Search Results for: beauty

Deepwood Grange is no longer what it was in the thirties: the beautiful old house has been converted into luxury apartments, and the original family is long gone. But on a rare visit to her godmother, solicitor Rosa Epton finds herself quite entertained by the eccentric residents of the other flats. Until, that is, one of them turns up dead in the chimney of an empty apartment, and her godmother becomes a prime suspect.

Then her godmother disappears, and Rosa’s involvement becomes even more personal …

Steve Manson’s magazine dealt in corruption: he attacked the rich, the powerful and the famous – and he made enemies. In a job like that, you couldn’t afford to have dirty secrets of your own. With the whole town itching for you to make a slip, it was like living in a goldfish bowl.

But Steve had lived clean – until his beautiful, extravagant wife was caught shoplifting, and suddenly he was up to his neck in the dirtiest secrets of all – blackmail and murder.

Escaping the religious tyranny of a 31st-century Earth by a fluke assignment to the planet of Ozagen, linguist Hal Yarrow found that the worst of Earth had followed him – Pornsen, his personal Guardian Angel, vigilant for any evidence of sin or wrong thinking.

Conditioned by a lifetime of submission, Yarrow would have accepted Pornsen’s constant spying as an unpleasant necessity, had it not been for Jeanette, the beautiful but dangerously different fugitive he found hiding in the ancient ruins…

The barbarians in their long ships waiting at the edge of the Galaxy waited for the ancient Terran Empire to fall, while two struggled to save it: ex-Admiral McCormac, forced to rebel against a corrupt Emperor, and Starship Commander Flandry, the brilliant young officer who served the Imperium even as he scorned it.

Trapped between them was the woman they both loved, but couldn’t share: the beautiful Kathryn – whose single word could decide the fate of a billion suns.

Behold the horned demon of the snows…
Who calls himself Klittichorn and schemes o destroy all Akahlar. With the power of the changewinds he can control the mighty storms that alter man and creature alike.

Beware his evil minions…
Who seek the beautiful Storm Princess in the Kudaan Wastes – lands that teem with frightful monsters and Storm Riders from the Inner Hells.

Run like the wind…
Or stand to fight with magic. For the fate not just of this but of all worlds is in the balance.

The corridors of time connect the ages to each other. Through them, one can travel backwards and forwards over the history of man. But rival factions have waged war for centuries: the gates onto time are bitterly fought for and jealously guarded. Malcolm Lockridge is a modern American swept into the past by the beautiful and mysterious Storm Darroway, the lithe, glowing Goddess of her people. Malcolm is an ordinary man of today, caught up in a time war beyond his comprehension.

Jake Cutter is reluctantly learning how to be a Necroscope – how to use the Möbius continuum to travel instantaneously from place to place, how to talk to the dead – but the dead don’t like him much. It seems Jake’s got a hitchhiker in his mind, a dead vampire named Korath. But since Korath holds the key to the Möbius equations, Jake can’t just kick him out…

In Australia, Jake helped E-Branch destroy the aerie of the mind-master, Nephran Malinari, one of the trio of Great Vampires who came to Earth from the vampire world. Malinari escaped and went to ground with the hideously beautiful Lady Vavara. Vavara has taken over a holy monastery on a beautiful Greek island and turned the nuns into most unholy creatures of fearsome appetites for all things carnal.

But Jake wants revenge against the Italian mobsters who killed the woman he loved. As far as he’s concerned, E-Branch can search for Malinari, Vavara, and the metamorphic Lord Szwart without him until he’s satisfied his own bloodlust. But it seems vampire-hunting is truly Jake’s job now – the men he’s trying to kill aren’t men at all but vampires hidden for two generations in human guise!

To defeat them, Jake will need every weapon in Necroscope’s arsenal, including the power to call the unsleeping dead out of their mouldering graves…

George Fraser, a lonely, timid fellow, lives in a dream world of gangsters, gunfights and beautiful women. He begins to imagine himself as the toughest gangster of them all to bolster up his feeling of inferiority. But George boasts once too often – and to the wrong person.

From that moment on, harmless George is caught up in a deadly net of intrigue, and finds himself committing the deadliest act of all …

‘An intelligent and harshly revealing piece of work with not a little serious penetration and power’ The Times

Defrauding an insurance company is not an unusual crime, but the way Stephen Venner planned to do it was not only unusual but macabre. But then Stephen Venner was a totally selfish and amoral man, and with the push of blackmail behind him, and the strength of his wife to support him, there was little he would stop at.

Ross MacLaren didn’t know that, and allowed himself to be lured to Portugal where he, Stephen and the beautiful but repressed Emma play out the last tense act of at least one of their three lives.

When a small-time clerk insures his life for $50,000 and then suddenly dies ten days later, it doesn’t take a genius to work out something suspicious is going on. So when Maddox, the top man in the insurance business, finds out, he is determined to get to the bottom of it. And this means trouble for someone. In fact, it means trouble for the beautiful, auburn-haired Meg Barlowe, a woman with a serious past.

‘The thriller maestro of the generation’ Manchester Evening News

Dillon Bryant, a successful engineer, is off on assignment after finishing his honeymoon. But news from home comes that his new bride, Laura, a beautiful woman whom he had met only weeks before proposing marriage, is in deep trouble.

By the time he gets to her, Laura has been murdered. Filled with grief and rage, he cannot leave it up to the police to solve the case – he wants his own kind of revenge against the killer …

His name was Robert Coffin, but the Maori natives called him Iron Hair. A civilized man in the raw wilderness of New Zealand, he had come to forge a nation at the end of the world – and discovered a magical world beyond his strangest dreams.

