Search Results for: beauty

The Golden Age is a haunting, mysterious story – a strange Gothic novel of the future. The holocaust is over; Oxford seems to be the capital of the habitable world; and a poet-ruler appears to live out a future tale of Orpheus and Eurydice.

It has become a world in which the devil can materialise monstrosities through barriers of time and place, where death has been the monarch and beauty remains a memory in the mind of only a few. The scientists, the priests, soldiers and politicians have all failed; perhaps only the poets can save mankind.

Draftsmen can’t fight dragons.

Then again, that’s usually no problem – they generally don’t have to. But Lafayette O’Leary does. When an accidental overdose of self-hypnosis wrenches him out of the dull (but safe) Mrs. MacGlint’s Clean Rooms and Board and deposits him in the feudal, bedragoned world of Artesia, it takes him a little while to catch on, even with the attentions of the beautiful Princess Adoranne. Then he decides that he likes this new life of his – except for the part where he’s supposed to get killed…

The far-flung fingers of Earth’s civilisation touched many corners of the galaxy, and among them was the beautiful planet Yan. Here the colonists lived a peaceful, almost idyllic life, amid ancient and secret relics, co-existing with their strange and compatible neighbours.

The arrival of Gregory Chart, the greatest dramatist ever, whose productions were played out in the skies, and whose actors were also the audience, could only disrupt and destroy once the Yanfolk were aroused from their dreaming indifference . . .



(First published 1972)

When Martin Mallory falls in love with a beautiful student, he has no idea the trouble it will cause. Suddenly Li Cho disappears from the secretive Wycherly Foundation for Religious Studies. The principal, Ludovic Lambert, says she has been transferred, but won’t say where.

In desperation, Mallory arranges for an ex-con friend to break into Lambert’s safe where he has heard the transfer list is kept. But the piece of paper they find is far more sinister than a simple list of student transfers.

‘Donald MacKenzie is a born storyteller’ Guardian

Every thief dreams of committing the perfect crime. Cameron, Thorne and Gun are convinced that the jewel robbery they have planned cannot possibly go wrong, but jealousy mistrust and fear doom the enterprise from the start.

One of them dies a slow, hideous death; the other two find they have walked into hell. Soon, a beautiful woman and two desperate men find themselves trapped by their own actions. And when the thread of tension snaps they learn that death can indeed be a friend.

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.

Another superbly crafted Middle Eastern adventure by the author of the classic Rogue Male

They called the organisation World Opposition. Its aim was a world where the State no longer existed and where the individual controlled their own destiny.

Their headquarters were called Kasr-el-Sittat – meaning fortress of the holy women – and their leader was the strange and beautiful Elisa Cantemir. For her, no method was too ruthless, no human life too valuable, compared with the aims of the organisation.

Only one man knew their real aims and opposed them. And he was desperately in love with Elisa Cantemir.

A superb thriller, romance and spy novel from ‘The best in his field since Buchan’ Observer

Arabesque is a love story that takes us to the colourful crossroads of the Middle East at the height of World War II

Armande Herne – half English, half French and impassively beautiful – is sitting out the war in Beirut with no visible means of support. The rumour is she’s a spy. But, as conflict between British and French, Jew and Arab whirl around her, it is a British security sergeant who finds her. Soon they are embroiled in a plot, rich with adventure and intrigue.

Beautiful Nell Varney was a newcomer to Contera – and to murder.

Suddenly she found herself in a strange courtroom faced with seven pairs of hate-ridden, accusing eyes. Seven witnesses had identified her as the murderer who had caused the death of two women by performing illegal abortions.

Why would anyone in this strange town believe Nell was innocent? Could anyone help her? One man, a dedicated lawyer named Jesse Falkenstein, was determined to try . . .

‘My favourite American crime-writer’ New York Herald Tribune

One of the very last authors of detective fiction from the genre’s “Golden Age” INDEPENDENT

Suicide or murder? Despite all indications to the contrary, Alec Methven had not eaten his last meal in solitude, and somebody was very anxious to conceal that fact.

As if one death on the beautiful island of Madeira was not enough, there was another. Peter Corey, who had found Methven’s body, had a cast-iron alibi: he was on a plane to the island at the time of the death, en route to visit his old friend. But what of the second killing that so inexplicably occurred?

Contains the two novellas Border Town Girl and Linda.

Border Town Girl

Once, Lane Sanson had been a Somebody – war correspondent and a bestselling author. Now he was a Nobody, bumming around Mexico. Lost, lonely, hungry for hope, he was a pushover for a border town B-girl – the perfect fall guy for a lethal frame up . . .

Linda

She was born with the morality gene missing. As beautiful, as inviting, as treacherous as the sea around her, Linda is one of the most compelling women ever created by John D. MacDonald.

Brilliant physicist and warrior Michael Kane’s experiments in matter transmission catapult him across space and time to the verdant and war-torn Mars of the distant past. There he meets the beautiful Princess Shizala and learns the ways of her people, the Kamala, and of their war with the Argzoon. Swept up in their civil war, with Kane win the day, and the heart of the Princess?

The creator of Elric of Melniboné, Michael Moorcock remains one of the most honored science fiction and fantasy authors of all time. Moorcock’s Eternal Champion makes his debut in book one of the Warrior of Mars series.

BOOK ONE OF THE PERILOUS QUEST FOR LYONESSE

In the year of Our Lord 1403, as England smoulders with suppressed rebellion, young Simon Branthwaite sets sail across the Atlantic in search of the lost realm of Lyonesse. His quest will take him to Rockall, a land wreathed in legend; a land of weird beasts and wondrous happenings, of great beauties and terrible dangers.

