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Diplomatic corps man Piers Hunt watches the glittering lights of Broadway from his Hotel Astor room. The German girl’s mocking voice returns to his mind yet again: ‘More melodrama, Piers?’ Yes: this time it’s ‘more melodrama’, but with a vengeance.

In New York incognito, only Piers knows that his superior, Samuel Anstruther, has been murdered, possibly to get him out of the way of a plan to withdraw a police force that governs post-Second World War Germany. Rumours abound that the Germans might be allowed free reign once again.

Piers is a man of peace, but he may have to get his hands dirty if he doesn’t want to be murdered – before telling the world what Anstruther knew . . .

Continuing the saga begun in the Renshai trilogy and the Renshai Chronicles, this story follows three sons of Kevral Tainharsdatter: Saviar Ra-khirsson, Subikahn Taesson, and Calistin Ra-khirrsson.
Bearn and her allies, including the Renshai, are faced with pirates, the vanguard of an army sent from a continent across the sea. Prejudice against the Renshai is growing rapidly, fueled by their ancient enemies in the Northlands. After a questionable battle, King Griff of Bearn is reluctantly forced to banish the Renshai from the Westlands.
Shunned by Westerners and hunted by Northmen, the Renshai will face many trials, while Saviar, Subikahn, and Calistin must each take his own stand in a world where there are no longer any safe havens for their people. Yet not only the Renshai are in dire straits: without their aid, Bearn may well fall to the “pirate” army fast approaching its shores….

After his father’s interference in Irish politics ends with a band of killers arriving on Christmas night to assassinate him, young Charles Peridore finds himself master of the estate. During idyllic school holidays, Charles enjoys riding to hounds and hunting geese and snipe while his friend Tommy Marlin tells stories of Tir-nan-Og, the land of eternal youth that lies just beyond the bog. But when Progress arrives in the form of an English corporation determined to convert the landscape into factories and housing, it appears that an entire way of life is destined to vanish. Only one thing stands in the way: the sorcery of an old witch, whose curses the English workers do not even believe in. In the novel’s unforgettable conclusion, the ancient powers of the wise woman will be pitted against the machinery of modern corporate greed, with surprising and thrilling results.

Born was a child of the rain forest that covered Midworld, part of the primitive society that the peaceful jungle planet had sustained for hundreds of years. He was wise in the ways of his world, and he knew well the precarious natural balance that governed all things.Then one day the aliens came. Giants. They knew nothing of the Upper or Lower Hell ? and they cared less. Born had risked his life to save them, to guide them through the myriad tangled boughs, past unseen, unsuspected dangers lurking in the underbrush. But worse than their ignorance of how to survive, the aliens had plans for Midworld, plans that could utterly destroy the globe-spanning forest that his people called home.As the days passed, Born realized his mistake. And as he had once hunted only to live, he knew now that he would be forced to live only to kill…

Artemesia is the daughter of a pirate queen, and she’s sick of practising deportment at the Angels Academy for Young Maidens. Escaping from the school, she hunts up her mother’s crew and breezily commands them out to sea in a leaky boat. Unfortunately, Art’s memories of her early life may not be accurate-her seasick crew are actors, and Art’s infamous mother was the darling of the stage in a pirate drama. But fiery, pistol-proof Art soon shapes her men into the cleverest pirate crew afloat. And when they meet the dread ship Enemy and her beautiful, treacherous captain, Goldie Girl, Art is certain that her memories are real. The Seven Seas aren’t large enough for two pirate queens: Art will have the battle of her life to win her mother’s title – and the race for the most fabulous treasure in pirate lore.

As guardian of the Universe’s freedom from the domination by the Cyclan, Earl Dumarest is ruthlessly hunted by their agent, Cyber Broge, as he searches for the fortune necessary to finance his epic quest for Terra – the planet of his birth. Hunter and fugitive, predator and victim, Earl Dumarest lands on the planet Zakym.

ZAKYM – a cadaverous, twin-sunned world where the spectres of the dead daily claim the lives of the living; a decadent world that threatens to explode with the unparalleled violence of civil war and broken taboos.

ZAKYM – home of the beautiful, haunted Lavinia whose soul is claimed and condemned by a power-crazed madman.

Both Lavinia and her planet are doomed until a man appears who promises to be their saviour. Dumarest is the only person capable of challenging the terrifying menace of the Cyclan and the terrors of Zakym. But can even he triumph against such foes?




(First published 1977)

THE FIFTH MAJIPOOR NOVEL

On the gigantic planet Majipoor it is a time of ancient mysteries and new wonders. The aged Pontifex Prankipin is at last near death. Omens are seen, prodigies are born – even the sea dragons have been glimpsed from the cliffs. Surely some great change is at hand!

