Search Results for: faces

Tiger Mann is faced with one of the most frightening challenges of his career: to avert the imminent destruction of the defence system of the United States. An engineer has disappeared, taking with him the secret of the device he created: a method to by-pass the buttons which activate America’s most deadly missiles – and render the system inoperative.

The Communists want more than anything else to discover the workings of the by-pass control, and Tiger is equally determined to see that they don’t. But to prevent them, Tiger has to find the missing man first …

And that’s a job in itself.

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

Mystery writer Brendan Monroe is tormented by the fear that his flamboyant fictional detective P. I. Roy Barron has come to life. Is the author losing his mind? Or is someone making it seem that way?

When Barron is found dead, Sergeant Dan Valentine of the Santa Monica police focuses his investigation on the local chapter of the Mystery Writers of America, where he faces the fascinating challenge of trying to trap a murderer whose profession is devising diabolical plots.

‘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.

After a thousand years in space the earth vessel lands on a remote planet capable of supporting human life, Shakespeare’s Planet.



But due to a systems malfunction Carter Horton is the only crew member to awaken from his long sleep. And on the strange alien planet he finds only the bizarre creature named Carnivore. Soon he discovers that the two of them must leave the planet immediately – or face certain death. But his space-ship is now obsolete and the inner-space tunnel, their only escape-route to safety, has broken down…

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…

Earl Dumarest, trans-galactic soldier of fortune, is still seeking his birthplace, the fabled planet Earth.

On the distant, decadent planet Dradea, he meets the mysterious, mutant woman Veruchia. She selected him from the gladiators’ arena to become her servant. . . and more.

Soon, Dumarest discovers that she too is engaged in a quest – and that the fate of her planet hangs in the balance. Fascinated, compelled, he agrees to help her.

But then he must face bizarre perils which make the gladiatorial arena seem a haven of safety. . .



(First published 1973)

When a nervous scientist from Beller Laboratories approached James Harker, asking him to introduce a new scientific discovery to the world, Harker had his own reasons for agreeing. The discovery was a reanimation process – bringing the recently dead back to life. But Harker hadn’t anticipated treachery within the ranks of the scientists working on the process, nor on the consternation and mounting hysteria when the news broke. James Harker faced the most demanding task of his life – and he didn’t know if he would live to see the results.



(First published 1962)

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.

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.

The Changeling could become anyone or anything – man, woman, child, animal. It was endowed with an inborn lust for disorder and destruction. Now it had chosen the plague-ridden planet of Alvea for its next mission – to throw an entire world into eternal chaos and madness.

The Earth Consortium could send only an embittered killer and an untrained anthropologist to hunt down the Changeling. Yet, dangerous though it was, the Changeling was not the only peril the Earthmen faced on Alvea, or the worst – for the Alveans feared and hated Earth. Even a hint of the hunter’s identities would leave them dead and dismembered within minutes

England has driven the French from Atlantis, giving King George leave to tighten control over the colonies. As part of a strategy to bend the colonists to their will, the Redcoats seize the continent’s eastern coastal towns, depriving the Atlanteans of the markets where they sell their goods.

Instead, England’s tactics only strengthen the Atlanteans’ resolve to be free. As leader of the revolutionaries, Victor Radcliff will make the English pay for each and every piece of land they dare to occupy. He will stop at nothing to preserve the liberty of his people as a new nation is born – a nation that will change the face of the world.

As the Derlavaian War rages into its last and greatest battles, allied nations manoeuvre for positions against each other in a postwar world. But before that time can come, the forces of Algarve, Unkerlant and their allies must clash a final time, countering army with army and battle magic with ever-more-powerful battle magic. In the midst of it all, the people the war has battered and reshaped must struggle to face their greatest individual challenges, as loves are shattered and found, terrible crimes avenged…and some journeys end forever.

