Search Results for: in-the-beginning

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.

Retired Andrew Basnett returns to Knotlington, where he once worked as an assistant lecturer, to an old friend who needs some advice. Two years earlier a member of the Fine Arts Department was murdered. Yet the killer had been caught and sentenced, so why should Andrew’s friend need help?
Many believed Stephen Sharland, who is serving a life sentence for the murder, was innocent. But before Andrew even begins making enquiries, there is another murder, and Andrew finds him in a complex web of emotion, struggling to sift truth from lies.

Tony Gregg was just an ordinary everyday American until the day he came into possession of an old Barkut coin. He knew it was more than just a collector’s curio because there was no such place on any map of Earth, past or present. He learned then that it could be used as a key – a key to a GATEWAY TO ELSEWHERE.

That was the beginning of one of the most fabulous and fantastic adventures that ever befell a young man looking for excitement. For Gregg plunged forthwith into a fourth-dimensional world of the Arabian Nights, where the djinns of Aladdin’s Lamp were rampaging realities, and a lovely princess was waiting to be rescued!

A mysterious and richly evocative novel, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque tells the story of portraitist Piero Piambo, who is offered a commission unlike any other. The client is Mrs. Charbuque, a wealthy and elusive woman who asks Piambo to paint her portrait, though with one bizarre twist: he may question her at length on any topic, but he may not, under any circumstances, see her. So begins an astonishing journey into Mrs. Charbuque’s world and the world of 1893 New York society in this hypnotically compelling literary thriller.

The settlement of Dun is a safe place, fortified from raider attacks, with its own spring to provide fresh water for all. The spring has never failed them – as long as it flows, Dun will never fall.

When the village captures a young raider, Nessan pleads to keep him alive, against the wishes of the elders. As the Chief’s daughter, she wins out. Their captive settles into the village, he and Nessan become cautious friends. Things are peaceful.

Until the spring begins to dry up. Have they angered the gods by not killing this raider? Or is there some other force at work?

On what trivialities the big things in life hang.

From the moment when, dining alone in her Brussels hotel, Georgia Yeo, celebrated writer of detective thrillers, opens her cigarette case and the Count comes into her life with the polite offer of a light, she realises that here is fate.

In that moment too begins the strange and inimitable spell of Georgia’s story. It is an enthralling story, of a woman successful in her career, yet timid and hesitant in making a decision which might have a far-reaching effect on her private life.

It’s truly a step in the dark …

The bodies of three young children, abandoned on a bleak hillside, are discovered by Lieutenant O’Connor’s Afghan hound, and so begins another long and tough investigation for the Glendale Police Department.

Vic Varallo, O’Connor and team are also tasked with a serial rapist, the murder of a respectable accountant, and a baby kidnapped during an armed robbery gone wrong. With both their wives expecting a baby soon, it’s a wonder Varallo and O’Connor have any time for murder.

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

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

The Wilcox Street precinct is as busy as ever. Sergeant Maddox and his team face three tricky murder cases, with motives that turn out to be as strange and bizarre as the crimes themselves.

But it is not only murder that is occupying Maddox. When policewoman Carstairs, who has vainly adored him for so long, begins to show interest in newcomer Sergeant O’Neill, Maddox discovers to his astonishment that he is jealous and will have to balance his time between romance and murder.

From one of the best-loved authors of the Golden Age of detective fiction, this collection of short stories by Helen McCloy features psychiatrist-sleuth Dr Basil Willing.

Beginning with her classic, Through a Glass, Darkly, which she later expanded into a full-length novel, McCloy experimented with daringly imaginative concepts within the framework of the formal, fairplay detective story. From doppelgangers to flying saucers each story demonstrates the author’s masterful combination of style, content and technique to produce some of crime fiction’s finest work.

