Search Results for: death-into-life

A bomber is killed in battle along with all of his companions; but something wakes in his dying, which is first a spirit bomber-crew, then the spirit of all those killed in battle, then the spirit of man, the cosmos and the Universal Spirit.

The Conversationalist sat among the boxes, trying to interest the friends in history. “The Compulsory Transfer Act was passed in 2056,” he was saying, “with the dual object of reducing the birthrate and preventing the wastage of valuable minds through death. It might fairly be said to have changed the face of civilisation.”

“I’ll say!” rasped one of the friends.

“If it wasn’t for the Act, I’d have been in a physical body now, instead of being in this damned box!”

“If it wasn’t for the Act, you’d have been dead this last hundred and fifty years,” pointed out the Conversationalist.

“You’ve probably has four physical bodies by now, a total of one hundred and sixty years of active life. And just twenty years in a box. That’s not bad!”

The problem of immortality had been solved in the 21st century: when you reached forty, your brain was transferred to the head of a six-month-old infant. In that way, you obtained another forty years of life, until you could do it all over again. But nobody could have foreseen the dramatic manner in which the birthrate would fall – resulting in a growing waiting list for host bodies, and the creation of Friendship Boxes to house the brains of those who waited. The Friendship Boxes proliferated: a grumbling section of the community, a constant source of embarrassment to every politician…Until the day it all came to a head.

There lived on Mars, 500,000 years ago, a race so intelligent, so superior to ours, that they knew the secret of everlasting life. They chose instead-to have one man come back to life exactly 500,000 years after his death!

His reappearance in the Galaxy World was enough to set planet against planet, ideology against ideology, man against man, and life against death.

The Humanx Commonwealth: Book Five.

He was smart. He was good. He was backed by the Commonwealth’s best equipment. So what could possibly go wrong?

‘In the midst of life…’ thought Evan Orgel.

A whole lot of life. Alien life-form upon alien life-form, crawling, floating, wriggling, darting and oozing. The entire unexplored surface of the planet Prism was unimaginably alive.

‘…we are in death.’

His death. His Mobile Hostile World suit – the very latest, state-of-the-art, off-world protection gear – had just failed. Attacked in just about the only way its proud makers hadn’t thought of.

So there he lay, a hermit crab trapped in his own armour, while the myriad alien life-forms of prism crawled, floated, wriggled, darted and oozed about him, getting ready to open him up like a tin of upmarket cat food.

Evan Orgell was full of misery.

Kirk Hammond was a man alone.

He had been chosen to ride in the first manned satellite to go out around the Moon and back to Earth. But when the satellite failed to orbit properly, it went on past the Moon into the vastness of outer space, and a whole world watched helplessly as he was borne toward an unthinkably lonely death.

Yet destiny decreed that Kirk Hammond should suffer, not death but a pseudo-death. And he awoke from it to find that a hundred centuries had passed and that the space age which had begun in the 20th Century had now grown into a vast galactic civilization that had carried the sons of Earth to countless stars and worlds. But, unexpectedly, the conquest of space had changed Man himself, and the human race had become not one but several species.

Hammond was plunged into the climactic struggle between the new races. And in his quest with a desperate band for the mysterious Star of Life that was the key to the struggle, in his relations with the strange and beautiful Thayn Marden who was not a human woman, in his odyssey through the mighty suns and earthly worlds of the galaxy, a man of the 20th Century found himself facing the dangers of the great space age which he himself helped pioneer.

They called him the Life-Lord and the deadly milk-white elixir that his syndicate pushed was called Lifewater.

As promised, Lifewater brought youth to the old. Women who were losing their once cherished beauty, men who were losing their strength gave their life’s savings for a vial of the magic substance. What they did not know was that the powerful brew could cause sudden and violent death.

As the fatal youth epidemic spreads throughout the Solar System, Captain Future battles with time and danger to save his fellow beings from doom – only to find himself trapped in a master fiend’s plot to conquer the solar system.

