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George Mallory was out for a quiet day’s shooting. A typical country-man, in typical English country. His day’s sport was interrupted by the beginning of the greatest catastrophe in man’s history – an alien space ship was crashing as his feet.
The ghastly monstrosity that emerged was so hideously repulsive that no one would have guessed at the degree of intelligence and potential friendliness in its strange mind.
Mallory shot first and asked questions afterwards. With its dying strength, the alien cursed the earth with a scientific horror beyond the comprehension of man, a horror that turned the beasts against us.
The only escape seemed to lie out in space… but the devastating effect of the cosmic rays wrought havoc in the minds of the space men and the lunar expedition turned on itself in deadly carnage.
What would be the outcome of the terrible conflict between man and beast?

The Edge – the farthest solar system of the civilized galaxy. Its one inhabitable planet, Tallyra, is unconventional, ungovernable an teeming with crooks – and it’s where young Jaxie Cade heads when he breaks jail with stolen information that could lead him to the fabled Phantom Planet, the dream of every Edge-worlder…

But trouble is right behind Cade: trouble from the alien Occians, from whom Cade stole the information; and from Raishe – a bounty-hunter and combat-ace determined to drag Cade back to prison. And that’s before the Commonwealth Intelligence Agency turns up – or the evil, mysterious criminal, Acs, takes a hand…

Edgar Pangborn studied music at Harvard when just 15 years old, eventually turned his back on music to focus on his writing. He flourished in the early ’50s, producing a string of highly-regarded stories for the likes of Galaxy, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Ellery Queen’s Mystery magazine. His work helped establish a new ‘humanist’ school of science fiction, and has been cited as an influence by Ursula Le Guin. This omnibus contains the Hugo-shortlisted Davy, International Fantasy Award-winner A Mirror for Observers and story collection Good Neighbours and Other Strangers.

DAVY: A HUGO and NEBULA AWARD nominee, this post-apocalyptic science fiction novel is Pangborn’s most acclaimed. It is set in the Northeastern United States some centuries after an atomic war ended high-technology civilization. Davy comes of age in a pseudo-medieval society dominated by a Church that actively suppresses technology.

A MIRROR FOR OBSERVERS: The Martians, long exiled from their home planet, have for millennia been observers of the world of men. Forbidden by their laws to interfere with human destiny, they wait for mankind to mature. From the turmoil of mid 20th-century America, word comes to the Observers that one their renegades is hoping to encourage humanity in its headlong rush to self-destruction through the corruption of a single rare intellect. The struggle between Observer and Abdicator for the continuance of the human species is one of the classic conflicts in the annals of science fiction.

GOOD NEIGHBORS AND OTHER STRANGERS: A collection of short stories reflecting Pangborn’s fresh writing style and mastery of the short form.

A fan from an early age, Chalker was also active as an editor, founding a small press in his early 20s, but it is as a writer that he is best known. Although his earliest novels were singletons, he soon turned his attention to the sequences that would dominate his career: most notably, The Well of Souls series.

This omnibus collects the first volume of that series, MIDNIGHT AT THE WELL OF SOULS; book one of his Soul Rider series, SPIRITS OF FLUX AND ANCHOR; and standalone novel, THE IDENTITY MATRIX.

Kate Wilhelm has a reputation as one of the 20th century’s finest SF writers. Winner of the Hugo Award for Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, she has produced an impressive body of work in the fields of SF and crime, and – along with her late husband, Damon Knight – has had a profound influence beyond her writing, through the Milford and Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshops. This omnibus contains novels The Clewiston Test and Welcome, Chaos and story collection The Infinity Box.

THE CLEWISTON TEST: Anne Clewiston would soon be hailed as a miracle worker. She had almost perfected the formula for a drug which would banish all pain from the world. The Lab tests went on; the caged apes were thriving, all the results positive. The next step – humans. Then, one night, a chimpanzee went berserk…

THE INFINITY BOX: A man’s eerie ability to enter – and control – the mind of a vulnerable young woman turns into a sexual nightmare…A hack writer with fading skills finds his soap operas foretelling the future…His retirement present, a watch, takes a man back into his own past…American soldiers attack the wrong country – their own!

WELCOME, CHAOS: Lyle is asked to spy on Saul Werther, who is thought to be a drug dealer. She finds him charming but realises she has been set up…Saul has developed a major breakthrough in the medical world which he is keeping secret, and Lyle has been sent there to uncover his secrets…

Meek and mild curate Thomas Blades discovered an alternative earth where humanity languished at the base of the food-chain. Over eventful years, Blades defeated the bestial Null master-race and carved out the empire of ‘New-Wessex’. Shedding all former inhibitions, he ascended its throne as unchallenged ‘god-king’.

Exiled in turn by overpowering new enemies – the ‘angels’ – Blades was rescued by his own descendant, Guy Ambassador, after centuries of absence. Under Blades’ strangely charmed leadership, the enigmatic and merciless angels were repulsed and humanity enjoyed a respite of liberty. But now, decades later, the venerable god-king broods in seclusion, refusing to die; the fountainhead of bitter thoughts and deeds.

