Search Results for: on-the-run

Masters of Everon, announces the brass plate on the door of the original Everon colonists’ corporate headquarters. But somehow Everon resisted all their efforts; it was as if the planet itself fought against human efforts to establish a foothold. Some settlers want to return the favour, wrecking Everon’s ecology in revenge, but Jef Roboni loves the great cat-like maolots of Everon, and the planet itself; he believes that settlers and planet can coexist.

Now time is running out – and even the hints that Jef has uncovered are not enough to prepare him for the incomprehensible strangeness and wonder of the true Masters of Everon.

About two centuries from now, the human race on Earth is in trouble, perhaps even facing extinction, because of the rapid evolution of diseases.

A crew of young men and women travel to the moons of Saturn, to Titan, to investigate the biochemistry of the pre-life conditions there in the slim hope of discovering something that might save Earth. Nearly half of the crew die on the way. They have to do most of their exploration in virtual-reality machinery. The whole story runs at high speed, as they race to find answers across the surface of an alien landscape with death close behind, and gaining.

Their space-yacht, pursued by angry Adderkops thirsting for their blood, has run into serious engine trouble. Picking up the trail of another alien spaceship, they decide to board it and force its crew to take them home. But once aboard, its not so easy to find the crew: they’re faced with cages full of bizarre, other-wordly animals: Tiger apes, Elephantoids, Gorilloids, Caterpiggles, Helmet beasts, Tentacle centaurs. One set of these extraordinary creatures must be the crew, in hiding. But which? Survival depends on finding the right answer…

The first woman wouldn’t even give her name. But the clear, feminine voice faltered considerably over the question of what Perry Mason’s charges would be for a day in court – a day doing nothing but listening.

The second woman gave a good deal more – but the question was, what did she expect to get? Dorla Balfour, lethally lovely and dangerously rich, forced a $1,000 retainer on Mason to deal with a case already tried and decided.

The offense involved appeared to be manslaughter, hit-and-run, but it soon became murder … with the corpse killed twice.

As Miss Maggs made her way nervously home, a clock stuck one, the town’s lights were switched off and footsteps sounded behind her. She broke into a desperate run. Later the doctor pronounced that she had literally died of fright.

In a provincial town, who was there to suspect but the rowdy gang led by Nick Salter? But Nick’s young wife swore to an alibi for him and so Sergeant Brent – a trifle embarrassed as a beneficiary under the will of the deceased – must look deeper into a case in which teenagers might too easily be made the whipping boys for the crimes of others.

The killing of Lippy Sullivan is only a one-column squib in the morning papers. Lippy was a loser, a pickpocket, and his one claim to fame was an acquaintanceship with Mike Hammer. Was that reason enough for someone to gag, torture and kill him?

By the time Mike figures out that the wrong man has been killed, it’s nearly too late. Containers of a virulent strain of bacteria have been hidden around the country, and when the canisters explode, there will be no stopping it: no vaccines, no natural barriers – nothing.

Each time Mike tracks down a clue, it leads to a dead man, and time is running out . . .

For Murray Kirk, running a private investigation agency is a business; he isn’t interested in justice or crusades, just profit and loss. And, because Murray knows something about police corruption, when he’s asked to act for a young officer accused of bribery, he isn’t keen. He can’t see the profit – until he meets the man’s fiancée. Then his motives become uncomfortably confused, and he finds himself descending into a murky world of bookmakers, gangsters and crooked politicians, where setting up an honest cop is all in a day’s work …

The twenty-seventh title in the popular Harpur and Iles series.

A street shooting leaves a mother and child dead on the school run. But was this a random attack? Unlikely, when it transpires that the victims were the wife and son of well-known drug baron Mansel Shale.

Having committed this atrocity, the gunman flees to a nearby shop where a hostage situation quickly develops. Detective Chief Inspector Harpur and Assistant Chief Constable Iles are brought in to oversee the siege – which ends in sudden tragedy.

But as subsequent events unfold, it appears that the gunman wasn’t tracking Shale after all, but his wife . . .

For years Panicking Ralph Ember and Mansel Shale have run profitable drugs empires in peaceful cooperation with each other – and Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles turns a blind-eye to their trade as long as it keeps violence off the streets. But this happy arrangement is threatened by foreign dealers moving in and offering punters not just drugs, but exploited girls from Eastern Europe.

