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Patricia Wentworth

The Key

Michael Harsch's long years of work were nearly at an end. The following day he was looking forward to handing over his precious formula to the government. But the next morning he was in no fit state to hand over the formula – he was dead. It looked like suicide, but Miss Silver knew it was murder. Michael Harsch's long years of work were nearly at an end. The following day he was looking forward to handing over his precious formula to the government. But the next morning he was in no fit state to hand over the formula – he was dead. It looked like suicide, but Miss Silver knew it was murder.<

Patricia Wentworth

Beggar’s Choice

When Car Fairfax starts his mysterious new job, his sole duty seems to be to dine in expensive restaurants, but soon some odd coincidences and dangerous deceits open his eyes to the truth.<

Patricia Wentworth

Pilgrim’s Rest

When Columba and Janetta Pilgrim think it unwise to leave their ancestral home after their brother suffers a fatal fall only days after talk of selling it, and Roger Pilgrim barely escapes two nearly fatal "accidents," Miss Maud Silver is called in to look into the case.<

Peter Watts

Blindsight

<p>Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown.</p><p>Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath.</p><p>Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune’s orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever’s out there isn’t talking to us. It’s talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.</p><p>So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn’t want to meet?</p><p>You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won’t be needed, and the fainter one she’ll do any good if she is. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.</p><p>You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they’ve been sent to find.</p><p>But you’d give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them…</p><

F-Paul Wilson

Reprisal

Adversary Cycle

F-Paul Wilson

Infernal

Repairman Jack

F-Paul Wilson

Bloodline

Repairman Jack

Stuart Woods

Dead In The Water

New York lawyer and private investigator Stone Barrington comes to the aid of a lovely woman accused of the murder of her missing, wealthy husband.<

Peter Watts

Maelstrom

Rifters

<p>An enormous tidal wave on the West Coast of North America has just killed thousands. Lenie Clarke, in a black wetsuit, walks out of the ocean onto a Pacific Northwest beach filled with the oppressed and drugged homeless of the Asian world who have gotten only this far in their attempt to reach America. Is she a monster or a goddess? One thing is for sure: all hell is breaking loose. This dark, fast-paced, hard SF novel returns to the story begun in Starfish: all human life is threatened by a disease (actually a primeval form of life) from the distant prehuman past. It survived only in the deep ocean rift where Clarke and her companions were stationed before the corporation that employed them tried to sterilize the threat with a secret underwater nuclear strike. But Clarke was far enough away that she was able to survive and tough enough to walk home, three hundred miles across the ocean floor. She arrives carrying with her the potential death of the human race, and possessed by a desire for revenge.</p><p>Maelstrom is a terrifying explosion of cyberpunk noir by a writer whose narrative, says Robert Sheckley, "drives like a futuristic locomotive."</p><

Peter Watts

Behemoth

Rifters

<p>Lenie Clarke-amphibious cyborg, Meltdown Madonna, agent of the Apocalypse-has grown sick to death of her own cowardice.</p><p>For five years (since the events recounted in Maelstrom0, she and her bionic brethren (modified to work in the rift valleys of the ocean floor) have hidden in the mountains of the deep Atlantic. The facility they commandeered was more than a secret station on the ocean floor. Atlantis was an exit strategy for the corporate elite, a place where the world's Movers and Shakers had hidden from the doomsday microbe ßehemoth-and from the hordes of the moved and the shaken left behind. For five years "rifters" and "corpses" have lived in a state of uneasy truce, united by fear of the outside world.</p><p>But now that world closes in. An unknown enemy hunts them through the crushing darkness of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. ßehemoth- twisted, mutated, more virulent than ever-has found them already. The fragile armistice between the rifters and their one-time masters has exploded into all-out war, and not even the legendary Lenie Clarke can take back the body count.</p><p>Billions have died since she loosed ßehemoth upon the world. Billions more are bound to. The whole biosphere came apart at the seams while Lenie Clarke hid at the bottom of the sea and did nothing. But now there is no place left to hide. The consequences of past acts reach inexorably to the very floor of the world, and Lenie Clarke must return to confront the mess she made.</p><p>Redemption doesn't come easy with the blood of a world on your hands. But even after five years in pitch-black purgatory, Lenie Clarke is still Lenie Clarke. There will be consequences for anyone who gets in her way-and worse ones, perhaps, if she succeeds...</p><