Michael Greatrex Coney was a British-born author who spent the last three decades of his life in Canada – including 16 years in the British Colombia Forest Service. His early work carried a sense of Cold War-inspired paranoia, but his repertoire was wide and perhaps his best novel, HELLO SUMMER, GOODBYE, is a wistful story of adolescent love on a far-distant planet. The titles collected in this omnibus come from the fertile beginning of his career and include his debut novel MIRROR IMAGE, CHARISMA and the BSFA AWARD-winning BRONTOMEK!

Britain in the near future: the country is heading toward ecological disaster, chemical waste is seeping into people’s brains, deadly parasites contaminate food – and the despotic fascist government is trying to keep it all quiet. But there is one thing they can’t suppress – the emergence of a new master race. Children who have the power to persuade adults to do anything they want…

American sociologist Claudia and reporter Peter Levin begin an investigation that brings them to a trail of genetic theories. All the children, they discover, have the same father. But who is he? And is he a force of good…or of evil?

In the beginning…

… there was Egan Drake, the genius who dreamed of spreading mankind among the galaxies.

Then came Megan, who took on her brother’s mantle and made his imaginings real. She gathered around her the finest in their fields – biology and astronautics, computer science and fusion propulsion – and fired them with her vision.

And finally was born The Project: a thousand tiny spacecraft crawling like electromechanical wombs towards the stars, each bearing the genetic seeds for a future colony of man.

And some fell on stony ground, and some fell on fertile ground and some…

The room was quiet; the man in front of the mirror was the only living things there, and he was too horrified to utter a sound.

In the mirror, five faces stared back at him: one young and ruddy, which was his own, and four that did not belong in that place at all, for they were wrinkled, malevolent, small as crabapples and blue as smoke.

So begins Damon Knight’s ‘Be My Guest’, a story of the human race possessed by things that were – well, not exactly demons . . . but not exactly not demons, either.

It’s just one of the unpredictably imaginative tales in this fascinating collection by a modern master of science fiction.

By the workings of chance Bleys Ahrens was born the genetic equal of Hal Mayne, the hero of The Final Encyclopedia, but he was destined by nurture to a far different fate. Raised alone by his unhappy Exotic mother, Bleys was an outcast from every society until his half-brother Dahno claimed him. Disciplined by Friendlies, schooled by Exotics, Dahno was beginning to build an interplanetary network of half-breeds, who called themselves “Others”.

But Dahno thought only of gaining wealth and power for himself; Bleys saw an opportunity to challenge the Dorsai for control of the Human Worlds.

The second book in the Urban Nucleus series, containing the following:

Prelude: The Domes (1978)
If a Flower Could Eclipse (1970)
Interlude: The Testimony of Leland Turner (1979)
Old Folks at Home (1978)
Interlude: The City Takes Care of Its Own (1979)
The Windows in Dante’s Hell (1973)
Interlude: Volplaning Heroes (1979)
The Samurai and the Willows (1976)
Interlude: First Councilor Lesser (1979)
Allegiances (1975)
Interlude: The Cradle Begins to Rock (1979)
At the Dixie-Apple with the Shoofly-Pie Kid (1977)
Interlude: The Fall of Saganella Lesser (1979)
Death Rehearsals (1979)

Max Harborn and his wife Eva, the first space explorers to visit Mars, discover an almost dead world of endless deserts. Lifeless, that is, except for a few curious Martian moths, paradoxically existing in the absence of vegetation and water. Two of the living moths are brought back to Earth, along with samples of rocks, sand, and atmosphere. But once back on Earth, the two moths, male and female, escape from captivity, and begin breeding at a prodigious rate. The alien grubs are capable of eating almost anything, and soon the world is imperilled by a horrifying destructive plague of the Martian moths…

An SF Gateway eBook: bringing the classics to the future.