These invaders have no respect for the old way of managing things and soon bloody gang warfare breaks out in a deadly scramble for territory.

‘Another dodgy gavotte by the master of the revels . . . brilliant’ Literary Review

Douglas Selby, the ambitious young District Attorney of the territory around Madison City, had up before him a young man guilty of embezzling a comparatively small sum of money which he had spent gambling. Selby could have locked him up – and perhaps ruined his life. But he wanted to find the how and the why of this otherwise law-abiding young man’s gambling.

Selby’s investigations led him to a hit-and-run motorcycle accident, to blackmail, and to the doorstep of DeWitt Stapleton, the local big-wig, who ran things in that part of the country by and for himself.

When Claude Kendrick, owner of a shadily run art gallery in Paradise City, is approached by Ed Haddon, the King of art thieves, to find a buyer for a priceless icon of Catherine the Great, he believes his dreams have come true.

Herman Radnitz, a multimillionaire, is the man prepared to pay six million dollars for the stolen art, but there’s a catch: Radnitz wanted the icon delivered to Zurich as part of the deal.

To his joy, Kendrick learns of a couple travelling to Europe. All he has to do is make sure the icon is planted on them unawares. But he’s picked the wrong couple …

Considered by many to be the most terrifying writer in English, M. R. James was an eminent scholar who spent his entire adult life in the academic surroundings of Eton and Cambridge. His classic supernatural tales draw on the terrors of the everyday, in which documents and objects unleash terrible forces, often in closed rooms and night-time settings where imagination runs riot. Lonely country houses, remote inns, ancient churches or the manuscript collections of great libraries provide settings for unbearable menace, from creatures seeking retribution and harm. These stories have lost none of their power to unsettle and disturb.

A time-traveller on an illegal trip into the past learns a chilling truth about her own destiny…


As a deadly Superflu runs rampant through a polluted, overpopulated Earth, a husband-and-wife scientific team races to scientific team races to salvage a livable future…


On a planet where the laws of physics are strangely twisted, a brilliant scientist’s work undermines an ancient faith and leads to a shattering revelation…


An ore-hauler on Mercury, desperate to save her endangered ship and career, finds a remarkable way out: a wormhole trapped in the hellish flux of magnetic fields and fiery plasma generated by the nuclear furnace of the sun…

One minute I was in New York . . . walking down Sixth Avenue, a private eye on a two-bit job . . .
Next minute I was in New York . . . a crazy town I almost recognised – but Goebbels was speaking in Union square, Hitler invited me to a cocktail party, and aliens from outer space were running the whole show. Fun City it wasn’t . . .

Plucked from his own “time”, a pawn in a Galactic power play, Ron Archer fights his way through a deadly maze of intrigue and conspiracy to an incredible destiny at the end of the star lanes!

MILK RUN.

That’s what they told Ronny Bronston this job would be. “Just like a vacation,” his boss had said. All he and the giant Dorn Horsten would have to do is visit the planet Einstein and see if there was any reason not to admit them to United Planets.

The planet was a paradise, where the people had bred themselves for intelligence and beauty, where everyone was completely free. Free, sometimes, to get into more trouble than they could handle.

Only Ronny could get them out of that trouble; and that’s how he wound up on Dawnworld, in a gladiator’s arena!

Nick Foley is on the run. The KGB and CIA are both after him. Not suprising, since he’s a Soviet sleeper whose cover has been blown, but Nick has more than state secrets to hide. If he tells a stranger to drive him a thousand miles, it’ll happen; if he tells a pusher to OD on his own heroin, the pusher will do it.

Nick’s strange power is vital to both sides, and neither of them intend to let him keep it to himself, but neither the CIA nor the KGB can imagine Nick’s final, desperate throw of the dice.

The lavalite world is a world of slow but constant change. Here mountains rise from plains, or sink into rifts; new oceans form as vast hollows collapse and seas rush in. There is only one escape from this world where the very landscape moves. The one gateway to other universes is in the palace of the Lord Urthona. Paul Janus Finnegan – also known as Kickaha – must reach it if he is to survive. And he must do so despite the Lords Urthone and Red Orc, the hired thug McKay, flesh-eating vegetation on the run, beasts of prey and planetary pseudopods.