Meanwhile, Wessex sinks-into anarchy and neglect. Guy Ambassador travels amongst the bickering princedoms and warring states, wavering in the faith that has cost him family, friends and home. All around him the world of New-Wessex is moving towards resolution of its ultimate destiny and reason for being. Forces beyond human comprehension invade the already baroque realm.

When Sabina picks up Adrien battered and bleeding outside Zagreb station, she knows only that she is drawn to this stranger and to the sense of danger he represents. She has no idea that she is also touching the Watcher, a mysterious figure who can inhabit Adrien’s body using a brain implant.

What might have been a love affair is about to turn deadly, for as Sabina is drawn into Adrien’s world, she will become the object of the Watcher’s desire in a battle over a metamorphic new technology known as I.

It’s murder on a film set…

‘Will keep you laughing and guessing from the first page to the last’ NEW YORK TIMES

Hildegarde Withers is just your average school teacher but with above-average skills in the art of deduction. She often finds herself investigating crimes led only by her own meddlesome curiosity, though her friends on the NYPD don’t mind when she solves their cases for them. After plans for a grand tour of Europe are interrupted by Germany’s invasion of Poland, Miss Withers heads to Los Angeles instead, where her vacation finds her working as a technical advisor on the set of a film adaptation of the Lizzie Borden story.

But the producer’s plans for an epic retelling of the historical killer’s murder-spree are derailed when a screenwriter turns up dead…

Mycroft has turned detective…

A masterclass of classic crime – ‘A triumph of ingenuity and horrific simplicity’ Boris Karloff

‘A very clever thriller’ Raymond Chandler


In an English country village, a recluse and a beekeeper team up to catch a cunning villain.

Far from the noise of Victorian London, Sydney Silchester’s two passions are privacy and honey. But when his honey supplier is found stung to death by her hive, the search for a new beekeeper takes Sydney to Mr. Mycroft, a brilliant man who has retired to Sussex to take up precisely this occupation, and who shares many traits with the great detective, Sherlock Holmes.

Mycroft, himself no stranger to crime-solving, immediately senses the bloody hand of murder. But what villain would have the mad intelligence to train an army of killer bees? And will Mycroft risk his own life to find the killer?

A magician turned detective is caught up in the most baffling locked-room murder mystery…

‘One of the all-time greatest impossible murder mysteries’ Publishers Weekly starred review

‘Dazzling’ Saturday Review

‘A cornerstone of detective fiction’ New York Times


Master magician The Great Merlini has hung up his top hat and white gloves, and now spends his days running a magic shop in New York and his nights moonlighting as a consultant for the NYPD. When the crimes seem impossible, it is his magician’s mind they need.

So when two occultists are discovered dead in locked rooms, one spread out on a pentagram, both appearing to have been murdered under similar circumstances, Merlini is immediately called in. The list of suspects includes an escape artist, a professional medium, and a ventriloquist – and it is only too clear that this is a world Merlini knows rather too well…

A series of horrifying murders rips through a sanatorium – and only the patients can stop the killings.

‘Baffling crimes, brilliant writing’ SATURDAY REVIEW

‘Quentin is a craftsman of the first class’ TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Peter Duluth turned to drink after his wife’s untimely death; now, two years later and desperate to dry out, he enters a sanitorium, hoping to turn his life around. But he doesn’t quite get the calm relaxation he expected. Strange, malevolent occurrences plague the hospital – and Peter hears his own voice crying out the warning ‘There will be murder.’

With a murderer is on the loose, and the staff every bit as erratic as the idiosyncratic patients, everyone is a suspect – including Peter, who is desperate to clear his name before the killer strikes again.

One woman drugged, another murdered – and a cat is the only witness. If you like Miss Marple, you’ll love this!

Terrific classic crime – with a new introduction by Joyce Carol Oates.

‘You will never regret having made the acquaintance of Miss Rachel Murdock’ NEW YORK TIMES

When Rachel Murdock and her sister Jennifer receive a call for help from their favourite niece, Lilly, they quickly hop on a train to see her – but not before collecting their prized cat Samantha in a picnic basket and bringing her along for the ride. Samantha, it turns out, is an heiress, the inheritor of a fortune left by a wealthy relative, and so the attempt on the cat’s life, made right after they arrive, comes as a shock. The cat survives, but Lilly, murdered soon thereafter, is not so lucky.

By the time the police arrive, the clues are already falling into place, with gambling debts just being the tip of a brutal killing spree iceberg. With the authorities distracted by lurid details, it’s up to Rachel and her furry friend to uncover the truth.

