The first Amanda Sutter knew of the pumpkin, the strange pumpkin, was a day in late September. Something was wrong with the pumpkin. Amanda felt it. There was an aura, a Sense of something emanating from the pumpkin that made her uneasy, brought primitive little stirrings of fear and disgust into her mind. Amanda remembered something her uncle, who had been a Presbyterian minister, had said to her when she was a child: Evil takes many forms, Mandy. Evil shares our bed and eats at our own table. Evil is everywhere, in every size and shape... Views: 55
A NAVAJO UNDERCOVER AGENT COMES TO THE RESCUE OF AN INNOCENT VICTIM IN ANOTHER COPPER CANYON MYSTERY BY AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR AIMÉE THURLO. Erin Barrett was the sole survivor of an armed assault on her company. Her saving grace? Undercover agent Kyle Goodluck, who'd grown from troubled youth to total warrior. Though he agreed to protect Erin, he still had unanswered questions. Starting with how much she could be trusted. But only Erin knew what these terrorists wanted--and were willing to kill for. Kyle just had to gauge how forthcoming she was going to be about it. Standing their ground as New Mexico heated up with cross fire, Kyle wouldn't settle for anything less than absolute victory. And with Erin as his spirit guide, he wouldn't have to settle for anything anymore.... Views: 55
The Bloody Conflict is long over. The lands are now controlled by despots, crooked cattle barons, energy hoarders, and anyone with enough might to keep the local folks under control.
For Clay MacAulay, none of that matters as he roams the land in a war machine from a time gone by. He wants nothing to do with small desert towns or brutal dictators. He only has his sights set on a new life. Unfortunately for Clay, too many ruthless people want what he has. They want the war machine he pilots. They want the battle mech that shouldn’t exist anymore.
They want his Fighting Iron.
But they will have to pry Clay’s cold, dead body out of that pilot’s seat before they can take it from him. And he plans on fighting them every massive mech step of the way!
A far-future mech western, Fighting Iron is a rip-roaring scifi adventure filled with six-shooters, plasma canons, rough and rowdy saloon brawls, showdowns, corrupt landowners, and fifty foot battle machines ready to crush everything in their path!
** Views: 55
When an aristocratic old lady is brutally murdered in her
English country home on the night before September 11, 2001, it will take all
the resources of the FBI and Interpol to work out the connection between her
death and a priceless Van Gogh, which is stolen that night. But in the
end, it is a courageous young woman who escapes from North Tower of the World
Trade Center after the first plane crashes into the building, who has the
foresight and determination to take on both sides of the law and avenge the old
lady's death.The young woman, Anna Petrescu, takes advantage of being
missing and presumed dead in the days after 9/11 to escape from New York City,
only to be pursued by both the FBI and a ruthless assassin across the globe,
from Toronto to London, to Hong Kong, Tokyo and Bucharest. But it is only when
she finally returns to New York that the mystery unravels.In his first
thriller since The Eleventh Commandment, international bestselling author
Jeffrey Archer takes the reader on a breathtaking journey, full of twists and
turns, all leading back to the question of why so many people are willing to
risk their lives to own Van Gogh's Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear. And it's not
just because it could be worth one hundred million dollars. Views: 55
In the grips of a cold and drab autumn, Collector's Weekly reporter Molly Appleby is thrilled to be attending a festive black-tie fundraiser hosted by the very private Natasha Gordon, an heiress known for her charitable events and aversion to the limelight. It's Molly first chance to see the stunning interior of the Gordon estate, but when a rare book dealer is pushed from a high window to his death, she's confronted with a sight that's become all too common for her. And despite the fact that the crude and pompous victim was roundly disliked by all who knew him and that any number of people may have wanted him dead, Molly agrees to look into the murder for his surviving son.As the police go about their steady business of interviewing the dozens of people in attendance that night, Molly decides to look closer to home and begins questioning the staff and anyone else connected to the estate and the victim. More and more stories of the dead man's troubled life and marriage... Views: 55
Bodies that won't stay buried—is it a practical joke? Or murder?Lord Fitzroy-Hammond of Resurrection Row has been dead and buried three weeks when he turns up sitting atop a hansom cab. Grave robbing, though a crime, isn't Inspector Thomas Pitt's usual fare. But when the macabre joke is repeated, and the man's corpse is found sitting in the family pew the Sunday following his second interment, Pitt begins to wonder if perhaps there's some message in it. The case grows increasingly bizarre as other disinterred bodies appear.A new mother, Charlotte Pitt only takes a cursory interest in the grave robbing case until she hears Thomas mention the name of her late sister's husband, Dominic Corde, as a possible suspect. As Pitt follows leads into the slums and rookeries, Charlotte, too, is drawn into the politics and horrors of greed and exploitation.For Pitt and Charlotte, what begins as a mysterious case of musical corpses, becomes a deadly pursuit through the London... Views: 55
On the bitterly cold morning of January 6, a frozen body is found in the Lancashire town of Brunton.