Back under the thumb of the Terran Empire after leading their planetary sector in an almost successful war against Imperial rule, Commissioner Desai saw real trouble brewing this time. A strange, fanatical movement was spreading like wildfire: there were rumours of the return of the fabled Elder Race: the Firstling, leader-elect of the planet, was on the run and hiding from Imperialist retribution. And off-planet agents from the Ythrian Domain and Mersia, Terra’s ancient foe, were abroad in the land. Unless Commissioner Desai could damp the fuse of rebellion, the universe would begin its terrifying descent into the Long Night . . .

She was haunted by Thunder and Plagued by Dreams… strange, dark dreams of a world beyond time and space, a land of magic and mystery. But Charley know it was more than a dream – for her friend Sam shared her visions.
Suddenly, the dreams become a reality…as a raging storm sweeps Charley and Sam to the fantastic land of Akahlar, where unicorns and griffins run free, an enchantress commands a den of unearthly pleasures, and a wizard warns of a terrifying, inescapable event:
The changewinds are coming…savage, purple – tinged storms that alter the shapes of man and beast alike. Soon, all creatures must look to the skies – and beware…

The case started with a corpse. Nobody knew who he was. Next, a man named John Burke disappeared. But D.A. Doug Selby could not find his body.

Then Mrs Burke swore that the corpse and her missing husband were one and the same man. This should have solved both mysteries. All it did was run the D.A. up two different trees. Sure, the faces of the dead man and John Burke were exactly the same. The only trouble was that their fingerprints were different!

Impossible? That’s what Doug Selby thought too – until the killer struck again …

An escaped convict, a mysterious deserted house, and murder in the Lake District..
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

The shades of night were falling fast when Arthur Crook drove the old Superb over the Lakeland Fells and into the valley, to stop at a mysterious house where, though a light burned in an upper window, no one answered the bell.

Here opens a double murder mystery in which Crook acts in the defence of a young prisoner on the run, whose guilt appears evident.

‘The usual gusto, racy prose, good plotting and up-to-the-minute social observation’ Sunday Times

The roar of a lion is not the kind of music one expects to hear at night in the stillness of the English countryside.

Yet in the neighbourhood of ‘Ganges’, Sir Benjamin Watson’s house, that terrifyingly wild sound is not uncommon. Sir Benjamin is rich enough to indulge his expensive hobby of a private zoo. The first time Ann Sherborne, walking at night to the gates of ‘Ganges’ on that strange, eventful visit, hears the savage roar, her courage dies and she starts to run.

But that frightening experience is just a prelude to a night charged with terror, when not only fear but death stalks ‘Ganges’, playing havoc among the guests assembled there …

The Soviet Union won the Cold War. The Russians were a little smarter than they were in our own world, and the United States was a little dumber and a lot less resolute. Now, more than a century later, the world’s gone Communist, and capitalism is a bad word.

For Gianfranco and his friend Annarita, a couple of teenagers growing up in Milan, life in a heavily regimented, surveillance-rich command economy is just plain dreary. The eventual withering-away of the state doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon.

Annarita’s a hard-working student and a member of the Young Socialists’ League. Gianfranco is a lot less motivated–but on the other hand, his father’s a Party apparatchik. The biggest excitement in their lives is a wargame shop called The Gladiator, which runs tournaments, and stocks marvelous complex games you can’t find anywhere else.

Then, abruptly, the shop is shut down. Someone’s figured out that The Gladiator’s games are teaching counterrevolutionary capitalist principles. The Security Police are searching high and low for the shop’s proprietors, who’ve not only vanished into thin air, but have left behind sets of fingerprints that aren’t in the records of any government on earth.

Only one staffer is left: Gianfranco and Annarita’s friend Eduardo. He’s on the run, and he comes to them in secret with an astonishing story: he’s a time trader from our own timeline, accidentally left behind when the store was evacuated. The only way Eduardo can get home to his own timeline is if Gianfranco and Annarita can help him reach one of the other time trader sites in this world – and the Security Police will be on their tails all the way there…

The weather in LA hasn’t been living up to its sunny reputation – the murder of an unwanted newborn and the assault of a twelve-year-old girl don’t make things pretty for the family-man cop, especially with a new baby at home.

The most puzzling crime of all is the murder of a respectable middle-aged woman from Indianapolis. A string of hit-and-runs involving a Model A Ford, and a bizarre mugger with a penchant for footwear all add up to another high-voltage month in the city of the stars for Lieutenant Luis Mendoza.

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