The Coronal Lord Confalume will succeed him as Pontifex, and it is no secret that the next Coronal will be Prince Prestimion of Muldemar – for, by law and custom, the blood son of the present Coronal cannot rule. Besides, everyone knows that they young Korsibar much prefers the pleasures of the hunt to the intrigues of court.

They cannot know this hunter has found a new quarry – the Starburst Crown. For, when Korsibar is visited by an oracle, the two-headed Su-Suheris whispers words that plunge the planet into a fearsome conflagration and engulf its myriad races in a war to alter destiny itself.

He called himself by the name of the father he had never known, Vazkor, king of a forgotten land. In his veins were mingled the blood of that regal warrior and that of his witch mother, the silver-masked, snowy-haired survivor of the hated Old Race. He had sworn that she would die at his hands in the name of his father and all that his world had become.

Across that barbaric and age-haunted planet his quest went relentlessly on. As he searched, so grew his own powers, his fearful heritage. Across wide seas, in conquered cities, and among haunted mountains, the hunt took him. And as he drew closer to his objective, the clearer became the way she must be slain, the more certain his ability to sunder all her witchcraft and ancient science to rid the world once and for all of his creator – the white witch from the volcano.

‘TWAS BORING IN ARTESIA

…or so thought Sir Lafayette O’Leary, ex-craftsman from Earth, and now seemingly ex-interdimensional swashbuckler extraordinaire as well. His battles were all won, his dragons all slain and life was just the same boring round of riches, royal hunts and regatas. Boring, boring, boring; until he walked past the azalia…

Suddenly Artesia was gone, and O’Leary was trapped in Melange, a world of giants and pirates, karate-chopping hags and electronic flying carpets, a world where goons and harlots are the spitting images (literally!) of his own aristocratic Artesian associates. And because they think he’s his double, lots of his new friends want O’Leary dead.

Unless he can get through the interdimensional gate and find the continuum path back home, O’Leary’s life will never be boring again. Just short.

Nick Walker can pass for eighteen, which comes in useful while living on the streets. But Nick isn’t eighteen. He’s fourteen. He’s been fourteen for years . . .

A chance encounter with Manta, an exceedingly powerful witch, sees Nick cursed with changelessness. Not only will he never age, but, more usefully to Manta, broken bones and sliced flesh, while excruciatingly painful, will mend themselves in a short space of time – making Nick the perfect weapon against the demonic assassins sent by the evil Cartel. Constantly hunted, Nick is forced to run – evading his enemy when he can and facing gruesome and bloody battles when he can’t.

But, help comes from a surprising source – April, a young girl Nick rescues from some occult enthusiasts intent on sacrificing her, has powers beyond her control or understanding. Together, might they be a match for the sinister forces that stalk them?

The gathering forces of the Dark Powers threaten the world of man. The legions of Faery, aided by trolls, demons and the Wild Hunt itself, are poised to overthrow the Realms of Light.
Holger Carlsen, a bemused and puzzled twentieth-century man mysteriously snatched out of time, finds himself the key figure in the conflict. Arrayed against him are the dragons, giants and elven warriors of the armies of Chaos, and the beautiful sorceress Morgan le Fay. On his side is a vague prophecy, a quarrelsome dwarf and a beautiful woman who can turn herself into a swan, not to mention Papillon, the magnificent battle-horse, and a full set of perfectly fitting armour, both of which were waiting for him when he entered the magical realm. The shield bears three hearts and three lions – the only clue to Holger Carlsen’s true identity. Could Carlsen really be a legendary hero, the only man who can save the world?

Tethra is not like the other children in his village. Fourteen years ago, he was left on the banks of a river, swapped by the Hill Folk for a human woman’s child, replacing the seventh son of Conan. Murna chose to raise him as her own, despite the dire warnings of their village leader.

Raising a child of the Hill Folk will bring disaster upon the Epidii people.

The dark days have arrived, bringing a poor harvest, a winter of plagues, and unsuccessful hunts. The Old One once again rallies the clan to cast Tethra out, this time with support turning against Tethra and Conan.

To spare his father, Tethra runs away, and stumbles across some members of the Hill Folk, his own people, who take him in.

As Tethra lives among them, however, he must decide if he is truly one of them, as his blood suggests, or if instead his real place is with the Epidii.

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

Cord Lynear, a Mormon ‘lost boy’ forced off his compound for supposedly rebellious behaviour, shows up in Absaroka County. Without much guidance, divine or otherwise, Sheriff Walt Longmire, his second-in-command Victoria Moretti and his good friend Henry Standing Bear search for the boy’s mother and find themselves in a scavenger hunt that ends at the doorstep of an interstate polygamy group. Run by Roy Lynear – Cord’s father – the group is frighteningly well-armed and very good at keeping secrets.

