Search Results for: in-the-beginning

Set in an imaginative alternate version of modern Los Angeles, “Earthquake Weather” begins with the murder of the Fisher King of the West, Scott Crane. His body is taken to the magically protected home of the Sullivans, and their 13-year-old adopted son, Koot, a boy destined to be the next Fisher King. But for now, he must aid in reuniting Scott Crane’s body and spirit, and restoring him to life.

Young Charles Dexter Ward is fascinated by the history of Joseph Curwen, his wizard ancestor of the 17th century. Curwen was notorious for haunting graveyards, practicing alchemy – and never aging! Ward can’t help his fixation: he, himself, looks just like Curwen. In an attempt to duplicate his ancestor’s cabbalistic feats, he resurrects the fearsome Curwen . . . and then the true horror begins!

Composer and dancer Anna van Tuyl is working on her masterpiece, a work she has titled “The Rose”. Her progress is stymied, however, when her body begins suddenly to change. For no knowable reason, she begins to grow strange protuberances, her body warping more day by day. Desperate to complete her symphony before her life becomes subsumed by these growths, she encounters a painter suffering from the same affliction.
Ruy Jacques is an artist, famed for his works and full of inspiration despite his condition. His wife is a scientist, a woman of logic, working to build the perfect weapon. While Anna at first believes she has found a saviour and kindred spirit in Ruy, she instead finds herself in the middle of a tense battle between art and science, with building jealousy and resentment.
Is the true goal the completion of her work, or the possibility of a cure? Is it better to seek immortality through their art, or a full life through science?

Award-winning author Charles Harness’ lost classic was rediscovered by Michael Moorcock more than a decade after it was first published, and champsioned by him to great acclaim. IT was awarded the Retro-Hugo award in 2004.

Marion is lost on a dark and lonely road; she’s tired and hungry and afraid. She thinks she’s dreaming when she sees a motel sign shining in the darkness: Bates Motel. But for Marion the nightmare is just beginning …

To most people Psycho needs no introduction, but although Alfred Hitchcock’s film was largely faithful to the book, in the novel itself you will find a story more nuanced and – if possible – even darker.

While hunting in the English countryside, Ben Selby stumbles upon the murdered body of Peter Gaston, a friend of some twenty years earlier. As they had both been agents in a clandestine organisation, he is convinced that Peter was killed to prevent their meeting and sets out to question his widow.

What she tells him is the beginning of a perilous and exasperating search for something buried long ago on a remote island headland.

Held captive in a dark room in New York State, a young woman is at the mercy of a killer. As guide-dog trainer Joanna finds herself fighting her attraction to blind sculptor Jack Donovan she also begins to feel dangerously unwelcome. Meanwhile, another object of beauty is being stalked …

‘Hilary Norman specialises in creepy thrillers and this one is just as gripping as her previous work’ Woman’s Own

Space Captain Tabitha Jute is the hero of the solar system. She has defeated the Capellan overlords and liberated the gigantic alien spaceship known as Plenty. Now begins the first human voyage to another star -a journey that will take the strange ship and her motley complement of passengers and crew far into unknown reaches of time and space.

Volume two of the Tabitha Jute sf trilogy: sequel to TAKE BACK PLENTY

Triton, the outermost moon of Neptune, is a world of absolute freedom. A world where every wish can be fulfilled. But for Bron Helstrom, one of society’s elite, life has lost its meaning.

In a world of endless possibilities, Bron begins an odyssey to find the object of his elusive desire. An odyssey that will take him to earth, involve him in political intrigue and transform him completely from the man he once was.

Thomas Covenant returns unwillingly to a Land ravaged by four thousand years of Lord Foul’s pestilence. Under the evil Sunbane, the people of the Land submit to cruel sacrifices; the rulers of Revelstone are corrupt, the fields and forests laid waste; the healing Earth-power impotent.

Accompanied by a woman from his own world, Covenant begins a new quest to save the Land from the forces that have all but destroyed it.

First there was the end.



After weeks of running from pursuers, Gene and Stacy finally found refuge on an isolated island.



But around them the island changed – and so did they.



Each time they awoke from sleep, they lived a different life in a different time. And the farther back they went, the more they lost their anchor to their own world. When at last they were found, the people they had become no longer recognised their pursuers.



And that was the beginning.

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

Things begin to heat up in the Los Angeles Police Department when Lieutenant Luis Mendoza’s stolid and good-natured colleague Sergeant Higgins is kidnapped by three dangerous escaped prisoners.

A manhunt is launched but no one expects Higgins to be seen alive again. Can Mendoza’s team ever recover, or is the officer’s return just around the corner?

When Cook’s newborn baby entered the world, he had nothing but hope for its future. However, it was immediately clear that this was no ordinary child – it’s murderous screams seemed a dark portent. As it grew, things only got worse, and the child’s mother began to despair. The new parents hoped their child would grow out of it, but soon came to realise that its inauspicious beginnings were only a sign of things to come.