CAPTAIN FUTURE FACES FIERY SOLAR DEATH

It was ten o’clock, solar time, when disaster struck. At exactly the same moment, gravium mines on Mercury, Mars and Saturn were totally destroyed by an unidentified army. Without gravium – the life-blood of interplanetary civilization – the system would perish.

Meanwhile, Captain Future struggled on the floor of a moving space craft, his arms and legs bound by steel ropes. He did not know why he’d been captured – only that the system was in grave danger – that he was needed…

As Captain Future was plunged through space, towards a deadly orb of flaming gases – the raging inferno of the sun – he planned his daring escape. It was to be the most dangerous gamble of his life.

When Meg Frazer’s actress mother is killed in a Hollywood accident, nineteen-year-old Meg finds it hard to adapt to life in Britain with her cold, distant father . . . and at night she is haunted by a strange dream of a face which she is sure has something to do with her past.

Meg follows a clue from the past to a remote Cornish Village. There she becomes involved in a nightmare web of terror and suspense . . . She meets a young man called Toby, who is different from her staid fiancé, but how is he wrapped up in the secrets she is unravelling?

First written as a short suspense story in the 1960’s, this YA romantic thriller went on to win an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Joan Aiken in 1972

“A cunning thriller romance, with the ever popular suspense and terror… good holiday reading for the not so bookish” Elaine Moss, Times

“Young, beautiful, talented, engaged to a handsome and successful stockbroker, she should have been content to stay in London. But irresistibly Meg was drawn back to Penlaggen…back into a forgotten past… And waiting for her was a man who exercised a strange and fearful power over her…and a secret that led her ever closer to danger” Fiction Database

“The suspense is wonderfully sustained and leads to a terrifying climax, and there is even a satisfying love story” Publisher’s Weekly

“A dream has haunted nineteen-year-old Meg for ten years, ever since her mother’s death. Now engaged and determined to exorcise the dream before her marriage, Meg drives to the remote Cornwall village of Penleggen where the author’s gift for direful scene and gripping incident takes control…the physical danger mounts as Meg’s psychological mystery is solved and a literate thriller gathers momentum” Kirkus review

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

In the fourth title of Anthony Price’s gripping spy series, British Intelligence officer David Audley slips away to Italy without authorisation, taking his wife with him. Immediately the suspicion arises that he may have defected, and the head of Italian security is also interested in his arrival, particularly as it has flushed from cover a rogue communist.

But Audley has his own reasons for leaving Britain, in an investigation that becomes a matter of life or death.

Mark Girland’s problems begin when a beautiful blonde is found lying on a dark deserted quai in Paris – the initials of the top Chinese atomic scientist tattooed on her upper thigh.

The girl is suffering from acute amnesia. Girland, desperate for money, is ordered by the CIA to get any information he can – by posing as her husband.

But the appeal of the mission begins to wear thin when Girland discovers he has involved himself in a life and death race to extract vital atomic secrets from the scientist’s beautiful mistress.

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.

‘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

When Norda Allison saw her husband-to-be slap his young son, she immediately called off the wedding. Now she is terrified. Her ex-fiancé has beaten up her new boyfriend, and anonymous newspaper clippings are flooding her mailbox – articles graphically depicting what jilted men do to the women who leave them.

Then Norda’s life takes an even darker turn. It begins with a barking dog, a child’s scream, a gun shot, and the discovery of a dead body – and takes a further twist when Norda is arrested and charged with brutal murder. Now only the brilliant courtroom strategist Perry Mason stands between Norda and a sentence of certain death …

In the darkness of World War Two, a murderer strikes…
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

‘No author is more skilled at making a good story seem brilliant’ Sunday Express

‘He stood very still for a moment. He said he had a sixth sense that warned him of danger. The fact that more murderous attempts had been made on his life did not affect his belief in his instinct. He said that in his profession a man had to harden himself to take risks. That was what his clients paid him for, “and,” he would add, “they pay damn well.” ‘

Death in the Blackout takes place in the heart of World War II and opens as a bomb drops uncomfortably close to detective Arthur Crook’s London flat, setting off a mysterious chain of events.

