Search Results for: beauty

One morning in 1995, Jonah Ransom, clothier, is going about his everyday business when he meets a beautiful demon in his storecupboard. At around the same time, the King of England with his entire court, vanishes abruptly before the astonished eyes of his public as he prepares to attend Mass. Even in an England where the Reformation failed, and magic has become a commonplace tool of the all-powerful Catholic Church, such events could be described as unusual.

Before long, it is apparent that something very different is abroad – magic ceases to work in its accustomed way, instability and political unrest threaten to disrupt a society used to order and rigid social obedience. Eventually the Pope is sufficiently perturbed to send one of his beloved (by him) and dreaded (by the public in general) Sicarii to investigate the disturbance. Arriving late on the scene, Adam (he has no other name), Sicarii extraordinaire, sometime spy, sometime security officer, sometime assassin, discovers a mystifying, malicious power at work, a power that can twist not only souls, but his entire world inside out.

A beautiful woman – with no memory – and the people who claim to know her may not have her best interests at heart…

‘Vera Caspary is an expert at suspense and suspicion’ New York Times

Kate and Allan Royce are driving home from a party in Westport, Connecticut one night when they see a girl in a beautiful but muddied dress wandering in the road and stop to pick her up. She is suffering from amnesia, so they name her Elizabeth X and take her into their home while the police try to establish her identity.

They are left in peace, until first a couple claim her as their daughter and then a psychiatrist arrives to say that she has escaped from his clinic. What does seem certain is that she is the child of wealthy parents.

But who really is Elizabeth X, and what has happened to her?

A beautiful Cornish coastal village is the setting for a highly sinister conspiracy involving a kidnapped baby, mysterious monks and an almost irresistible new perfume…

‘Joan Aiken’s triumph with this genre is that she does it so much better than others’ New York Times Book Review

Martha works for an advertising agency, filming a TV commercial on location on the stunning Cornish coast. The client is the eccentric owner of a chemicals company that has invented a new, almost irresistible perfume, and Martha is in charge of shooting the romantic ads – unfortunately starring his beautiful but highly manipulative daughter-in-law.

Before long, Martha finds herself embroiled in the conspiracy over the perfume’s true origin – to say nothing of a kidnapped baby, sinister monks, her own long-since vanished ex-husband and a series of exploding soup cans. And what of her own floundering love life…?

‘Witty and acute … a nice romantic thriller’ Punch

A dark tale of the destructive power of love and obsession from ‘The supreme master of suspense’ NEW YORK TIMES

‘The father of the modern suspense story’ LA TIMES

When Louis Durand first meets his bride-to-be after a months-long courtship by mail, he’s shocked that she doesn’t match the photographs sent with her correspondence. But Durand has not exactly been truthful, either, concealing the details of his wealth. Mostly, he feels fortunate she is so much more beautiful than he expected.

Soon after they marry, however, he becomes increasingly convinced that the woman in his life is not the same woman with whom he exchanged letters – and then she suddenly disappears with his fortune.

Alone and desperate, Louis becomes obsessed with finding Julia and bringing her to justice – but it is only when he finally tracks her down that the nightmare truly begins…

A group of strangers are forced to take shelter in a remote house – and then the murders begin…

‘A new Ellery Queen book has always been something to look forward to’ Agatha Christie

‘Ellery Queen is the American detective novel’ Anthony Boucher

When Ellery Queen and his father take shelter from wildfires in an isolated manor, they don’t expect their detective skills to be required. But the next morning a body is discovered. The suspects include a society beauty, a highly secretive valet, and a pair of conjoined twins.

When another murder follows, and the only clue is a torn playing card, Queen must use all his powers of deduction to unpick a web of alibis, motives and evidence, before the killer strikes again.

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.

Charles Rathlyn has everything – a benefactress, a rich wife and a comfortable country life. But while riding to hounds one day he takes a terrible spill, and, on reviving, finds himself looking into a pair of beautiful brown eyes. He knows he has fallen once again . . . in love.

But are his fall and those soft brown eyes linked to another fall – the fatal plunge his wife, Kate takes over the banister to the parquet floor below, supposedly while sleepwalking?

