Search Results for: witness-to-life,-a

2030. The Moralist party is in power, buoyed by the promise to end death. Chronic care specialist Patricia Jewett deals daily with the result: her ward is packed with technologically dependent patients. When a colleague ends up paralysed and nearly brain-dead, Jewett is forced to keep him alive – while knowing his wishes to terminate life support. Then a murder occurs, and Jewett, the only witness, is also the prime suspect.

In the wilds of the Trans-Himalayan region, a quartet of adventurers led by Dr. Walter T. Goodwin stumbles upon a tribe of human primitives forgotten since the age of Alexander the Great, and an awesome being of living metal commanded by the exiled Norhala. As Norhala’s guests, Goodwin and his team witness the mind-boggling marvels that are the Metal Monster’s way of life, and the unspeakable horrors it commits when Norhala takes it to war against her persecutors.

A crime writer’s family witnesses a real-life murder – the neighbourhood just got dangerous…
Perfect for fans of KNIVES OUT

‘There was never anyone else like Craig Rice’ NEW YORK TIMES

Growing up with a crime writer for a mother leaves the Carstairs family with a talent for detection. So when they witnesses a neighbourhood murder, they launch their own investigation. And why not? They know everything about baffling mysteries from reading their mother’s books, the publicity could do wonders for her sales, and then she and a handsome detective could fall in love. It’s too perfect for words.

Marion’s too busy wrapping up the loose ends of her latest book for the inconvenience of a real crime. But what’s surfacing in the shadows of the house next door is not quite as predictable as fiction: accusations of racketeering, kidnapping and blackmail – and much more…

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.

When Kupe, one of the great Polynesian voyagers, chases a huge octopus across the ocean, he discovers the strange and mysterious Land of Mists and rescues a man and a woman from the wild sea. He carries them back to the island of Raiatea where the pale strangers witness the momentous events that follow the death of the king and the struggle for succession.
But the gods are watching also, and when Prince Tangiia and his followers secretly flee the island in search of a new home, their intervention becomes inevitable.
Delighting in the rich and colourful detail and myth of Polynesian life, The Roof of Voyaging is the first part of a wonderful tale which will become a landmark in fantastic fiction.

Amongst the gorse and the heathers of his native highlands, Skelter the mountain hare enjoyed an idyllic life: browsing and gambolling; taking in the superb scenery and making female friends, including the beautiful Rushie. Then one day Skelter’s life of ease came to an abrupt end. Netted and captured, he and several other hares are transported hundreds of miles, to the strange lands of the south, destined for the cruel sport of hare coursing. Amidst a hell of shouting men and howling greyhounds, Skelter witnesses a nightmare, before making a miraculous escape.


Alone, stranded in a landscape he does not understand, Skelter must learn to survive, despite the hostility and distrust of the local hares and other natural hazards.


By far the most horrifying peril that faces Skelter is the florge: a vast, flying monster which is terrorising the countryside, killing indiscriminately.


Raised in isolation by a man, thousands of miles from his native habitat, Bubba is a killer more terrifying than any natural creature: for he believes himself human. Can one small mountain hare survive against such a monster?

Darian is apprentice to the Wizard Justyn in a small Valdemaran village. He is unwilling to hone his skill in magic as he believes it is quicker more efficient to achieve your ends by purely physical methods. When Errold Green is suddenly and devastatingly attacked by a force of men accompanied by monstrous creatures of magic, Justyn makes a dramatic last stand, destroying the village in a cataclysmic spell that Darien witnesses. Escaping into the forest, Darien is chased down by three of the enemy only to be saved at the point of capture by the mysterious Hawkbrothers. It is the beginning of a new life where he will for the first time realise the worth of the magical talent he has always wanted to be rid of.

Section G, the top-secret security unit of United Planets, had a special problem on their hands wit the situation on Firenze. And for that special problem, they gathered together the most unusual squad in Section G’s unusual history. It included:

A research biologist who could bend steel bars like rubber bands.

A middle-aged lady with total total recall.

An interplanetary cowboy whose bullwhip was deadlier than a ray gun.

A brazen young lady acrobat who looked like an eight-year-old kid.

A mild young man who never lost a bet in his life.

And the best pickpocket that ever lived.

But Firenze with its CODE DUELLO was to prove a match for the lot of them!

Keith Robert’s The Lordly Ones offers a wide variety of sf and fantasy (and even a ghost story). The title story is a vision of near-future Britain collapsing in social disorder told from the viewpoint of a slow-witted lavatory attendant. Another take, “The Comfort Station”, approaches a similar situation from a quite different perspective. In other stories we see Roberts in a more light-hearted vein: “The Checkout”, another of his series of stories about a modern-day witch, Anita, or “Diva”, a tale of singer of unique abilities. In “Ariadne Potts” a man’s wish brings a classical statue to life, with, inevitably, unfortunate results. “The Castle and the Hoop” is an atmospheric ghost story set around the pubs of Southwark. And “Sphairistike” is perhaps the only sf story ever to centre on the game of tennis.

