Time Magazine
'The foremost thriller writer of out time.'
With An Introduction By Robert Harris
Josef Vadassy, a Hungarian language teacher, decides to break his journey from Nice to Paris at the windswept coastal town of St Gatien. And there his solitary nightmare begins . . . Vadassy, a keen photographer, has made his first stop the village chemist, where he leaves a film to be developed. But instead of the expected picture of lizards, the film shows the locations of top secret military installations. The pictures cannot be released. And, after a none too gentle arrest by two plainclothes policemen, neither can the man who calls himself Josef Vadassy . . . In Epitaph for a Spy, published just a year before the outbreak of World War II, writer Eric Ambler echoed the confusions and changing views of a generation on the brink of world conflict. It remains a truly modern spy thriller.
Terrorists working to stop the building of a power plant threaten to trigger an earthquake on California's coast line. An FBI expert warns that the individual behind the threat is sane, capable and serious. If he causes the earthquake millions of lives will be at risk.
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Britain is in mortal danger. The Prime Minister has been assassinated. Is a giant power determined to absorb Britain into its own system? Enemies flood into the country and the noose is tightening. Who is running this gigantic operation?
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Forfeit'
'Risk'
'Reflex
Longshot'
'Straight'
High Stakes'
Dr Clare Burtonall has promised to pass on a message from a patient who has died of AIDS. But she has no address, all she knows is that Jase "works at the wharf with pollen". Unfortunately Jase is a weapons man for a gang of yardies, and blames Clare for the death.
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Lina McLaidlaw waits until she is 30 before accepting a marriage proposal from the feckless and irresponsible Johnnie Aysgarth. As head of a fine household and guardian of both the morals and finances of the man she chose to marry, she finds her husband was, and perhaps still is, a killer.
A ground-breaking novel of crime fiction
Francis Iles was the pseudonym for Anthony Berkeley Cox. The main body of his work comprises the crime novels he wrote as ‘Anthony Berkeley’, which mainly feature the amateur detective Roger Sheringham.
However it is for his two masterpieces, Malice Aforethought and Before the Fact, both written as Francis Iles, that he is most famous. With these innovative novels he turned the crime genre on its head, by revealing the identity of the murderer from page one. The reader was thus led not on a trail of clues to uncover the killer’s identity, but into the mind of the murderer himself. With the emphasis on character rather than plot, Iles was the father of the psychological suspense novel as we know it today. In Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books, H.R.F. Keating described Before the Fact as ‘One of the key texts in the history of crime fiction.’
Iles was also a literary reviewer for the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Times and, in later life, The Guardian. He died in 1971, aged seventy-seven.
In 1939 Alfred Hitchcock adapted Before the Fact into his classic film Suspicion, starring Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine.
Helen Booth, a petite 15-year-old girl, goes missing on her paper round in south London. An ananymous phone call leads the polic to a boathouse in Putney where they discover her blood-stained jacket and trainers. A murder inquiry is launched, head by DS Michael Walker.
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Introduction By Reginald Hill
Eighteen-year old Lowell Mitchell leaves her Friday morning history class and goes back to her room. Her roommate talks to her as she lies on the bed with her arm across her face. That is the last time she is seen, and 12 hours later the Bristol Police are involved.
One of the first, and best, police procedure novels
Last Seen Wearing . . ., published in 1952 and only his fourth novel, is considered by many to be a masterpiece of tightly plotted suspense fiction and a pioneer of the police procedural, where dogged police work and attention to detail is as important as the intuition of the series detective. In his study of crime fiction, Bloody Murder, Julian Symons stated: ‘If a single book had to be chosen to show the possibilities in the police novel which are outside most crime fiction, no better example could be found than Last Seen Wearing...’
Hillary Waugh was born in 1920 in New Haven, Connecticut. During World War II he served as a pilot in the United States Navy Air Corps, and has also worked as a cartoonist, song-writer and teacher.
During his career Waugh has written over forty detective novels, mostly featuring tobacco-chewing Police Chief Fred Fellows or, more recently, Detective Second Grade Frank Sessions. He has also published novels under the names Elissa Grandower and H. Baldwin Taylor.
He still lives in Connecticut.