It seems 19-year-old Hannah Woodgate is the latest victim of the serial killer the media have dubbed “the Lancashire Leopard”.
Detective Inspector Percy Peach is determined to find the Leopard before he kills again.
But with no motive, no fingerprints and no clues, that is proving to be a very hard task indeed.
How does the Leopard choose his victims?
And, with a 60-strong task-force going through a painstaking process of eliminating suspects trying to track him down, how is he keeping one step ahead of the police at every turn?
When the next woman’s body is found, the police are as baffled as ever.
Whom should they suspect?
Handsome loner Clyde Northcott, who was found with drugs after a bust-up at a party?
Neo-Nazi thug Paul Dutton, who has shown he can certainly be violent?
What about Terry Plant, recently released from prison, and on the hunt for his ex-wife?
Or Michael Devaney, who certainly has reason to hold a grudge against women?
With no shortage of suspects, or victims, DI Peach faces fatal pressure to find the ‘Lancashire Leopard’ before he makes his next kill.
‘The Lancashire Leopard’ is a chilling, expertly-plotted mystery story. It is perfect for fans of Ian Rankin and Peter Robinson.
Praise for J M Gregson:
‘Begins with quiet observation before pouncing to murderous effect’ - Sunday Express
‘A chilling story that never flags from start to finish’ - Bolton Evening News
‘. . . Peach is as distinctive as Inspector Morse but less brooding’ - Booklist
J M Gregson taught for twenty-seven years in schools, colleges and universities before concentrating on full-time writing. He has written books on subjects as diverse as golf and Shakespeare. His other crime novels include ‘Stranglehold’, ‘Girl Gone Missing’ and ‘Body Politic’.
Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent publisher of digital books.
**From Publishers Weekly
Lives hang in the balance as series hero Detective Inspector Percy Peach tracks a serial killer in J.M. Gregson's (A Turbulent Priest) The Lancashire Leopard. The killer's tendencies suggest law-enforcement know-how, and the fact that he targets young women of a certain type makes Peach fear for his companion and colleague, Detective Sergeant Lucy Blake.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
Gregson is a Lancastrian by birth, and taught for 27 years in schools, colleges and universities. Views: 55
As the twenty-fifth century draws to a close, Prime Cornelian, a ruthless usurper of Martian rule, will do anything to control all of human civilization, and the fate of all humankind is in the hands of the exiled King of Earth, Dalin Shar. About the AuthorAl Sarrantonio, the author of twenty-eight books, is a winner of the Bram Stoker Award and has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the British Fantasy Award. He is the editor of numerous books, including the highly acclaimed anthology 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense. His short stories have appeared in magazines such as Heavy Metal, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Analog, Fantastic and Amazing, as well as in anthologies such as The Year’s Best Horror Stories, Visions of Fantasy: Tales from the Masters, Great Ghost Stories, and The Best of Shadows. His best stories have been collected in Toybox. Views: 55
A new e-book compilation of Alfred Bester's brilliant short fiction, Views: 55
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.Tomb of the Mad Emperor "Oops," Annja Creed said as she felt something give beneath the cleated heel of her Red Wing walking shoe. The floor of the passageway was caked inches thick in dust. Annja couldn't see the trigger. She had sensed more than heard something like a twig snapping. Already in motion, Annja dived for the floor. She heard a grind, a rumble, a rusty creaking. Then with a hefty metallic sound something shot from the stone walls above her. Catching herself on her hands, Annja looked around by the light of her bulky hand lantern, which lay several feet ahead of her. She spotted three bronze spears spanning the two-yard-wide corridor a yard above the floor. They were meant to impale any unwary intruder. That included her. Annja shook her head. "Emperor Lu may or may not have been crazy," she muttered. "But he sure was paranoid." The echoes of her words chased each other down the slanting corridor, deep into the earth's dark recesses. Cautiously Annja wiggled forward. As her weight came off the hidden floor plate the spears began to retract into the walls. By the time she reached her lantern they had vanished. The stone plates that covered the ports through which the spears had thrust out swung back into place. Coughing on the dust she had stirred up doing her snake act, Annja sat up and shone her light on the walls. She could see no sign of where the spears had come from. The walls had been painted with some kind of murals, perhaps once quite colorful. They had faded to mere swirls and suggestions of faint color. They worked to camouflage the trap, though. She shook her head and picked herself up. "Got to move," she told herself softly as she dusted off the front of her tan shirt and khaki cargo pants. This would be her only shot. With the construction of a giant dam nearby, the floodwaters were rising. By tomorrow they would make the subterranean tunnels unsafe. With redoubled caution she made her way deeper into the lost emperor's tomb. The corridor walls were hewed from a yellow limestone. Tests showed it had been quarried in