In every mouse’s long life, there comes a time when ancestral voices tell him to move on. Pedlar, a yellow-necked mouse, has reached that point. Told to leave the Hedgerow and go on a long journey, the adventurous mouse says his farewells and sets out for a far-distant country knows as The House. Reaching his destination, Pedlar enters a strange new world inhabited by many warring tribes: the Stinkhorns of the cellar, the great Savage Tribe in the kitchen, the library Bookeaters, the Invisibles, the Deathshead and the rebellious 13-K Gang.

During his stay, Pedlar witnesses a momentous truce, in which the tribes come together at an Allthing meeting and decide to rid themselves of the greatest pests in The House, the greedy, stupid nudniks – the humans. And so the Great Nudnik Drive is set in motion, a time of considerable anxiety for the nudniks, when clocks strike twenty and inanimate objects seem to have a life of their own. Ranged against the mouse tribes are the nudniks’ allies: the two cats, Eyeball the Burmese blue and Spitz the ginger tom; the Headhunter, a barbarian human child; and Little Prince, the Headhunter’s cannibalistic pet white mouse. The House becomes a hotbed of riot and discord, until Pedlar finally comes up with a solution. The outcome of this heroic struggle has gone down in the annals of mouse history, a history tens of thousands of days long, and the whole remarkable tale is recorded here, between these pages.

Ted Bunpole proposes, and Betty Haverhill says no. But Ted won’t take “no” for an answer, and the situation gets tiresome. Betty books passage to Europe by freighter.
The Garda departs San Francisco for Italy, via the Panama Canal. Passengers include the intellectual Alex Cato and his wife Ora; Nello di Prieri, whose father is a Marquis; plump Harry Mayberry, owner of a dry-cleaning plant in Oakland-and the formidable, cigar-smoking Mik Finsch, a Dutchman recently from El Salvador.
And who but the dogged Ted Bunpole-following Betty despite her clear wishes? In desperation, Betty flirts with Mik Finsch; Ted loses his head, and sinister events follow.
In San Salvador, Betty witnesses a killing. With the Garda back at sea, the killer is on the ship-and her life is in danger…
But Betty is no pushover.

An inheritance comes with its own sinister dangers…
‘Joan Aiken’s triumph with this genre is that she does it so much better than others’ New York Times Book Review

Annette, an increasingly amnesiac magazine editor who has inherited an unexpected fortune, leaves London for a new life in a cottage in the country, but falls prey to a series of strange characters who threaten to deprive her of not just her money, but her sanity too. There’s a world-famous artist with a dark secret; a New Zealander on an archaeological dig; and a strange neighbour wheeling an invalid ‘child’ on a lonely road…

Set in the picturesque Sussex town where the author was born and spent her early years in a haunted house, this gothic thriller builds to a terrifying climax as the heroine pits her wits against the sinister forces that surround her.

Harry Keough, aka the Necroscope, has always considered himself a master of the Mobius Continuum – a dimension existing parallel to all space and time and his personal instantaneous gateway to anywhere in the multiverse. But this is hardly overweening conceit on Harry’s part, for to his knowledge he is not unique; two other intelligences, with powers similar to his, do indeed exist. One such is the long-dead August Ferdinand Mobius himself, the German astronomer, mathematician, and discoverer of the eponymous Mobius Strip which led him to explore, posthumously, his previously conjectural Continuum; and the other is Harry’s son, who has not only inherited his father’s mathematical skill but also the metaphysical talent by means of which the Necroscope converses with dead people in their graves!

Picture Harry’s confusion, then, on returning home via the Mobius Continuum from an adventure in Las Vegas, as he witnesses however briefly a flailing figure hurtling conscious but uncontrolled through the endless midnight of the Continuum. Who could this be – how can it be? – that a helpless, silently protesting other is rushing meteor-like across the Continuum’s Stygian vault? Moreover, if he hasn’t arrived here voluntarily, then what vile murderer has sent his victim on this monstrous journey to the end of life itself? For Harry is sure that this is neither his son’s nor Professor Mobius’ doing.

Who and where is he, this Mobius murderer? It is a mystery that only the Necroscope can ever hope to solve – but at what risk to his own life?

Scott Warden is a man haunted by the past – and soon to be haunted by the future.
In early twenty-first-century Thailand, Scott is an expatriate slacker. Then, one day, he inadvertently witnesses an impossible event: the violent appearance of a 200-foot stone pillar in the forested interior. Its arrival collapses trees for a quarter mile around its base, freezing ice out of the air and emitting a burst of ionizing radiation. It appears to be composed of an exotic form of matter. And the inscription chiseled into it commemorates a military victory…sixteen years in the future.
Shortly afterwards, another, larger pillar arrives in the center of Bangkok – obliterating the city and killing thousands. Over the next several years, human society is transformed by these mysterious arrivals from, seemingly, our own near future. Who is the warlord “Kuin” whose victories they note?
Scott wants only to rebuild his life. But some strange look of causality keeps drawing him in, to the central mystery and a final battle with the future.

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.

Powerful war machines of the far-future collide across a barren desert world in this post-apocalyptic debut novel from award-winning Australian author Cat Sparks.