A world of astonishing beauty and breathtaking adventure, the natives called it the Land of the Long White Cloud. And Robert Coffin was about to enter its greatest mystery, cast in the wondrous spell of a shaman whose magic would change his life forever…

All his life Manvar has had a dream. One day, he will escape the harshly primitive, blizzard-torn lands of the north. He will follow the paths of the Ancients and see for himself the fabled lands of the south: lands without ice and snow and perpetual night; lands of warmth and light, where life is easy and comfortable within walled cities of incredible beauty. Manvar follows his dream, but finds it hollow. Life in the wondrous city of Delphos is not the paradise it seemed.

The Algorans. masters of time travel, had lost control of the time channels. In despair, they stood helplessly by as the barbarian hordes of the devastating Bakori were unleashed on the universe. In the little town of Midland, U.S.A., Joe Simmons worked feverishly to assemble the only device that had a chance to stop them. He knew that success depended on a beautiful Algoran woman, Tamarina, yet he didn’t even know if she would re-appear! This whole disaster was his fault.

Suppose… a man who was blasted into our time from the future arrived without any clothes?
Suppose… a man who craved the love of beautiful women got too much of it?
Suppose… a conscientious young realtor refused to rent a floor in an office building because it didn’t exist?
On such faintly horrifying, delightfully absurd speculations are some of these stories founded. With a keen satiric touch William Tenn uses his insight into contemporary life as a springboard into an absolutely believable, if slightly wacky, future.

The inhabitants of Terra nicknamed them “Angels”. They were exquisitely beautiful, these shimmering, fiery creatures , highly intelligent and playful. Yet they were awesome, too, considering that the youngest were four million years old, and the oldest had probably participated in the First Cause, which had given birth to the whole universe. To young space cadet Jack Loftus fell the overwhelming responsibility of negotiating a treaty with them – a treaty which could mean the life or death of earth and mankind.

The Virgin of Zesh

In which a beautiful woman, a mind-drunk poet, and a super-sober scientist must fight for their lives on a planet occupied by weird cultists from the Earth and bizarre varieties of humanoids from all over the galaxy.

The Wheels of If

In which a young lawyer is trapped in a sense-shattering shuttle among alternative worlds of possibility, and lands at last in an America that has been colonised by Norsemen and divided between two great warring empires – one white, one Indian.

In February 1915 the Great War is still raging on the Western Front but back in Westminster a policeman is shot dead. At first, Hardcastle believes the murderer to have been a disturbed burglar. But then, there is another killing – the beautiful wife of a Royal Flying Corps Officer – on whose doorstep the first victim was killed.

As enquiries continue, attention focuses on an antiquarian bookseller, a struggling artist, a reporter and even officers of the Royal Flying Corps. Hardcastle must uncover a tangle of lies, emotions and betrayals before he can get to the truth.

Slim Callaghan had been hired by beautiful Cynthis Meraulton to stop her cousins getting her step-father’s money. But when the old man is murdered, the only suspect with no alibi and a giant motive is Cynthis.

Slim always played his cases the way they came, but it turned out the Meraulton job had more twists than a hangman’s rope.

‘Slim Callaghan’s quick wit and knowledge of rough and tumble place him in the top ranks of private eyes. What a man!’ New York Times Book Review

A castle, a deserted village, and murder in the Scottish Highlands

When child psychologist and US Naval Intelligence officer Lieutenant Peter Dunbar takes on a secret mission in the Scottish Highlands at the end of World War II, he finds himself drawn into the lives of a troubled boy and his beautiful young cousin.

But why does Johnny Stockton refuse to explain why he keeps running away from his comfortable home? And how might the answer be entangled with the mystery of an escaped German prisoner and a dying man’s message?

In the northern reaches of the Empire of Elabon, Gerin, called the Fox, battled to save his domain from destruction by the warlike Trokmoi and their wizard-leader, Balamung.Assisted by the giant Van of the Strong Arm, Gerin prepared to make the hazardous journey to the city of Elabon, there to enlist the aid of a sorcerer more powerful than the Tokmoi masge.Pursued by demons, beset by bloodthirsty nobles, and encumbered by the presence of the beautiful Elise whom Gerin had sworn to protect, the comrades encountered greater dangers than either had ever known.

The tetraploids, giant men and women created by genetic experiment, only wanted to live their lives in peace, but they had to live in the world of the jealous ‘normals’ who gathered in screaming mobs with murder in their hearts.

Sena, the heroine of this remarkable science fiction novel, is a tetraploid giantess whose youth would last more than a century, who looked with wonder at the toy bridges and houses of normal men and women who regarded her with fear and revulsion. Beautiful, defenceless Sena was the first of a new race, but would she be allowed to live . . . ?

It is the far future. Earth is beautifully planned efficiently run and happily united. It is the world that dreamers have envisioned since the beginning of time – no slums, no crime, no poverty, no disease, no shortages. But still, it is a world with problems – people have become so lazy, so self-satisfied, that human progress has all but ceased. To make matters worse, addicts of the newly-developed “programmed dreams” are increasing at an enormous rate.

Only a few individuals understand the far-reaching consequences of these problems; only a few realize that the human race is destroying itself.

From The SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal sample introduction to Sheri S. Tepper, the author of several resoundingly acclaimed novels, including Beauty, which was voted Best Fantasy Novel of the Year by readers of Locus. She is one of the few writers to have titles in both the SF and Fantasy Masterworks lists. This omnibus contains three of her acclaimed SF novels: After Long Silence, Shadow’s End and Six Moon Dance.