Stefan Rudnicki

"As soon as he began publishing fiction more than three decades ago, Charles McCarry was recognized as a spy novelist of uncommon gifts" wrote Charles Trueheart in The Washington Post. Tears of Autumn, McCarry's riveting novel of espionage and foreign affairs, was a major bestseller upon its first publication in 1975. Spun with unsettling plausibility from the events surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and featuring Paul Christopher,...

'Twixt Land and Sea (1912) contains three long stories written for magazines in the 1909-11 period. 'The Secret Sharer' is one of the great tales in the English language. All three tales explore a young captain under stress. Although in this period of renewed personal and financial turmoil Conrad's imagination turns nostalgically to life at sea, the sea is no longer the simplified world of 'Typhoon' or 'The End of the Tether', where moral distinctions...

Frontiers can be found in all directions. Frontiers of time and space, as well as frontiers of courage, devotion, love, hate, and the outer limits of the human spirit. This outstanding collection of stories by one of science fiction's premier talents spans the length and breadth of history and the universe, while exploring thought-provoking new ideas and dilemmas. From the Baghdad of the Arabian Nights to a vast interstellar empire thousands of years...

Reverend Deacon Elder does the Lord's work in his own unique way. A former marine with the ability to detect and cast out demons, Deke goes where the need-and the evil-is greatest. After receiving a terrifying warning of a botched exorcism, Deke shows up in Somerton, Tennessee, ready for battle. The demon possessing sixteen-year-old Carlyss Bolerjack had only partially been driven out, and Deke must convince a traumatized Carlyss to submit to a second...

The curious call of an unseen bird lures a young European explorer deeper and deeper into the jungle, where he encounters the source of the siren song - a lovely, half-wild girl with mysterious powers. Thus begins the romance between Abel, a revolutionary hiding among an Indian tribe in the Venezuelan rainforest, and Rima, who speaks the languages of birds and longs to return to the land of her birth to be reunited with others of her kind. Written...

A tale of supernatural possession, The Return tells the story of Arthur Lawford, who falls asleep by the grave of a Huguenot adventurer who died by his own hand, and awakens to find himself physically transformed into that man. Author Walter de la Mare's rich imagery and superb story-telling skills come alive through the reactions of Lawford's friends and family, and the truths that are revealed.

During the annual Fiesta, three desperate men converge in a perilous New Mexico town in this “extraordinary” crime novel (The New Yorker). It takes four days for Sailor to travel to New Mexico by bus. He arrives broke, sweaty, and ready to get what’s his. It’s the annual Fiesta, and the locals burn an effigy of Zozobra so that their troubles follow the mythical character into the fire. But for former senator Willis Douglass, trouble is just...

The scientific detective known as the "American Sherlock Holmes" pursues a ruthless arch villain in this high-stakes suspense novel. Professor Craig Kennedy and his loyal sidekick, newspaper reporter Walter Jameson, first learn of the Clutching Hand and his gang when they investigate a string of murders involving the policyholders of Taylor Dodge's insurance company. After receiving a threatening note signed by the arch criminal, Dodge himself is...

The Circus Pig and the Kaiser is a rollicking historical satire that deals with freedom of expression under an authoritarian regime, a subject much talked about today! The novel takes place in 1907 in Russia and Germany. Vladimir Durov has a prized pig he has trained for the circus. Durov loves to make people laugh at his pig's crazy antics. But he finds that when his pig performs for the recently widowed circus owner, Natasha, the most he can get...

Murder on an omnibus? Marriage in a prison? Mysterious disappearances? William Le Queux's The Temptress is chock full of sensational circumstances, and somehow they all trace back to the enigmatic Valérie Dedieu. Hugh Trethowen, deep in debt and readying himself to flee from his creditors, is saved by the news that his older brother is dead and he has just inherited his family's fortune. Not long after, he becomes acquainted with Mademoiselle Dedieu...