tricks.

‘Johnson’s pacing is tight and his dialogue snaps’ Entertainment Weekly

A midnight hit-and-run accident on a mountain road … a tragic fatality … the discovery of the missing car … and Doug Selby, District Attorney of Madison City, finds himself not only up against a most involved case but in the hottest spot of his career.

Featuring an absorbing cast of supporting characters, including genial Sheriff Rex Brandon, the sly, suave A.B. Carr, a strange couple from New Orleans who should be cooperative but aren’t, and Inez Stapleton, Madison City’s only woman lawyer, who finds the going tough when she tries to be both friend and foe of Doug Selby.

Douglas Selby, the ambitious young District Attorney of the territory around Madison City, had up before him a young man guilty of embezzling a comparatively small sum of money which he had spent gambling. Selby could have locked him up – and perhaps ruined his life. But he wanted to find the how and the why of this otherwise law-abiding young man’s gambling.

Selby’s investigations led him to a hit-and-run motorcycle accident, to blackmail, and to the doorstep of DeWitt Stapleton, the local big-wig, who ran things in that part of the country by and for himself.

A reporter, a young mother and a shadowy band of former schoolmates play out a drama to an end none of them anticipated.

Still reeling from the miscarriage that ended her marriage, columnist Kate Turner, is lashing out at anyone in her wake. Equally miserable is Laurie Moon, who defied her parents by carrying her precious son Sam to term only to place him at Rudolf Mann House because he has Down’s syndrome.

One winter afternoon Kate is escaping the city to lick her wounds. While just miles away, Laurie counts the hours till she sees Sam. Neither knows that a game has been created for them. A killing game.

Jake Woods, ex-cop and criminal justice professor, is pulled into danger when investigating the disappearance of a friend’s son. Attempting to help, he uncovers a similar case in New York City, where Lydia Johanssen is going through hell because her sixteen-year-old son has vanished. Each disappeared after receiving an anonymous gift: ‘Limbo’, a violent, bestselling computer game.

Jake identifies with Lydia’s plight. But his involvement brings great peril. This is the work of a kidnapper for whom the margins between reality and fantasy have blurred beyond recognition. To him, it’s all just a game …

‘Spine-chilling’ Publishing News

‘If I Should Die is a page turner thriller with great characters and literally heart-stopping suspense – I loved it!’ Mary Higgins Clark

In cities all over the USA people whose lives have just been saved by a medical miracle are dying mysterious and violent deaths. Chicago policeman Joe Duvall realises his sister’s life may be at risk, and a desperate race against time begins.

‘An exciting and compelling piece of storytelling. Fast moving and full of suspense’ Publishing News

In Queens, in the middle of a brightly lit street, a woman is savagely stabbed to death. The victim, Anna Grace, was a nurse devoted to helping others. But no one tries to help her on the last night of her life, even as she screams.

Homicide cop Miranda Torres vows to bring the killer to justice. Then a series of mob hits in the city takes the case in an astonishing new direction. And when Miranda discovers why Anna was murdered, she must catch a killer who will soon hold her life in his hands.

It’s 1927 and New Orleans-born novelist Jeff Caldwell is called back to that most colourful of American cities by a frantic letter from Dave Hobart, a boyhood friend.

Dave owns a fabulous and foreboding 16th-century English manor house moved from England to New Orleans at the whim of his eccentric grandfather. But Delys Hall has been nicknamed Deadly Hall. Some terrible things have happened there – including murder – and there are rumours of hidden treasure and a ghost.

‘The plot’s the thing … it is a sort of gleeful game’ New York Times Book Review

Two petrol bombs thrown on the Cakewalk promenade, a sports reporter and his bike rammed off a cliff, a policeman thrown through a plate-glass display window in the city centre and left to die. All this is ‘a quiet summer weekend’ in the dockland city of Canton and its Art Deco resort town of Ocean Beach.

Chief Inspector Sam Hoskins links the investigation of these crimes, but political chicanery hampers him on both sides: on the left is ambitious young Eve Ricard riding to national fame and fortune on ‘women’s issues, media bias, and insensitive policing’; to the right is the monstrously corrupt councillor and aged razor-boy Carmel Cooney, with his girls and clubs and rackets …

‘Strong on city life and the interplay between policemen and local politics’ Independent

When Detective Tom Lepski shot down the runaway killer on his beat in Paradise City, he unleashed a chain of events that would involve two sets of criminals and a honeymoon couple in one of the most exciting nights any of them had seen for a long time.

Wilbur Warrenton and his beautiful, grasping wife Maria are on their honeymoon in the luxurious Spanish Bay Hotel when their penthouse suite is the scene of a collision between a gang of jewel thieves intent on stealing the famous Warrenton diamonds and a gang of ransom-hungry Cubans – all determined to get exactly what they want – at any cost …