Edmond was born to village idiots who put all his skill points into Luck. They knew an opportunity to win the lottery when they saw it.Edmond doesn’t want to be a winning ticket. He dreams of becoming a great hero and scholar. Impossible goals when your Intelligence and Wisdom stats couldn’t be lower.Is Edmond nothing but a walking rabbit’s foot? Will his parents’ dreams of easy fortune come true? It’s all just a lucky roll away.

    There's no identification on the body. Only the dogged work of a pair of local newspapermen and a graduate student in forensics turns up any clues. But that's just the beginning of the mystery. Because the more they learn about the man and the baffling circumstances of his death, the less they understand. Was it an impossible crime? Or something stranger still...? No one but Stephen King could tell this story about the darkness at the heart of the unknown and our compulsion to investigate the unexplained. With echoes of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and the work of Graham Greene, one of the world's great storytellers presents a surprising tale that explores the nature of mystery itself...

    Her obsession with the case intensifies with the abduction of her five-year old son. Ben Orton, an ex-SAS soldier metes out revenge on former members of the IRA who murdered his brother and are released as part of the Good Friday agreement. Living in a secluded location in Scotland, a stranger approaches Orton and blackmails him into joining The Disciples of Retribution, a select band of vigilantes. The abductors of the children share an unusual fantasy, their frightening and abnormal behaviour provoking punishment for the youngsters. Hush Little Children, a tale of revenge and indignity, will frighten and captivate you.

    

    He knows exactly why they are there and he knows that the world he has carefully constructed over twenty deliberately uneventful years is about to fall apart. He could lose everything.A story of a toxic love gone wrong, with a setting that moves easily between present day London and 1990s Cambridge, Stronger Than Skin is compulsively readable, combining a gripping narrative with a keen eye for the absurdities of the way we live now.

    She had once wanted to be an artist herself, but discovered she found more joy in helping other people find the truly talented artists' creations. Her life is simple but satisfying. 2045 Graham is a member of an elite secret agency called Time Travel Guardians. His job is to travel to different time periods and collects time travel devices to bring them to his own time, and store them in a safe government facility. The next device he was assigned to collect is a Clara Moore painting that has been found in an art gallery in Denver. After literally running into each other, Destiny and Graham begin a great adventure together- to 1879. Once they make it back to 2017, Destiny can't explain the desperate need to stay with Graham when he returns to his own time. Graham is concerned about the new information Destiny will learn about what will be her future. If she learns too much, it could change history. Come travel through time with Destiny and Graham in this brand new series of time travel, mystery, and intrigue, along with a good old-fashioned love story.

    But it is only the beginning of a hair-raising adventure in which Denison finds himself trapped with no way to escape. One false move and the whole delicately balanced power structure between East and West will come toppling down…THE ENEMYWealthy, respectable George Ashton flees for his life after an acid attack on his daughter. Who is his enemy? Only Malcolm Jaggard, his future son-in-law, can guess, after seeing Ashton's top secret government file. In a desperate manhunt, Jaggard pits himself against the KGB and stalks Ashton to the silent, wintry forests of Sweden. But his search for the enemy has barely begun…Includes a unique bonus - Desmond Bagley's pen portrait, written for the original publication of The Tightrope Men.

    After a hushed-up scandal over his Olympics win and the death of his wife in a car accident five years ago, Ethan wants nothing more than to forget his past. Skip is not only the light of Ethan's life--she is his life. Then, Skip is kidnapped. A series of bizarre ransom demands start coming in that stretch Ethan's athletic prowess to its limits, and he realizes with growing horror that they are modern versions of the Twelve Labors of Hercules, demanded in tricky, rhyming clues by someone who seems to have followed every step of Ethan's career.

    One of the dead cops was his girlfriend.The investigation grinds to a halt when he discovers that the young murderers have fled to Somalia to fight in the rebel army. He's at his wits' end when the father of one of the boys, an ex-gang leader named Mustafa, comes looking for answers, wanting to clear his son's name and refusing to take no for an answer.Bleeker and Mustafa form an uneasy alliance, teaming up to help bring the boys back home to stand trial. But little do they know what Somalia has in store for them.Murder, warfare, piracy, love, betrayal and revenge. ALL THE YOUNG WARRIORS is an epic thriller that will have you white-knuckling your eReader all through the night.

    

    With an irresistible client who won’t take “no” for an answer, if the job doesn’t get him killed, she just might.HOLLYWOOD PHARAOHS has been described as a fast-paced love child of The Big Lebowski and Indiana Jones.

    Nine years. Nine years since she stepped over her mother’s drunken body and into a cold Alaska night running south, lost to her mother forever. How did she find me? She hesitates, not wanting to open the envelope, knowing the letter inside will drag her home; back into the bleakness of a life with no exit. Kris Gabriel, twenty-four, Alaska Native, and fierce like a wolverine, returns to Alaska—to find her mother murdered; shot in the face by the double-barreled blast of a shotgun. Angry her mother is pushed around even in death, guilty she abandoned her in life, Kris only knows to fight. Relentlessly, she tracks a trail of pain, of lost love, of lives ripped apart by the frozen north’s unyielding law of survival, never suspecting it’s not what her mother would have wanted. Never suspecting that she has far more at stake than finding her mother’s killer. Broken Angels is fast-paced Alaskan noir filled with richly drawn characters struggling to survive in a hostile country where there are no second chances.

    His skills and kills are legendary across the Heavens. However, his heart is starting to grow cold toward the Lord and everyone else. The Lord see's this so he has Gideon reassigned to a guardianship over a little girl named Charlotte, that Gideon will nickname Charlie. The plan is while watching Charlie grow the heart of this battle worn warrior will learn how to love again.

    A British master criminal assembles an international gang of infamous thieves to steal a castle whose stones contain a hidden fortune in cash, jewelry, and stocks.

    Although these stories are not all mysteries, they all are suspenseful and very enjoyable. They already show the creative mind that devised later so many complex plots as well as Stout’s gift for creating characters with a few quick strokes. The stories, which are presented here in order of publication, are: “Excess Baggage,” “The Infernal Feminine,” “A Professional Recall,” “Pamfret and Peace,” “A Companion of Fortune,” “A White Precipitate,” “The Mother of Invention,” “Méthode Américaine,” “A Tyrant Abdicates,” “The Pay-Yeoman,” “Secrets,” “Rose Orchid,” “An Agacella Or,” “The Inevitable Third,” “The Lie,” “Target Practice,” “If He Be Married,” “Baba,” “Jonathan Stannard's Secret Vice,” “Sanétomo,” “The Strong Man,” “It's Science That Counts,” “The Rope Dance,” “An Officer and a Lady,” “Heels of Fate,” and “Annuncio's Violin.”