David Weber

Torch of Freedom

Wages of Sin

<p>Someone is assassinating the leaders of both the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the recently liberated former slave planet of Torch. Though most believe the Republic of Haven is behind the murders, Anton Zilwicki and Havenite secret agent Victor Cachat believe there is another sinister player behind the scenes. Queen Berry of Torch narrowly escaped one assassination attempt, and a security officer from Beowulf has been assigned to protect her, a task complicated by the young monarch's resentment of bodyguards, and the officer's growing attachment to her. Meanwhile, powerful forces in the Solarian League are maneuvering against each other to gain the upper hand, not realizing or, perhaps, not caring that their power struggle is threatening the League's very existence and could plunge the galaxy into war. </p><p>Once again best-selling authors David Weber and Eric Flint join forces in an exciting new novel in the Honorverse. </p><p>Cover Art by David Mattingly</p><

Connie Willis

L'anno del contagio

Per la giovane Kivrin, che si prepare a studiare dal vivo una delle epoche più oscure della storia, regno della paura, della superstizione e di tremendi flagelli, viaggiare nel tempo è un'esperienza unica e affascinante, ma in fondo non troppo difficile: l'importante è prepararsi con cura e osservare scrupolosamente tutte le regole perché il suo improvviso arrivo nel XIV secolo risulti plausibile e, soprattutto, passi inosservato. Il resto è compito di una straordinaria tecnologia che rende possibile un simile trasferimento temporale. Tuttavia il suo viaggio nel Medioevo, dove l'esistenza quotidiana è un'avventura per la sopravvivenza e dove si sta scrivendo un nuovo libro dell'Apocalisse, sarà molto più che la realizzazione di un sogno.<

David Wroblewski

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

<p>Born mute, speaking only in sign, Edgar Sawtelle leads an idyllic life with his parents on their farm in remote northern Wisconsin. For generations, the Sawtelles have raised and trained a fictional breed of dog whose thoughtful companionship is epitomized by Almondine, Edgar's lifelong friend and ally. But with the unexpected return of Claude, Edgar's paternal uncle, turmoil consumes the Sawtelles' once peaceful home. When Edgar's father dies suddenly, Claude insinuates himself into the life of the farm-and into Edgar's mother's affections.</p><p>Grief-stricken and bewildered, Edgar tries to prove Claude played a role in his father's death, but his plan backfires-spectacularly. Forced to flee into the vast wilderness lying beyond the farm, Edgar comes of age in the wild, fighting for his survival and that of the three yearling dogs who follow him. But his need to face his father's murderer and his devotion to the Sawtelle dogs turn Edgar ever homeward.</p><p>David Wroblewski is a master storyteller, and his breathtaking scenes-the elemental north woods, the sweep of seasons, an iconic American barn, a fateful vision rendered in the falling rain-create a riveting family saga, a brilliant exploration of the limits of language, and a compulsively readable modern classic.</p><

Scott Westerfeld

Evolution's Darling

Darling, an astronavigational control unit, wants to know if a clone has a soul. Two hundred years and one artificial body later, he is off in search of a dead artist, a living artwork, and the forces behind a mystery that spans the universe.<

Scott Westerfeld

The Secret Hour

Midnighters

<p>Upon moving to Bixby, Oklahoma, fifteen-year-old Jessica Day learns that she is one of a group of people who have special abilities that help them fight ancient creatures living in an hour hidden at midnight; creatures that seem determined to destroy Jess.</p><p>"Fast paced and spooky — a good read for the dark hours."</p><p>Ursula K Le Guin</p><

Scott Westerfeld

Touching Darkness

Midnighters

<p>The Midnighters of Bixby, Oklahoma, know that their town is full of secrets. These five teenagers are the only ones who know about the mysterious hour at midnight when the world freezes, except for them and the creatures that inhabit the darkness.</p><p>But they do not know why earlier generations of Midnighters all disappeared, or why they are now the only Midnighters in town. As they learn more about the secret hour's twists and turns, they uncover terrifying mysteries woven into the very fabric of Bixby's history, and a conspiracy that touches both the midnight hour and the world of daylight.</p><p>At the same time, the Midnighters' own secrets start to emerge, including some that were never meant to come to light, changing the fragile dynamics among the five.</p><p>This time Jessica Day is not the only Midnighter in mortal danger, and if the group can't find a way to come together, they could lose one of their own — forever.</p><p>A tale of betrayal, horrifying revelations, and powerful alliances, touching darkness is the second volume of the riveting Midnighters trilogy by acclaimed author Scott Westerfeld.</p><