some hills several miles away. The passageway air was cool and dry. It smelled of stone and earth. Some indeterminate distance down, as Annja began to feel the weight, not just of years, but of millions of tons of earth pressing upon her, the corridor leveled. It had taken several bends and a couple of doglegs, and had plateaued briefly, as well. Annja wasn't sure whether the zigs and zags had some ritual significance, were meant to additionally befuddle an interloper or were simply to prevent a cart full of spoil from running all the way back down to the bottom during the digging of the corridor. She suspected it was all of the above. Far down the hallway, in which she could just stand upright, Annja saw that something was blocking the way. Could that be the door to Lu's actual tomb? she wondered. Her heart beat quickened. According to the ground-penetrating radar scans, it could be. The last Chinese team to come down here had intended to open the bronze door to the burial chamber proper. She had no idea whether they had or not. The Beijing University officials who had hired Annja suggested that they felt the last team had indeed made some major discoveries and had then departed by some currently unknown entrance to the great mound before vanishing. There was nothing intrinsically unlikely about that. Such huge structures often had multiple entrances. But she was being asked to play archaeology cop—to find out if the tomb had been plundered and, if possible, to trace the thieves. She was certainly willing enough. Like any real archaeologist she had an unremitting hatred of tomb robbers. "Of course that assumes a lot of ifs," Annja said aloud. Her voice, echoing down the chamber, reassured her. Something about the place bothered her. She flashed her light down the corridor. She thought she saw a hint of green from the obstruction. She knew that was consistent with bronze doors. The copper in the alloy turned green as it oxidized. Otherwise bronze wasn't prone to corrosion, as iron and steel were. I wonder if I should have looked more closely for bloodstains around those spear traps, she thought. The two expeditions that had returned had warned about various booby traps. But she wasn't here to do forensic work. Time pressed. So did the billions of tons of water that would soon be rushing to engulf the mound. As she moved forward toward the door she became aware of a strange smell. A bad smell, and all too familiar—the stench of death. It grew stronger as she approached the door.And then she fell right into another of Emperor Lu's little surprises. The floor tipped abruptly beneath her. The right side pivoted up. She dropped straight down. Without thought she formed her right hand into a fist. Obedient to her call, the hilt of the legendary blade of Joan of Arc filled her hand. Falling, she thrust the sword to her left and drove it eight inches into the pit's wall. It was enough. Grabbing the hilt with her left hand, as well, she clung desperately and looked down. The hint of scent had become a foul cloud that enveloped her. She choked and gagged. The floor trap was hinged longitudinally along the center. The pit was twenty feet long and sank at least twelve feet deep. Bronze spearheads jutted up from the floor like snaggled green teeth. Entangled and impaled among them, almost directly below her, lay a number of bodies. She couldn't tell exactly how many; they had become tangled together as they fell onto the spears. The glare of her lantern, which lay tilted fortuitously up and angled in a corner, turned them into something from a nightmare. One man hung alone to one side, bent backward. His mouth was wide open in a final scream at the spearhead that jutted two feet upward from his belly. The remnants of what looked like a stretcher of sorts, possibly improvised out of backpack-frames, lay beneath him. At the shadow-clotted base of the pit she could just make out the dome of a skull or the multiple arch of a rib cage protruding from ages of drifted dust. The missing Chinese archaeology team were not the first victims. She looked up. She had fallen only a couple of yards below the pit's lip. The sword had entered the wall blade-vertical. It flexed only slightly under her weight. She knew it could break—the English had done it, when they burned its former holder at the stake—but it didn't seem strained at the moment. Unwilling to test it any longer than she had to, she swung back and forth experimentally, gaining momentum. Then she launched her legs back and up and let go. Whatever kind of graceful landing she was hoping for didn't happen. Her legs and hips flopped up onto the floor. Her head and upper torso swung over empty space—and the waiting bronze spearheads. As her body started to topple forward she got her hands on the rim of the pit and halted herself. Her hair escaped from the clip holding it to hang about her face like a curtain. With something like revulsion she threw herself backward. She sprawled on her butt and elbows, scraping the latter. Then she just lay like that awhile and breathed deeply. The sword had vanished into the otherwhere. One thing her life had taught her since she had come, unwittingly and quite unwillingly, into possession of Joan of Arc's Sword was to bounce back from the most outlandish occurrences as if they were no more significant or unusual than spilling a cup of coffee. "That got the old heart rate going," she said. She slowly got to her feet. The trapdoor swung over and began to settle back