And the end of the war may not bring peace…

PROGRESS REPORT:


Cornwall, Nebraska – 894 catatonic, 86 dead


Boland, California – 1200 blind


Berwick, Maine – 2100 severely mentally retarded


McKay, Maryland – 2300 with complete loss of memory


Small towns, each wiped out as surely as if bombed off the face of the earth.

The president’s announcement was simple: “My fellow Americans, the people of the United States are under attack. Terrorists are using germ warfare against us and we must take extraordinary enforcement measures. I will ask Congress to declare a state of national emergency…”

Stolen from Earth by Ithaqua the Wind-Walker and transported to the alien world of Borea, a team of ERP-talented earthmen are faced with a terrible choice: join with the Thing That Walks on the Wind in his eternal war with Armandra and the People of the Plateau, and become his mindless slaces or side with Armandra and risk the perils of the Plateau – especially its Cavern of Madness!

Such a choice might seem easy, for at least the People of the Plateau are human…but is Armandra herself human As Ithaqua’s daughter, who can say which way her loyalties will turn when the chips are down and Ithaqua walks on the wind?

Earth was threatened with attach from the huge space-fleets of the Hundred Suns of Andromeda – an attack that the Terran Fleet could not hope to defeat.

Only one chance remained to prevent Earth’s destruction, and that was the chance that a skilled and experienced saboteur might just have time strike his blow before the enemy could launch the attack.

It was Captain Blair whose mission this became, and it was his ace-saboteur who raced against death in planet after planet, as the zero-hour approached when Earth would face the attacking fleets of DARK ANDROMEDA.

At last, Claidi and her beloved Argul are free to get married. But before they can start their life together, Claidi must face her past. They return to her birthplace, the House, to rescue the other slaves – and find that there has been a revolution, sparked by Claidi’s escape. Then the two are urgently summoned by Ironel Novendot of the Wolf Tower, who tells them that Ustareth is alive. Ustareth, the mother of Argul and Venn, the science-sorceress, who has perhaps manipulated each of them for their entire lives. Now she wants them all to visit her – but to what end?

Man is established on Kliron XIV, a dark, bleak, barren little globe used solely as a base for spatial patrol ships. Life on Kliron is no bed of roses, but it is only when faced by perils that seem at first too incredible to believe that the best – and worst – is revealed in men. Here in Kliron XIV just such a peril materialises. For the first time in their lives men find themselves confronted by an enemy against which no weapon can prevail. Worse even than the Master Entity, the Gargantua are its slaves, evil Flowers of Darkness that bloom where no life can exist . . .

Dr. Henshaw had created what he thought was a time travel machine and he had sent guinea pigs through it. But now he needed a human guinea pig to test it with.

Christopher Wilkinson thought the whole idea was absurd, until a book that had been sent through the machine came back with a thumb print on it, the fingerprint of Vanessa, his long lost sweetheart!

So Wilkinson agreed to the experiment. He stood in the white circle facing the machine as it began to gleam and spin, pulling him down through the tortuous coils of time…

A manuscript is found: filled with small, precise writing and smelling of pit-water, it tells the story of an old recluse and his strange home – and its even stranger, jade-green double, seen by the recluse on an otherworldly plain where gigantic gods and monsters roam.

Soon his more earthly home is no less terrible than his bizarre vision, as swine-like creatures boil from a cavern beneath the ground and besiege it. But a still greater horror will face the recluse – more inexorable, merciless and awful than any creature that can be fought or killed.

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.

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.

It was largely chance that took Dougal Macneil to the empty racetrack that morning, but when he inadvertently sees – and photographs – something he shouldn’t he is soon under threat from a seemingly omnipotent force.

Colonel Weber, head of police of the tiny Central American country of Montoro, is sheltering a former Nazi whose name is high on Israel’s most-wanted list. And on the face of it he holds all the cards: control of the police force, the trust of government officials – and Macneil’s wife, whom he is holding in ‘protective custody’. But Macneil is not an adversary to be underestimated . . .

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.