John Ansell, the new editor of Truth and Crime magazine, takes his appointment, and the title of the magazine, at face value. Until his boss, President of Barclay-Truth Inc., Noble Barclay, rejects his ‘Unsolved Mystery of the Month’ article, an investigation into the death of Warren G. Wilson, household name in correspondence courses, who was found dead in his hotel room with a bullet in his back.

Noble Barclay, it turns out, is anything but noble, and a dangerous man to boot. But how will his employee face the dilemma of exposing the father of the woman he loves? And at what cost?

When a woman’s body is found by the Thames river police, floating opposite the Houses of Parliament in London, it doesn’t take DCI Brock long to work out that she has been murdered.

Further investigation reveals the woman was one of a stable of prostitutes run by a shadowy figure wanted in his native Australia. But the investigation presses other names upon Brock and Poole, and they must suffer several missed turns and pay the price for their assumptions before they get their man.

When the traffic police call the local police station, who call CID, DI Brock is none too pleased to be forced to attend the scene of a traffic accident when he doesn’t see how it’s any of his business. But then it turns out that the body of a woman discovered in a ditch alongside the crashed car was not involved in the accident, but had been there for some time. What’s more, the woman is naked and covered in the vicious marks of a whip.

Unpleasant as it might be, this is very definitely Brock’s business.

Detective Constable Henry Campion turns lone avenger when his childhood friend and colleague DC Fred Jordan is shot dead by a gangster who is spared the death sentence. And Campion is convinced there were two killers. To try to catch the second, Campion goes undercover as a spiv in a King’s Cross nightclub, the Full Moon.

But Campion’s adventures at the Full Moon draw him deeper into gangland, and closer to the woman of his dreams – his dead friend’s widow . . .

But is it love, or is Anne Jordan using Campion for her own ends?

Sir Herbert Sterron is found dead, hanging by the neck from a curtain cord. He had good reason to want to kill himself, so nobody is unduly surprised.

But then hints of foul play start to emerge: Sterron’s wife, Griselda, was desperately unhappy with the marriage; and shocking evidence is uncovered that incriminates not just the County Sheriff but a Catholic priest.

Now what looked to be a straightforward suicide is turning into something quite different – a complex case of murder . . .

At a meeting of Quenborough Borough Council, the Mayor, Sir John Assington, is accused by Alderman Trant of wasting money and turning a blind eye to speculators on the make.

Then Trant is stabbed with his own knife, and while dying, manages to scratch the initials ‘MA’ on a piece of paper.

Local Chief Constable Race is on the case. He is new to the force, so Superintendent Vorley comes to his aid. With the help of Scotland Yard, in the shape of Inspector Lott, they each bring a different approach to the investigation.

For the truth is rarely straightforward . . .

Cousins James and Charles Morden run a shipping company in Liverpool that is, in the wake of the Great War, struggling. It appears there have been financial irregularities, and then James Morden’s body is washed up on a bank of the Mersey. Evidence points to Charles Morden, after burning a lot of papers, having fled to New York.

It turns out there’s an illicit side to the business – and that James Morden’s wife, Lilith, is a major player.

The strands of the plot seem past untangling, but the family solicitor, William Turnbull, grasps every thread and draws them all together . . .

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.

Laura Chance, wife of Borford’s prospective Lord Mayor, becomes infatuated with her young hairdresser, Pierre, who resembles her dead son. Pierre is utterly selfish, unscrupulous and sees in the wealthy, middle-aged woman a dupe who can give him some of the material possessions he covets.

Despite her innate intelligence, Laura deceives herself that their relationship has a basis of real affection. But the trouble really starts when James Chance discovers what is happening and determines to ruin Pierre by using his influence in the city. Pierre, in his turn, plans a violent revenge . . .

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.

Brendan Thorne, ex-army Ranger and master CIA sniper, has turned his back on violence. But while working as a game warden at a Kenya safari park, an FBI team appear from nowhere, kidnap him and fly him back to the US to meet the newly elected President.

President Wallberg is being stalked by veteran Vietnam sniper and old schoolmate Hal Corwin. According to the government’s computers, Thorne is the perfect match for Corwin in every way. Only Thorne can stop him before he gets to the President.

Thorne pursues Corwin across America in a deadly game of cat and mouse, but as he closes in on his target, he learns that all is not as it seems, and that he can trust no one. Now he is caught in a web of deceit and ambition far larger than he ever suspected . . .

‘Rewarding, inventive and enjoyably perplexing’ Sunday Times

A colleague writes an obituary for a fellow scientist and Nobel Prize winner, somewhat relishing his death; a train in the Scottish Highlands takes the wrong track during a snowstorm, resulting in a death, possibly murder; a publisher’s reader reports on a hospital romance novel that bizarrely ends with a gory, Ripper-style murder. Ten apparently separate stories are ingeniously drawn together to form variations on a single theme – obsession with the success of a rival and the plotting of his death.

But obsession is an unstable motive for murder, and the game of revenge can turn very sour . . .

Betrayals is an ingenious, mesmerising puzzle, intricately pieced together by a master of the art.