to the appearance of a normal, innocuous stretch of floor. As it eclipsed the beam of her lost lamp, shining up from the pit like hellfire, she reached up to switch on her headlamp. Its reassuring yellow glow sprang out as the glare was cut off. It wasn't very powerful. The darkness seemed to flood around the narrow beam, with a palpable weight and presence. "It'll be enough," she muttered. "It has to be." Putting her back to the left-hand wall, she edged down the corridor. The dust, which had settled in the past few weeks, hiding the doomed expedition's footsteps, had been dumped into the pit, except for a certain quantity that still swirled in the air and rasped her lungs like sandpaper. The clean patch of floor, limned by the white light shining from below, made its end obvious. Cautiously she moved the rest of the way down the corridor toward the green door. No more traps tried to grab her. As she'd suspected, the door was verdigrised bronze. It had a stylized dragon embossed on it—the ancient symbol of imperial might. She hesitated. She saw no obvious knob or handle. Reaching into her pocket for a tissue to cover her hand, she pushed on the door. It swung inward creakily. She had to put her weight behind it before it opened fully. A great wash of cool air swept over her. Surprisingly, it lacked the staleness she would have expected from a tomb sealed for two and a half millennia. Bending low, she stepped inside. The tomb of Mad Emperor Lu was almost anticlimactic. It was a simple domed space, twenty yards in diameter, rising to ten at the apex, through which a hole about a yard wide opened through smooth-polished stone. Annja wondered if had been intended to allow the emperor's spirit to depart the burial chamber. Dust covered the floor, a good four inches deep, so that it swamped Annja's shoes. In the midst of the dust pond stood a catafalque, four feet high and wide, eight feet long. On it lay an effigy in what appeared to be moldering robes, long cobwebbed and gone the color of the dust that had mounded over it, half obscuring it. A second mound rose suggestively by the feet. Annja dug her digital camera from her pack. She snapped several photos. The built-in flash would have to do. Feeling time and the approaching floodwaters pressing down, Annja moved forward as cautiously as she could through the dust. Her archaeologist's reflex was to disturb things as little as possible. But that wasn't the reason for... Views: 55
From Publishers WeeklyCornwell's fourth entry in the popular Saxon Tales (following Lords of the North) is a rousing romp through the celebrated ninth-century reign of Alfred the Great. Uhtred of Bebbanburg, a 28-year-old pagan Saxon lord of war, has pledged to serve Alfred by commanding the defensive frontier forts (burhs). Trouble arises when the Norse Viking brothers Sigefrid and Erik Thurgilson capture and occupy London, threatening Alfred's border and his control of the Thames River port. The Christian Alfred directs Uhtred to raise a Wessex army, expel the pagan Thurgilsons and resecure London. Commanding Uhtred is his vain, abusive cousin Ethelred, who is married to Alfred's eldest daughter, Ethelflaed. Plying his swords Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting, Uhtred is a stirring, larger-than-life action hero conflicted by ambition, fidelity and thirst for violence. All the major characters are well drawn, and the London battle scenes unfold quickly and vividly. A deft mix of historical details and customs authenticates the saga. And Cornwell drops in a slick twist precipitating the climatic battle to wrest control of London for the Saxons, paving the way for the story to continue. (Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review‘The characterisation, as ever, is excellent...And one can only admire the little touches that bring the period to life: the bitter weather; the swollen rivers; the soliders gossiping about ale and women...he can also claim to be a true poet of both the horror and the glory of war, showing a feeling for the ways of fighting men which is too often lacking in the politicians who send them into battle.’Sunday TelegraphThis is typical Cornwell, meticulously researched, massive in scope, brilliant in execution’. News of the World‘Sword Song’s as sharply written as all of Cornwell’s historical adventures.’ Bournemouth Daily Echo‘...this will not disappoint Cornwell’s legions of fans.’ Western Daily Press‘...epic drama, rich language and a thoroughly satisfying journey through Saxon history.’ Eastern Daily PressPraise for ‘The Lords of the North’:‘Beautifully crafted story-telling, complete with splendid set-piece battles and relentless derring-do, so gripping that it rarely stops to catch a breath. It demonstrates once again Cornwell’s enormous skill as a historical narrator. He would have graced Alfred’s court entertaining the guests with his stories.’ Daily Mail‘Cornwell takes the spectres of ninth century history and puts flesh back on their bones. Here is Alfred's world restored – impeccably researched and illuminated with the colour and passion of a master storyteller.’Justin Pollard, author of ‘Alfred the Great’Praise for Bernard Cornwell:'Bernard Cornwell is a literary miracle. Year after year, hail, rain, snow, war and political upheavals fail to prevent him from producing the most entertaining and readable historical novels of his generation.' Daily Mail'Cornwell's narration is quite masterly and supremely well-researched.' Observer Views: 55