Scott Westerfeld

Blue Noon

Midnighters

<p>the darklings will hunt once again</p><p>Until suddenly, the blue time comes… in the middle of the day.</p><p>The noise of school stops. Cheerleaders are frozen in midair, teachers brought to a standstill. Everything is the haunted blue color of the midnight hour.</p><p>The Midnighters can't understand what's happening, but as they scramble for answers, they discover that the walls between the secret hour and real time are crumbling. Soon the dark creatures will have a chance to feed after centuries of waiting, unless these five teenagers can find a way to stop them.</p><p>A desperate race against time, a mind-blowing mystery of paranormal logic, a tale of ancient evil and spine-chilling sacrifice: blue noon is the exhilarating third volume in the Midnighters series by acclaimed author Scott Westerfeld.</p><

Scott Westerfeld

Peeps

Peeps

<p>One year ago, Cal Thompson was a college freshman more interested in meeting girls and partying in New York City than in attending his biology classes. Now, after a fateful encounter with a mysterious woman named Morgan, biology has become, literally, Cal's life.</p><p>Cal was infected by a parasite that has a truly horrifying effect on its host. Cal himself is a carrier, unchanged by the parasite, but he's infected the girlfriends he's had since Morgan-and all have turned into the ravening ghouls Cal calls peeps. The rest of us know them as vampires. And it's Cal's job to hunt them down before they can create even more of their kind…</p><p>Bursting with the sharp intelligence and sly humor that are fast becoming his trademark, Scott Westerfeld's new novel is an utterly original take on an archetype of horror.</p><

Scott Westerfeld

The Last Days

Peeps

<p>Strange things are happening: old friends disappearing, angels (or devils) clambering on the fire escapes of New York City. But for Pearl, Moz, and Zahler, all that matters is the band. As the city reels under a mysterious epidemic, the three combine their talents with a vampire lead singer and a drummer whose fractured mind can glimpse the coming darkness. Will their music stave off the end? Or summon it?</p><p>Set against the gritty apocalypse that began in Peeps, The Last Days is about five teenagers who find themselves creating the soundtrack for the end of the world.</p><

Scott Westerfeld

So Yesterday

<p>Ever wonder who was the first kid to keep a wallet on a big chunky chain, or wear way-too-big pants on purpose? What about the mythical first guy who wore his baseball cap backwards? These are the Innovators, the people at the peak of the cool pyramid.</p><p>Seventeen-year-old Hunter Braque is a Trendsetter, on the second level of the pyramid. His job: find the newest, coolest thing for the retail market. His MO: observe, don't get involved.</p><p>But he has to get involved when he and his crush, Jen, discover his boss's cell phone in an abandoned building— and his boss missing. Hunter and Jen are soon snared in a web of brand-name intrigue: a missing cargo of the coolest shoes they've ever seen, ads for products that don't exist, and a shadowy group dedicated to the downfall of consumerism as we know it.</p><

Donald E Westlake

The Road To Ruin

Dortmunder

John Dortmunder as a butler? Well, he’s not really a butler; he’s just playing one at the heavily guarded estate of crooked tycoon Monroe Hall. A corporate pariah surrounded by loot, including a fleet of priceless vintage cars, Hall soon finds his needs—from driving to cooking—eagerly fulfilled by Dortmunder and his gang. Dortmunder’s plan: to change in one fell swoop from loyal servants to merry robbers, and drive off with ill-gotten plunder. There’s just one problem. Monroe Hall has as many enemies as antiques. Before Dortmunder can go from serving to stealing, Hall disappears and the cops are knocking on the door. And after a violent crime is committed, Dortmunder is in the worst place possible. For as everyone knows, whenever there’s mischief in a mansion …<

Donald E Westlake

Watch Your Back!

Dortmunder

It's the score of a lifetime: easy access to a lavish New York City apartment, hordes of valuables, and an absentee owner avoiding the lawyers of his unhappy ex-wives. But before they pull the job, Dortmunder's crew is startled to find their beloved gin joint, the OJ, in the clutches of the Mafia — who consider it perfect for a little fraud, courtesy of a nice big fire. For tactical and highly superstitious reasons, the fate of the OJ is ever more important to the crew than the enormous score. Now, Dortmunder and his gang are determined to split their time, fighting the mob and robbing the rich simultaneously.<

Donald E Westlake

Nobody's Perfect

Dortmunder

Comic crime hero Dortmunder and his gang of bungling thieves are back in a hilarious caper -- out of print since 1979. Mishaps and misunderstandings force the gang to steal a painting not once but twice in this hilarious misadventure starring the inimitable Dortmunder.<

Donald E Westlake

Why Me?