A chilling day of murder in the midst of post-World War II austerity
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

In the spring of 1946, the redoubtable Lady Bate arrives at The Downs, built by the eccentric Colonel Anstruther years before. The aftermath of war has forced the colonel’s daughter to take in paying guests, but only Lady Bate knows the secret of Mrs Anstruther’s past life and the mystery behind her hermit-like existence.

When Lady Bate is found dead, a chance remark puts detective Arthur Crook on the right track, which he follows – at risk to his life.

She lost her memory – now her life is at risk.
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

When lawyer-detective Arthur Crook bumped into a woman called Barbara on the parade at Beachampton it became apparent she had no idea who she was. She had been closely involved in the sudden deaths of two rich old ladies but something had instinctively prevented her from going to the police.

Now Barbara finds herself under grave suspicion and fighting for her life. But will Arthur Crook be able to untangle the mystery?

‘No author is more skilled at making a good story seem brilliant’ Sunday Express

Murder on the train – and the killer is looking for the next victim…
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club


On a fast train to London, Arthur Crook meets trouble with a capital T. During the journey one passenger disappears and is subsequently found dead beside the line. The killer has killed before and is preparing to kill again.

Soon, a girl in desperate circumstances finds herself at the hands of a criminal organisation – will Crook now step in as her salvation in this life-and-death chase?

May Forbes came four nights a week to feed the wild cats on Broomstick Common. That was how she happened to glimpse a masked man with a spade – and she’s now in fear for her life.

Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club


May leaves the common and ends up at the Mettlesome Horse, where irascible lawyer, Arthur Crook, is drinking at the bar. So when the body of eighteen-year-old Linda Myers is found buried on the Common, Crook discovers a number of people who might want the girl dead.

Then May Forbes leaves for work one lunchtime and does not reappear . . .

A movie star whose fame is on the decline – but did he take his own life or did someone else have an axe to grind?
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

Eight years ago René Tessier was at the height of his fame. Now the once-celebrated film star frequents less reputable Parisian cafés. That is until young producer Julian Lane plans to star Tessier in his latest production with the promise of millions.

Tessier is headed to London. But the washed-up old man spends less than 24 hours in a dingy Soho hotel before he is found dead. Was it suicide or murder? And who could have wanted Tessier dead?

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.

A hurricane of terrifying intensity is looming over Florida. Along a state highway, a handful of foolhardy souls trying to outrun the storm are forced to seek shelter in an abandoned house.

Thrown together by nothing more than chance, this disparate bunch of misfits includes an undercover agent seeking revenge for a personal tragedy, a burgeoning criminal in over his head, a beautiful young widow trying to start over, and a businessman whose life’s work is crumbling before his eyes. Their refuge from the awesome power of nature becomes a sort of grand and grisly hotel – especially once the invisible hand of flying death descends.

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 …

Jerry Jamison wants out: out of a sloppy marriage, a dull job and the empty suburban rat race. Once Jerry had a beautiful bride and a good salary at her old man’s successful business – that was before his wife turned into a lush. Before the business started to go to pieces. And before the lazy afternoon when Vince Biskay, an old army buddy, rings his doorbell and makes an intriguing proposition. Vince promises to bring excitement into Jerry’s life – and money – but this is a plan that leaves only death and destruction in its wake.

Girzel Graeme looked on her father as the embodiment of all that was wise and good. But now her father lay in a hospital hovering between life and death, and the evil that struck him down reached out to claim his daughter.

What terrifying secret did her father’s past conceal? What horrifying act could he have committed? And what nameless danger threatened his daughter as she followed the lure of a fabulous jewel into a labyrinth of deceit, on the trail of a mysterious man who could save her faith in her father – or destroy both it and her.