Rob Merlin was the best engineer who had ever lived. That was why “The King of Space” had to have him for the most spectacular construction project ever – even though Rob was a potentially fatal threat to his power…


Thus begins a breakthrough novel by the former President of the American Astronautical Society, about an idea whose time has come: a shimmering bridge between Earth and space that mankind will climb to the stars!

Deep inside a palace on the edge of the world, the orphan Nepenthe pores over books in the royal library, translating their languages and learning their secrets. At sixteen, she knows little of the outside world. But when a young mage gives Nepenthe a book that has defied translation – a book written in a language of thorns – it speaks to Nepenthe’s soul, and becomes her secret obsession. As the words escape the brambles they reveal themselves – and begin to reveal Nepenthe’s destiny …

When car trouble forces private detective John Bryant to spend the night in the small village of Foxall, he is immediately struck by the antagonism and secrecy of the locals. Why was there so much hostility and fear? And why were the streets deserted after dark?

Next morning the murdered body of Andrew Woodside is discovered on a nearby hill, beginning an investigation that takes Bryant to the dingy industrial town of Castington, where an atmosphere of jealousy, suspicion and intrigue prevails . . .

Millie Trent, the toast – or scandal, according to some – of a West Country sailing resort, is found drowned. The verdict is accidental death, although no one seems to know when or why she ended up in the sea.

Paul Mycroft, despite his determination not to let the affair spoil his family holiday, finds himself drawn into an enquiry that begins by providing a startling diversity of views on Millie’s character and ends by involving him in unexpected danger.

A murder has taken place on stage and it seems that one of three people must be guilty. The crime was committed in full view of the audience and players, but no one can say whom the murderer is. There appear to be no clues, the suspects are all well trained in the art of dissimulation, and all three deny any knowledge of the crime.

It looks like the perfect murder, until Dr Basil Willing, psychiatrist-sleuth, begins to investigate the peculiar behaviour of a pet canary and a housefly.

‘We have an agent in East Germany whom we wish to get out …’

There was nothing unusual about these words to the urbane British Intelligence chief who spoke them. He might have been discussing the weather. But to Martin Ainsworth it was the beginning of a nightmare journey from Munich to Istanbul.

They had picked Martin for the job. They had planned everything. They had made it all very simple. But they hadn’t counted on everything going wrong …

For over 100 years, the machine called Colligatarch had ruled the Earth. Its predictions of the future have proved so accurate that humans accepted its recommendations as the best course of action – until a young engineer in Phoenix begins to travel without authorization, enter secret places, assume aliases, and display super-human feats of strength. Is it because he has fallen in love? Or has he instead fallen into an interplanetary plot?

As the Hukk maneuver on the fringes of Terran Space, the Terran Navy is about to begin the most important “game” in the history of the human race. For too many years the Hukk have been pushing, pushing at humanity’s frontiers, testing our strength and our courage – and finding both wanting. Now the Terran Hardliners have had enough. They will use the coming war games to start a real war, even if it requires a revolution at home to clear the way!

From the author of the world-famous Travis McGee thrillers, thirteen of John D. MacDonald’s earliest and best crime and mystery stories brought together in one volume.

Written at the beginning of his career and originally published in American magazines only, these stories give us a taste of MacDonald’s early achievements and show the range of his skill in the realm of mystery and thriller writing.

‘Sharp, taut, realistic … an impressive selection’ Times

Professor Alistair Dirke thought himself a reasonable man – he could scarcely acknowledge the suspicion that was beginning to grow in his mind every time he saw his wife Rose with Paul Eckleston . . . Paul seemed to be there very often these days.

Yet soon a more terrible suspicion was to grow and spread through the little community of Rollway, where the Dirkes had lived in peace with their neighbours. A valuable collection of coins goes missing and then a man is murdered.

Past worlds almost too strange to describe, three men hurtle into the dark uncharted mystery of space. Their task: to make contact with the Hegemony of Malis, the unknown force that has been watching the Solar System since before the beginning of recorded history. On their success or failure depends the future of the entire Earth.

Join them as they accelerate on Haertel drive towards the stunning core of the Hegemony itself in James Blish’s masterpiece of the time to come, Mission to the Heart Stars.

Before there was an England, there was Roma Mater . . .

Before King Arthur, there was the King of Ys . . .

In the wild and eldritch time between the fall of Rome and the rise of our own age, the kingdom of Ys was ruled by the magic of The Nine and the might of the king, their husband. How the Nine conspired with their gods to bring him to them, though he belonged to Mithras and to Rome, is only the beginning of an enchanted saga that weaves together Celtic myth with distant memories of Roman Britain – and adds a magic of its own.