Dortmunder

The Byzantine Fire: 90 carats of flawless ruby with great national and religious significance. It's the biggest heist of Dortmunder's career, making him the target of everyone from the FBI to the Turkish government. Now Dortmunder has to find a way to unsteal the heist of a lifetime…<

Donald E Westlake

What's So Funny?

Dortmunder

<p>In his classic caper novels, Donald E. Westlake turns the world of crime and criminals upside down. The bad get better, the good slide a bit, and Lord help anyone caught between a thief named John Dortmunder and the current object of his intentions. Now Westlake's seasoned but often scoreless crook must take on an impossible crime, one he doesn't want and doesn't believe in. But a little blackmail goes a long way in… WHAT'S SO FUNNY?</p><p>All it takes is a few underhanded moves by a tough ex-cop named Eppick to pull Dortmunder into a game he never wanted to play. With no choice, he musters his always-game gang and they set out on a perilous treasure hunt for a long-lost gold and jewel-studded chess set once intended as a birthday gift for the last Romanov czar, which unfortunately reached Russia after that party was over. From the moment Dortmunder reaches for his first pawn, he faces insurmountable odds. The purloined past of this precious set is destined to confound any strategy he finds on the board. Success is not inevitable with John Dortmunder leading the attack, but he's nothing if not persistent, and some gambit or other might just stumble into a winning move.</p><

Donald E Westlake

Bad News

Dortmunder

John Dortmunder doesn't like manual labor. So when he gets the offer of money to dig up a grave, he balks . . . then he wonders why Fitzroy Guilderpost, criminal mastermind, wants to pull a switcheroo of two 70-years-dead Indians.<

Donald E Westlake

Thieves' Dozen

Dortmunder

On a literary landscape filled with cunning criminal masterminds, Donald E. Westlake's John Dortmunder is in a league of his own. With no scam too outrageous to contemplate, and no plan too simple to go wrong, this quirky career thief has stolen everything from money buried under a reservoir to a bank-the whole bank. Now the ultimate repeat offender returns in a first-time collection of short stories that prove that just like bagels and donuts, with Dortmunder it's always better by the dozen … .<

Donald E Westlake

Get Real

Dortmunder

<p>In Donald E. Westlake's classic caper novels, the bad get better, the good slide a bit, and Lord help anyone caught between a thief named John Dortmunder and the current object of his attention.</p><p>However, being caught red-handed is inevitable in Dortmunder's next production, when a TV producer convinces this thief and his merry gang to do a reality show that captures their next score. The producer guarantees to find a way to keep the show from being used in evidence against them. They're dubious, but the pay is good, so they take him up on his offer.</p><p>A mock-up of the OJ bar is built in a warehouse down on Varick Street. The ground floor of that building is a big open space jumbled with vehicles used in TV world, everything from a news truck and a fire engine to a hansom cab (without the horse).</p><p>As the gang plans their next move with the cameras rolling, Dortmunder and Kelp sneak onto the roof of their new studio to organize a private enterprise. It will take an ingenious plan to outwit viewers glued to their television sets, but Dortmunder is nothing if not persistent, and he's determined to end this shoot with money in his pockets.</p><

Donald E Westlake

Bank Shot

Dortmunder

<p>When John Dortmunder sets out to rob a bank, he really means it. He steals the whole thing. With the help of his usual crew, as well as a sophomoric ex-FBI man and a militant safecracker, Dortmunder puts a set of wheels under a trailer that just happens to be the temporary site of the Capitalists' & Immigrants' Trust Corp.</p><p>When the safe won't open and the cops close in, Dortmunder realizes he's got to find a place — somewhere in suburban Long Island — to hide a bank.</p><p>"One of the funniest conceptions you're going to come across…the ending is hilarious." (The New York Times)</p><

Donald E Westlake

Jimmy The Kid

Dortmunder

Bungling burglar John Dortmunder and his merry band of thieves are back in another classic, comic crime novel from the award-winning author of the new hardcover Baby, Would I Lie? Dortmunder and his gang plan to kidnap precocious kid Jimmy Harrington with the help of a crime novel outlining the perfect caper.<

Donald E Westlake

Drowned Hopes

Dortmunder

Tom Jimson, the burglar has $700,000 stashed away in a valley town, which has been converted into a reservoir, by the state of New York. Now, the money lies fifty feet below water and the only way in which Jim wants to retrieve it is to blow up the dam. With the fate of nine hundred people at stake, it falls on John Dortmunder to formulate an alternate plan for retrieving the loot. And, as each attempt by Dortmunder fails, Tom’s dynamite finger gets itchier… and itchier.<

Donald E Westlake

What's The Worst That Could Happen?