As Walt, Henry and Vic pursue the Lynears, they hear whispers of Big Oil and the CIA and find they might be dealing with more than they bargained for.

‘The characters talk straight from the hip and the Wyoming landscape is its own kind of eloquence’ New York Times

Without setting foot on another planet, people like Shep Blaine were reaching out to the stars with their minds, telepathically contacting strange beings on other worlds. But even Blaine was unprepared for what happened when he communed with the soul of an utterly alien being light years from Earth. After recovering from his experience, he becomes a dangerous man: not only has he gained startling new powers – but he now understands that humankind must share the stars.

Hunted through time and space by those who he used to trust, Blaine undergoes a unique odyssey that takes him through a nightmarish version of small-town America as he seeks to find others who share his vision of a humane future. Blaine has mastered death and time. Now he must master the fear and ignorance that threatened to destroy him!

Pip and Flinx: Book Ten.

Never have the cares of the universe lain so heavily on Flinx’s shoulders, nor the forces against him seemed so invincible. Pursued by a newly revealed sect of doomsday fanatics and hunted by factions inside and outside the Commonwealth, he is expected to single-handedly avert a looming galactic crisis (or bear responsibility for the consequences.) Flinx can be forgiven for feeling a slight touch of melancholy.

According to his ship’s Al, there’s only one solution for what ails Flinx – a vacation. But with increasing number of enemies chasing him with ever greater enthusiasm, Flinx must find a getaway shrouded in obscurity. It seems that Jast, a planet smack in the middle of nowhere, is prefect, but trouble can find Flinx anywhere. What he doesn’t know is that his vacation paradise is a danger zone of the highest magnitude. And by the time he learns the truth, it may be too late.

It was definite – Dumery had no magical talent at all. He could never fulfill his dream to become a wizard’s apprentice. Hurt, angry, and mortally disappointed, he despaired of ever choosing a trade.

But then Dumery spied a so-called great wizard humbling himself before a man selling dragon’s blood – the precious stuff that made difficult spells work. If Dumery couldn’t be a wizard, maybe he could become a dragon-hunter and have all those scornful wizards crawling to him.

So, leaving his family, city, and comfortable home, Dumery began trailing Kensher, the man in brown – even though Kensher said he didn’t need a dragon-hunting apprentice. But when Dumery finally caught up with Kensher, he would discover Kensher’s great secret of how the precious fluid was obtained – a secret from which only Kensher’s kin could profit.
Once again, Dumery would be left without career or future.

Unless . . .

Orthe – half-civilized, half-barbaric, home to human-like beings who live and die by the code of the sword. Earth envoy Lynne Christie has been sent here to establish contact and to determine whether this is a world worth developing. But first Christie must come to understand that human-like is not and never can be human, and that not even Orthe’s leaders can stop the spread of rumors about her, dark whisperings that could cost Christie her life.And on a goodwill tour to the outlying provinces, these evil rumors turn to deadly accusations. Christie is no offworlder, Church officials charge: she is a treacherous and cunning descendant of Orthe’s legendary Golden Witchbreed – the cruel, ruthless race that once enslaved the whole planet. Suddenly, Christie finds herself a hunted fugitive on an alien world, where friend and foe alike may prove her executioners. And her only chance of survival lies in saving Orthe from a menace older than time…

Predictably unpredictable, normally abnormal.

Watson combines science fiction and fantasy into an eclectic mix that includes stories about fallen angels in Hell rebelling and mounting a breakout, about the inconvenience of keeping aging parents in your brain instead of a nursing home, about Jesus’ immortal brother as solo passenger on the first starship, about alien coffins bombarding the solar system, about right-wing U.S. militias stealing a quantum computer to commit nuclear blackmail, about a computer games designer haunted by the cyber-ghost of his murdered wife, about frozen heads and strange mind-changes, and how a cake decorator defeats a vampire with a sweet tooth. De-evolution, treasure-hunting via hang glider, dark animal fantasies, humanity as hive-entity, Hercules Poirot on a starship – Watson takes the strange, the eerie the weird, mixes his seasoned writing skills, and produces a potpourri of the fantastic. These nineteen stories are sure to amuse, bemuse and entertain.

Kerrigan was a legend of his own life-time. He was the kind of electric personality around whom strange stories accumulate like iron filings dancing towards a magnet. When Kerrigan failed to return from a special mission in 2178 the stories grew wilder. Some of his crew refused to believe he was dead, others went to look for him. By 2180 it was as fashionable to go to Lunar Base to look for Kerrigan as it had been fashionable to hunt monsters in Loch Ness two centuries before.