Seventeen-year-old Star and her sister Nene are orphans, part of a thirteen-wagon caravan of nomadic traders living hard lives travelling the Sand Road. Their route cuts through a particularly dangerous and unforgiving section of the Dead Red Heart, a war-ravaged desert landscape plagued by rogue semi-sentient machinery and other monsters from a bygone age.

But when the caravan witnesses a relic-Angel satellite unexpectedly crash to Earth, a chain of events begins that sends Star on a journey far away from the life she once knew. Shanghaied upon the sandship Dogwatch, she is forced to cross the Obsidian Sea by Quarrel, an ancient Templar supersoldier. Eventually shipwrecked, Star will have no choice but to place her trust in both thieves and priestesses while coming to terms with the grim reality of her past-and the horror of her unfolding destiny-as the terrible secret her sister had been desperate to protect her from begins to unravel.

Meanwhile, something old and powerful has woken in the desert. A Lotus Blue, deadliest of all the ancient war machines. A warrior with plans of its own, far more significant than a fallen Angel. Plans that do not include the survival of humanity.

A quick-witted Irish safecracker juggles alchemy and automatons in the action-packed follow-up to the nineteenth-century United States steampunk adventure, King of the Cracksmen.

Liam McCool, the premier safecracker in 1877 New York, isn’t the type to hang around fairy circles on the Celtic day of the dead. But an invitation from his Gram leaves the “King of the Cracksmen” possessed by the spirit of Finn McCool, the great hunter-warrior of ancient Ireland and a mighty magical force.

Just in time, too. Edwin Stanton, once Lincoln’s Secretary of War but now a self-proclaimed dictator, has restored slavery in the United States, and conscripted every able-bodied white male to fight in the war he’s waging against Little Russia, made up of all the continental North America west of the Mississippi, sold to Russia by Andrew Jackson fifty years earlier.

Stanton needs Little Russia’s calorium, a mineral used to power America’s airships, factories, and humanoid automatons. But Liam and the love of his life, world-famous reporter Becky Fox, mean to stop him. Joined by Crazy Horse, the Sioux war chief and medicine man, and Ambrose Chen, a Taoist sorcerer and alchemist, Liam and company embark on a wild series of adventures from New Petersburg, where revolutionaries are fighting to overthrow the government, to the Bear Flag Republic, a California enclave governed by P. T. Barnum.

Lucius Shepard is a grand master of dark fantasy, famed for his baroque yet utterly contemporary visions of existential subversion and hallucinatory collapse. In Dagger Key, his fifth major story collection, Shepard confronts hard-bitten loners and self-deceiving operators with the shadowy emptiness within themselves and the insinuating darkness without, to ends sardonic and terrifying. The stories in this book, including six novellas, are:


“Stars Seen Through Stone” – in a small Pennsylvania town, mediocrity suddenly blossoms into genius; but at what terrible cost?


“Emerald Street Expansions” – in near-future Seattle, echoes of the life of a medieval French poet hint at either reincarnation or a dire conspiracy.


“Limbo” – a retired criminal on the run from the Mafia encounters ghosts, and much worse, on the shores of a haunted lake.


“Liar’s House” – in the grip of the legendary dragon Griaule, destiny is a treacherous and transformative thing.


“Dead Monty” – a small-time New Orleans criminal ventures outside his proper territory, and poker and voudoun conspire to bring him down.


“Dinner at Baldassaro’s” – a gang of immortals debates the future in an Italian resort, only for events to outrun any of their expectations.


“Abimagique” – a glib college loser falls in love with a witch, becoming an involuntary part of a world-saving – or world-destroying – magical ritual.


“The Lepidopertrist” – a small boy on a Caribbean island witnesses the creation of preternatural beings by a Yankee wizard…


“Dagger Key” – off the coast of Belize, the ghost of a famous pirate seems to control a spiral of murder and intrigue; or is someone else responsible?

For millennia, humankind and the other intelligent races had studied the bizarre and unfathomable constructs of the legendary beings known as Builders. But for all that study, they were still no closer to figuring out who – or what – the Builders had been, or where they had gone. Then, on the world called Quake, in the midst of the violent planetary upheaval that was Summertide, a small group of humans and aliens witnessed the culmination of all those years of watching and waiting: the planet Quake opened up, and something came out – and it looked as if, at long last, the discovery of the Builders themselves was at hand.


All her life, Darya Lang had dreamed of finding the Builders, whose artifacts she had single-handedly catalogued for the rest of the universe. Troubleshooter and adventurer Hans Rebka had his own dreams of unraveling the mystery of those artifacts. To Louis Nenda and the Cecropian Atvar H’sial, the Builder artifacts represented a once-in-a-lifetime shot at untold wealth. And close behind them came the others: Councilor Julius Graces, who did not trust anyone to make first contact unassisted; the slavesJ’merlia and Kallik, who craved only a reunion with their masters; and the embodied computer E.C. Tally, charged with finding out just what the rest were up to.


The trail that began at Quake led to unexpected Builder artifacts full of traps for the unwary and answers for those who knew how to ask the questions. But the biggest question of all would remain an enigma, while their search unleashed the greatest threat to civilization ever imagined…