Twenty subtugs had been lost attempting to bring back oil from the undersea fields on the enemy’s borders. A brilliant psychologist-electronics expert is planted in the crew of the subtug Ram to discover the reason. And the reason becomes terrifying reality when, miles deep in the ocean, the minds of the crew begin to crack …

A stunning work from the acclaimed author of Dune, the series which inspired the 2021 Denis Villeneuve epic film adaptation, Dune, starring Oscar Isaac, Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya and Josh Brolin.

Keill Randor, the Last Legionary, and his alien companion, Glr, set course for the uninhabited planet of Rilyn in the Jitrell Federation to investigate the sinister activities of the Overseers’ deadly enemy, the Warlord, and his agents the Deathwing.

Amongst these strange and deadly life-forms on Rilyn, Keill encounters the grotesque, golden figure of the Altern, “The One”, leader of the Deathwing. In a thrilling climax, Keill must not only pit his wits against the concerted forces of the Deathwing band of warrior clones but also defend himself and Glr from the savage futy of the elements as the murderous Starwind begins to blow.

Newly extradited to England from California on charges of fraud, Philip Page faces a long prison sentence. The police are already convinced of his guilt, having been furnished with apparently watertight evidence by an anonymous informant, but Page believes he has been framed.

Released on bail, he sets about unmasking the mystery witness. When maverick investigator John Raven is called by one of the suspects, Page and Raven soon realise they want the same thing. So begins a gripping race against time to expose the source of the evidence and clear Page’s name.

Morrey, Serge and Tony are sent to Mars to investigate the murder of William Baines, an electronics specialist who has been found dead in a crater. There are more than a hundred people working in Mars city, and at first the astrotecs, as Commander Morrison calls them, see no reason to suspect one more than another. However, investigations on the spot soon narrow down the field to a few suspects, and gradually all the clues begin to point in one direction. Morrey and Serge are sure that the case is solved, but Tony still has doubts, and he decides on an independent – and dangerous – piece of detective work.

It was Thane who crossed the abyss of the ages and stood on the very brink of Eternity…who found the secret of the Time Treasure… who saw, and laughed and came back sane from that place beyond the Universe where no man had ever been before him, and where none should ever come again.

This was the ending. But the beginning was in the city of Zotheera on the planet Daikoon…

A restless outworlder was Thane of the Two Swords. A man of blood and steel, a man of strange powers strangely acquired. The warrior Thane possessed a secret vital to the greedy Princes of the Planets. And it was on the planet Daikoon that the princes tried to buy Thane’s services…

By the time Jim Gilruth returns to Pakistan, twenty years after he served as a law officer in a small village near Lahore, colonial rule has given way to Pakistani officialdom. His strange and enigmatic mission is painfully involved in the brutal clash of the old and the new – but why has he been chosen as the instrument of coercion?

Then the details of a half-forgotten murder that he had long ago adjudicated begin to come back in all their bewildering nuances, and Gilruth, in an eerie repetition of the circumstances of a generation ago, is powerless to save the life of a good man, or bring a murderer to justice.

With the rumoured transfer of Chief of Police Mark Lane, London’s competitive drug lords are on edge. In the past, Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles has managed to maintain the peace on the streets in an old-fashioned system of give a little, take a little. But suddenly Iles is in danger of losing his power when the new chief constable comes to town, and the drug gangs begin a struggle for dominance.

With a dangerous mix of greed and fear, the looming threat of a stricter police force, and three sudden deaths, all sides are preparing themselves for a full-scale battle of the ugliest kind.

‘Essential reading’ Independent

Classic police procedural by a ‘born storyteller’ (Sunday Times), who combined natural flair with his experience in the police to truly authentic effect.

There was an extra body in the morgue – a body stripped of all identification and with its face badly battered. But when Inspector Martineau was called to the scene he had a pretty good idea whose it was.

That was, however, just the beginning. A big payroll robbery, a group of out-of-town mobsters and some odd behaviour in a local night spot all attract Inspector Martineau’s attention. While, at a funeral parlour, the quick are considerably more active and dangerous a problem than the dead.