Did she fall or was she pushed? Kate Rathlyn’s death begins an investigation into blackmail and murder among the sporting set.

Unexpectedly sent to Moscow to manage his firm’s stand at a world fair, Cristopher Battle feels that he may not be up to the job. Then his chairman is murdered and, after the discovery of a second body, Battle is convinced that the Russian Security Police are trying to kill him.

Fearful of violence, Battle goes on the run – and becomes emotionally entangled with a beautiful Russian woman who creates an entirely fresh set of problems . . .

The Dashkova Ballet Company – a visiting Russian troupe led by Inspector Gautier’s charming Soviet mistress, Princess Sophia – is about to become the toast of Paris when the famous Judge Prudhomme is found with a bullet in his heart in a squalid hotel room. And when the corpse of the beautiful prima ballerina Nicola Stepanova turns up equally cold, the company’s once sparkling future pales considerably.

Gautier has to solve the murders to save the troupe and salvage his great romance – all of which he undertakes with his customary élan, éclat and joie de vivre.

Dogeron Kelly, a walking bomb of a man, suddenly appears in elegant – and not so elegant – New York circles with a suitcase containing a quarter of a million dollars. There are rumours, but no one is certain where he, or the money, came from. It seems he is out to claim his inheritance – or is there something else he is after?

Sharon Cass, for instance: a bright and beautiful girl with some very special gifts for the right man.

Whatever it is, Dog Kelly isn’t telling, but his search takes in a baronial old family manor, the higher reaches of international illegal trafficking, paid mobsters and the rich and famous …

The third of the Tiger Mann adventures calls on the master of counter-espionage to act as unofficial bodyguard to a visiting Arab king.

The American government is courting the visiting ruler for reasons of oil. The Communists want the king, too – but they’d prefer him dead. So Tiger has to outwit the principal Far East Communist agent, counteract Communist propaganda being fed to the king, entertain the monarch’s beautiful fiancé …

… and still keep his lovely Rondine happy.

Deep was back in town after a twenty-five-year exile – to inherit an empire and avenge a death. He and Bennett had made the inheritance pact when they were kids; they had known that even New York was too small for them to share and so they had tossed a coin to determine who would stay and who would build his organisation in another town. Deep had lost and gone.

But now Bennett has been murdered in his own home and Deep is ready to prove he’s strong enough to take over. Deep wants Bennett’s killer, the others want Bennett’s job. And all too many of them – including the beautiful Irish – want Deep dead . . .

Everyone thought Mike Hammer was dead, shot in a drugs war battle on the docks of New York. But now he’s back from a stay in Florida, and in deeper trouble than ever before. He has the slaying of Marcus Dooley, an old army buddy, to pay back with interest – and two generations of a powerful Mafia family to beat at their own bloody games. Plus, just before he died Dooley revealed to Hammer that there’s a missing cache of $89 billion to find – before the bad guys get their hands on it, and their sights on Hammer.

And to really complicate matters, the Feds have dealt themselves into the action, eager to beat everybody to the loot.

With two rock-hard fists, a well-oiled .45, his beautiful secretary, Velda, and a miracle, Hammer might just make it out of this one alive …

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?

Seven years of hitting the hard stuff have taken it out of PI Mike Hammer. That’s how long it’s been since he gave his beloved secretary the job from which she never returned.

Now he’s back with a vengeance. Velda is alive, if only he can reach her in time. But New York’s toughest investigator still has friends in the right places. And his long-neglected .45 is definitely one of those.

Piecing together the puzzling deaths of a senator, a newsagent and an FBI man, Hammer finds the missing link in a murderous network of international spies. One that turns out to be Spillane’s kind of beauty – and who knows a good deal more than she should.

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.

It began with the murder of a beautiful woman, the adulterous wife of a mild-mannered professor. Then a corrupt cop was gunned down in a phone booth.

After that, the killer who called himself Raptor moved through a list of players, playboys and mobsters from Palm Springs to Minnesota. With each hit came a phone call to San Francisco organised crime investigator Dante Stagnoro, and a disguised, taunting voice daring Stagnoro to stop him. Raptor is a killer like no other Stagnoro has ever pursued.