And there begin adventures stranger than the wildest of Simon’s imaginings; adventures that will change the course of his life and reshape that land for ever…

Princes of Sandastre is the first in Anthony Swithin’s fantastical Lyonesse sequence, edited by Mark Sebanc.

Deep in the sounds, scents and shifting rhythms of the Amazon forest, a family have lost their seven-year-old child, stolen by the mysterious ‘Invisible People’, the tribe which has never been seen.
Through ten years their agonised search for him takes them beyond the world’s last great natural frontier into the cruel beauty of the Brazilian jungle.
When at last father and son do meet – in a dramatic and terrifying encounter – it is in the emerald forest, a place where the mythical and magical powers of primal existence must clash with the cold-hearted greed of modern man.

Trullion – World 2262 of the Alastor Cluster – was a beautiful waterworld of fens, mists, idyllic islands set in clear oceans whose teeming richness provided food for the taking. The Trill were a carefree, easy-living race. But violence entered their lives during the raids of the galactic pirates known as the Starmenters. And there was also the planetwide game of hussade, when the Trill’s ferocious passion for gambling drove them to risk all – even life itself – on the hazardous water-chessboard gaming fields. Their prize? The virginal body of the beautifu sheirl-maiden, the body any Trill is willing to die for.

Pennterra is a beautiful and fertile planet and humanity’s last hope for survival. But Pennterra is already inhabited. After warning other colony ships to stay away, the small advance colony of Quakers has adapted to life on Pennterra. Heeding the empathic warnings of the native hrossa, they have settled in a single valley, sharply limited their population, and continued to use no heavy machinery in their building and farming. But surviving under these conditions has left the Quakers little time to learn more about their native neighbors. Catastrophe or peace-Tanka Wakan, the omnipotent master spirit of Pennterra, will decide.

Cyber Prime surveyed the domains of his vast scattered empire with trepidation. Central Intelligence had ruled the empire in the past. Now he knew that this gigantic computer was degenerating, breaking up after years of use.

Only one man could save them: Earl Dumarest, a lonely space traveller engaged on a long quest to find his birth planet, Earth. The Cybers must find and intercept him.

But before the Cybers discover Dumarest, they encounter Eloise, a beautiful seductress who drives logic from their minds . . .



(First published 1975)

They were the first arrivals from the other side of the cosmos.

With the help of the Martian scientist Thrin, they had crossed the whirling black abyss of the fourth dimension – a dimension that had never been reached before!

Now a man with skin of pure marble-white and a woman of unearthly beauty stood before the disbelieving eyes of Captain Future and the Futuremen. The strange couple stared back in awe and amazement – particularly at Captain Future.

“Here is the one,” the man said finally in his alien tongue. “He is the only one who can save us!”

The planet Elysium should be a paradise.

Like Earth before the Age of Waste, it is both beautiful and bountiful, inhabited by peaceful aboriginals and human colonists. But in its chief city, Port of Plenty, the first colonists have kept the superior technology sent from Earth for themselves, governing the outlying settlements with an iron fist.

As unrest grows, two unlikely allies, Richard Florey, an employee of the city’s university, and Miguel Lucas, a settler who has ‘gone dingo’, are caught up in a revolution that could awaken the alien aboriginals and change the balance of power on Elysium forever . . .

Jerry Jamison wants out: out of a sloppy marriage, a dull job and the empty suburban rat race. Once Jerry had a beautiful bride and a good salary at her old man’s successful business – that was before his wife turned into a lush. Before the business started to go to pieces. And before the lazy afternoon when Vince Biskay, an old army buddy, rings his doorbell and makes an intriguing proposition. Vince promises to bring excitement into Jerry’s life – and money – but this is a plan that leaves only death and destruction in its wake.

US Federal agent John Dennison arrives in the UK to meet Chief Inspector Philip Hunter of Scotland Yard, and to find $300,000, smuggled ashore via Liverpool. According to Dennison, the smugglers are intent on buying diamonds, to ship back to the US.

Two suspects are followed to a London hotel and the diamonds are found. Shockingly, they are discovered to be real . . . but synthetic.

The diamond deal, involving an eccentric middleman, exposes a much bigger racket. Hunter and Dennison have a complex plot to unravel, some dangerous men to deal with – and Dennison the beautiful, red-headed Martine to keep an eye on . . .

Janey Elliott fails to return home one evening from a friend’s, and her husband John goes out looking for her car. He and the friend’s husband find Janey, brutally murdered.

The gruesome killing of beautiful but wayward Janey Elliott calls for the special services of the Metropolitan Police. Does the element of sexual violence point to a frenzied killer, or is it a cover for a more straightforward motive? Scotland Yard soon find the answer to that question, but the murderer remains elusive.

Someone is caught in the tangle of relationships that goes along with the wealth and social prestige the Elliotts and their circle enjoy …

Did the twelfth member of the jury know something the rest did not…?
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

Circumstantial evidence was as good as proof in the trial of Viola Ross. Everything pointed to the conclusion that this beautiful woman had smothered her wisp of a husband. But the twelfth juror, Richard Arnold, would not agree. Perhaps he knew something which the others didn’t – perhaps he only guessed.

When a retrial is ordered, Arnold sets out to conduct his own investigation. But soon he is faced with three attempts on his life.

When Charles is given just twelve months to live, his doctor sister takes him to a small Cornish village to end his days. They are joined by other friends including Tuesday, the young author of an unexpectedly sensational novel that brings her nothing but trouble.

Combining doomed love, a beautifully groomed and immaculately behaved psychopath, an escaped circus leopard and a fortune hidden in the pages of a library of books Joan Aiken once again serves up all the ingredients for an explosive finale.

‘Unusual, enthralling, full of wry fun’ Sunday Times