Dortmunder

When Max Fairbanks, a vastly wealthy and powerful magnate, catches John Dortmunder breaking into his Long Island mansion, he thinks he is dealing with some regular loser. It amuses him to deprive Dortmund of his lucky ring. In Westlake's ingenious and dazzling comic thriller, Fairbanks lives to regret that gratuitous humiliation. The engaging Dortmund gathers a band of cronies, and exacts revenge at a series of the rich man's fancy palaces, from a penthouse on Broadway to a fantasy retreat in Las Vegas.<

Stuart Woods

Kisser

Stone Barrington is back in New York, and after a rather harrowing sojourn in Key West, he's looking to stay closer to home and work on some simple divorce and custody cases for Woodman Weld. But when he crosses paths with a fetching Broadway actress-and sometime lip model- Stone gets a little more deeply involved with business than he'd expected. When his new lady love turns out to be a lady with a shady past, Stone and downtown cop Dino Bacchetti realize that her beauty may have an unusually high price…<

Connie Willis

Doomsday Book

<p>This new book by Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning author Connie Willis is an intelligent and satisfying blend of classic science fiction and historical reconstruction. Kivrin, a history student at Oxford in 2048, travels back in time to a 14th-century English village, despite a host of misgivings on the part of her unofficial tutor. When the technician responsible for the procedure falls prey to a 21st-century epidemic, he accidentally sends Kivrin back not to 1320 but to 1348 — right into the path of the Black Death. Unaware at first of the error, Kivrin becomes deeply involved in the life of the family that takes her in. But before long she learns the truth and comes face to face with the horrible, unending suffering of the plague that would wipe out half the population of Europe. Meanwhile, back in the future, modern science shows itself infinitely superior in its response to epidemics, but human nature evidences no similar evolution, and scapegoating is still alive and well in a campaign against "infected foreigners." This book finds villains and heroes in all ages, and love, too, which Kivrin hears in the revealing and quietly touching deathbed confession of a village priest. </p><p>Won Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1992</p><p>Won Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1993</p><

Tom Wolfe

I Am Charlotte Simmons

<p>Dupont University—the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition . . . Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a freshman from Sparta, North Carolina (pop. 900), who has come here on full scholarship in full flight from her tobacco-chewing, beer-swilling high school classmates. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that Dupont is closer in spirit to Sodom than to Athens, and that sex, crank, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.</p><p>As Charlotte encounters Dupont's privileged elite—her roommate, Beverly, a fleshy, Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jayjay Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennium Mutants who run the university's "independent" newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus—she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives.</p><

Edward Whittemore

Quin’s Shanghai Circus

There is little of the overt fantastic in this great, bloody sprawl of a novel, in which tortured souls follow twisting paths through WWII Shanghai; rather, there is a gradual stretching of the ordinary to the extraordinary. And eventually all those twisted paths converge at the final, dreadful performance of Quin's Shanghai Circus.<

Inger Ash Wolfe

The Taken

<p>The eagerly awaited second novel from the author of the widely acclaimed debut mystery The Calling.</p><p>DI Hazel Micallef is still recovering from back surgery when a report comes in that a body has been found in a nearby lake, snagged under several feet of water. But as DC Wingate says, the whole thing is way too eerie. The first installment of a story has just been published in the local paper: a passage that describes in detail just such a discovery. Real life is far too close to fiction for coincidence.</p><p>The second novel featuring Hazel Micallef is a stunning and suspenseful exploration of the obsessive far reaches of love. It will confirm Inger Ash Wolfe as one of the best mystery writers there is.</p><

Alexander Wolkow

Der Zauberer der Smaragdenstadt

Smaragdenstadt

Lawrence Watt-Evans

The Lure of the Basilisk

The Lords of Dus

Lawrence Watt-Evans

The Seven Altars of Dusarra

The Lords of Dus

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