And the final truth of his death trip – a truth about man, nature and God – will not be revealed until the last victim is claimed.

Once Eddie Dain had a life: a beautiful wife, a happy young son and a thriving business catching soft-core bad guys by computer. Then he hung onto an odd-looking case and made a mysterious enemy – one whose calling cards were two men with shotguns.

Now Eddie is reborn – as a dead man. Known by the single name of Dain, he pumps his body and his psyche as he follows a trail of sweaty white-collar crime to the steamy Louisiana bayous. Here, in this torrid landscape, is a woman on the run who can lead him to what he wants more than anything: the man who took everything from him …

After eight hard years in San Quentin prison, Runyan is out and ready to lead a quiet life – an honest life. But certain people have been planning for the day of his release – people who desperately want the two million dollars in diamonds Runyan was carrying just before he went to jail … Like the insurance investigator who arranged his parole. A beautiful woman who wants him alive. The unknown killer who definitely wants him dead.

Runyan goes to recover the diamonds from where he has stashed them, so he can buy his way out … but the diamonds are gone. Now he must pull another robbery – something he swore never to repeat – and use the proceeds to stay alive.

On a Hollywood studio lot, a dancing bear – a Gypsy in a fur suit – does a little sly pickpocketing. In San Francisco, Daniel Kearny Associates are waging a campaign to repossess twenty-seven classic cars from people who are creatively determined to keep them. And in a fortress in the Big Sur wilderness, a rich man vows to steal a collectors’ item. Soon the bear, DKA and the millionaire entangle in a twisted plot of betrayal and murder.

When the dancing bear is killed, the police start searching for his beautiful wife, Yana. But Yana is eluding everyone – DKA included – and working a grift of her own.

Meanwhile a helicopter is headed for Big Sur, carrying the greatest scam of all.

Jose Aragon is a ranch hand between jobs. Looking and smelling just like a piece of border-town trash, he’s hoping the Chenoweth Hotel, El Paso, will let him in for a much-needed shower, a room and a couple of cold beers.

But a beautiful and wealthy woman with golden-brown hair, Dulcinda Farrar, mistakes him for a local, and offers him money to pick up a package for her. Jose goes along for the ride, but his playfulness is about to get him in trouble.

Just minutes after he’s picked up the package, it disappears, and suddenly he has the border’s toughest thugs on his tail. Jose knows how to round up a herd of cattle, but a classy blonde is going to prove more difficult . . . and more dangerous.

One-way ticket to death . . .?

‘Hughes is the master we keep turning to’ Sara Paretsky

‘The tension and terror of Dread Journey are such that few will be able to lay the book down unfinished’ New York Times

‘Cornell Woolrich meets Agatha Christie’ Publishers Weekly

‘Superbly done’ Washington Post

In the four years since she arrived in Los Angeles, Kitten Agnew has become a star. Not all by herself, of course; though beautiful and talented, Kitten would be lost without her director, the acclaimed and powerful Vivien Spender.

But Spender is a dangerous man. Kit knows that, and has heard all the stories – of discarded stars that have ended up in a chorus line, or a sanatorium, or worse.

Spender knows that Kit knows, and wouldn’t dare destroy her glittering career. But he may be willing to kill her . . .

On a train from LA to Chicago, Kit makes a discovery that could have her fighting not just for her career, but for her life.

Who killed Louie Lepetino?

Was it Barby, with her silvery sheen of hair, looking like a top model and acting like a woman madly in love?

Or the beautiful Toni, who is hiding some strange secrets?

Could it be Otto, a handsome refugee, nicknamed Blue Eyes and an object of attraction for Barby?

Kit, a cop’s son, has come back to New York to track down his best buddy’s killer. It had to be murder: Louie wasn’t the suicidal type. One person stands in the way of his revenge – The Wobblefoot, his unseen nemesis from two terrible years spent in captivity during the Spanish Civil War. He is watching. One false step will mean curtains for Kit. But Kit is willing to take any risk for a friend – even murder in cold blood.

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 . . .