His brother Harry was open minded about the stories, even a little sickened by the transport companies who were cashing in on Kerrigan’s disappearance. Then Harry met Susan Croft and his opinions of the transport companies changed a little. Susan was a telepath and she believed that Kerrigan was trying to contact her. Lunar, however, is a big, empty, dusty place and it was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. Then one day they saw Kerrigan, or something that looked like Kerrigan…

George Sanford has a gift for guessing right the first time and very little else going for him. When Ahmed and his other friends graduate school and got jobs in The City, George finds himself left behind. He never wanted to sign his name, let alone fill out applications and reports.

Then George bumps into the Rescue Squad and is swept up in the excitement of a hunt for a trapped girl. It is George who finds her with his special talent for guessing right … and it is George who suddenly becomes the pride of the Rescue Squad. With a friend running interference for him with the bureaucracy, George lands a place for himself as a “consultant” – and the more he works, the more his strange talents grow.

With each success George begins to change. Using his special talents to rescue a computer technician from a gang of revolutionaries, he finds he has become a pawn in a mad iconoclastic game. A game where his own talents pose the greatest threat to The City – and the world!

When Sarah McKensie’s parents are murdered, the young girl is saved by a mother wolf and raised in the pack. Part Mowgli, part Tarzan of the Apes, Sarah becomes the Wild Angel of the Sierras, rescuing those in need, while eluding her parents’ killer, a man who still wants to see her dead.

An amazing young savage, Sarah lives with the wolves, hunts with the wolves, fights for dominance in the pack. She watches people from a distance, but she does not think of herself as one of them. She belongs to the pack. How can such a child be reclaimed for civilization?

Sarah’s struggle for survival brings together a fascinating assortment of characters: Max Phillips, who found her parents’ bodies and never gave up the search for the missing child; Audrey North, Sarah’s aunt, who wants nothing more than to find her niece; and, ultimately, a young Temperance missionary, Professor Serunca’s travelling circus, and a mysterious itinerant fortune-teller named Gitana.

Occupation of Earth is now in its 27th year, and relations between humanity and the dictatorial Hefn have never seemed shakier. The aliens mission is to save the planet from its human abusers; and the Baby Ban imposed by mass hypnosis has made Earth a cleaner, wilder, less crowded place. But the Ban has now lasted so long, and provoked such hatred, that when a spark is struck the situation explodes into worldwide riots on one side and retaliatory mindwipings on the other. Years of effort by the eco-spiritual Gaians, who mediate between humans and Hefn, have been destroyed.

While the Gaians regroup and brainstorm frantically in an atmosphere of doubt and danger, one obsessed Hefn and one young woman begin a radical experiment. Pam Pruitt has discovered a growing ability to acquire information by non-rational means. Childhood suffering has empowered her, in a way once understood by hunting and gathering peoples – an understanding lost with that lost lifeway – to communicate with mysterious forces through strong dreaming: to function as a shaman on behalf of her community, the human race.

Shon knew that the Taken must die. Death had touched them, and the evil spirits which issued from Death’s Place to the east beyond the valley Took away the souls of the living. It was the law of Shon’s people, who seldom ventured far from their simple huthouses in Pine Walk, except to hunt boar in the forest. And even the forest was not completely safe, for across the river at its eastern edge lay Crow Mork, Death’s Place, and in the stories Crow himself, who was Death, rode there with Crow’s People, Death’s children, on strange four-legged beasts shod with white metal and swift as the wind.

Lost in the dark forest, Shon encountered Death’s Children. ‘Don’t go home,’ the dead girl told him – he was almost sure it was a girl, though her face was a black void in the night. But there was nowhere else to go. They would kill him, of course; being Taken, they would have to.

Yet Shon escaped that death – though he was to meet Death in Death’s Place, and learn the extraordinary truth about it.

Zerfall awakens in an alley, wounded and unable to remember her past. Chased by an assassin out into the endless wastes of the desert, she is caught, disfigured, and left for dead. Her scabbard is empty, but the need for answers-and the pull of her sword-will draw her back to the city-states.

When Jateko, a naïve youth, accidentally kills a member of his own tribe, he finds himself outcast and pursued across the desert for his crimes. Crazed from dehydration, dying of thirst and hunger, he stumbles across Zerfall.

Hunted by assassins and bound by mutual need, both Zerfall and Jateko will confront the Täuschung, an ancient and deranged religion ruled by a broken fragment of Zerfall’s mind. Swarm, the Täuschung hell, seethes with imprisoned souls, but where gods-real or imagined-meddle in the affairs of man, the cost is high.

In Swarm and Steel, the power of belief can manifest and shape reality, and for political and religious leaders, faith becomes a powerful tool. But the insane are capable of twisting reality with their delusions as well, turning increasingly dangerous as their sanity crumbles. It is here that a long prophesied evil will be born, an endless hunger. The All Consuming will rise.