Thriller & Adventure

now utterly vanished into the dark heart of Africa. He is persuaded that a white people, of which he has heard rumours all his life, exists somewhere on the highlands in the vast, still unexplored interior, and his great ambition is to find them before he dies. This is the wild quest upon which he and his companions have departed, and from which I shrewdly suspect they never will return. One letter only have I received from the old gentleman, dated from a

mission station high up the Tana, a river on the east coast, about three hundred miles north of Zanzibar. In it he says that they have gone through many hardships and adventures, but are alive and well, and have found traces which go far towards making him hope that the results of their wild quest may be a "magnificent and unexampled discovery." I greatly fear, Continue reading

The hall-porter presently entered, bearing a huge parcel, which hadjust arrived by post. I opened it with all the excitement that anunexpected parcel can cause, and murmured, like Thackeray's sailor-man,'Claret, perhaps, Mumm, I hope----

'It was a Mummy Case, by Jingo!

This was no common, or museum mummy case. The lid, with the gilded mask, was absent, and the under half or lower segment, painted all over with hieroglyphics of an unusual type, and green in colour--had obviously been used as a cradle for unconscious infancy. A baby had slept in the last sleeping-place of the dead! What an opportunity forthe moralist! But I am not a collector of cradles.

Who had sent it, and why?

Once more his anger flared. A week ago he had been rich-and his anger found a new target. There was at least somewhere he could seek vengeance, there was a tangible enemy to strike, to kill. The Boer.

The Boer had robbed him of his wagons and his gold, had sent him scurrying for safety; because of them the woman had come into his life and because of them she had been snatched away from him.

So be it, he thought angrily, this then is the promise of the future.War!

*

Four years of travel in the road less wilderness had battered the wagons. Many of the wheel-spokes and disselboonu had been replaced with raw native timber; the canopies were patched until little of the original canvas was visible; Continue reading

Storm. His corrupt, disgraced son Dirk. And his new young assistant, Mark Anders, a fellow survivor of the trenches.

Mark finds himself trapped between Sean's two children, shaped by an impossible love for Storm, and a victim of Dirk's ongoing hatred, greed and jealousy. With all Sean's experience of war and family, can he protect Mark and everything Sean has ever stood for?

Sean Courtney, who made and lost £5 million on the goldfields of the Witwatersrand and fought his way through the bloody battlefields of the Anglo Boer War, now makes his final appearance as soldier, statesman and power in the land. Continue reading

Centaine screamed and drove the point of her stave down into the jaws with all her strength. She felt the sharpened end bite into thesoft pink mucous membrane in the the back of its throat, saw the spurt of scarlet blood, and then the lion locked its jaws on thestave and with a toss of its flying mane ripped it out of her handsand sent it windmilling out and down to hit the earth below.

The passionate love of a beautiful French aristocrat for a courageous South African aviator is begun and extinguished inthe blazing skies of war-torn France. But Centaine de Thiry is bent on realising some of the dreams which she and Michael Courtney had shared - and sets out to seek a future for his unborn child in the country of Michaels birth.

Excitement had rouged her cheeks and although she had carried four children, her waist was slim as a virgin's. So the wide sash of funereal black that she wore over one shoulder was all the more incongruous youth and beauty decked in the trappings of mourning. Despite her emotional turmoil, she stood with her hands clasped in front of her and her head bowed, silent and still.

She was only one of almost fifty women, all dressed in white, all draped with the black sashes, all in the same attitude of mourning, who stood at carefully spaced intervals along the pavement opposite the main entrance of the parliament buildings of the Union of South Africa. Continue reading

She regretted her modesty and her timidity now.

She was staring out through the eye slit in the rude grass structure of the hide, down a narrow open tunnel the gun bearers had meticulously cleared through the thick bush, for even a tiny twig might deflect a bullet flying at 3,000 feet a second. The tunnel was sixty yards long, paced out so that the telescopic sight of the rifle could be zeroed on target precisely.

Without moving her head, Claudia swiveled her eyes toward where her father waited in the hide beside her. His rifle was propped in the "V" of a branch in front of him and his right hand rested lightly on the stock. He needed to lift it mere inches to his cheek to be aiming and-ready to fire. Continue reading

Menace emanated from them as fiercely as the heat from the sun. Night and day, the drums never stopped, a constant reminder of the mortal threat that hung over them. She could hear them booming across the waters, like the heartbeat of the monster.

An unimaginable enemy will bring them together . . .

In the burning heat of the Sudanese sun, the city of Khartoum is under siege from the fearsome forces of the Mahdi, the charismatic leader of those who tire of the brutal Egyptian government. In Khartoum, along with thousands of innocent citizens, are trapped the fanatical General Charles Gordon, intrepid soldier Penrod Ballantyne of the 10th Hussars, English trader Ryder Courtney and the British consul and his three beautiful daughters.

The hull throbbed and resonated to a different impulse as she swung round and went plunging away back into the west. With the southeast wind now astern she was transformed, lighter and more limber, even with sails reefed and with three feet of water in her bilges. It was all so familiar to Hal Courtney. He had greeted the last five and sixty dawns from the masthead in this manner. His young eyes, the keenest in the ship, had been posted

there to catch the first gleam of distant sail in the rose of the new day.

Even the cold was familiar. He pulled the thick woollen Monmouthcap down

"Because you are the littlest," Tom told him, with lordly authority. He was surveying the tiny hamlet below them, which was now visible in the slot of the ravine.

Smoke was rising from the forge in the smithy, and washing flapped in the easterly breeze behind the Widow Evans's cottage, but there was no sign of human life.

At this time of day most of the men would be out in his father's fields, for the harvest was in fullswing, while those women who were not toiling beside them would be at work in the big house. Continue reading

Jim sprang back on to the truck of the violently rocking wagon, and stared across at Manatasee. She saw him and pointed her assegai at his face. Then he saw the length of slow-match had been exposed across the last yard of trampled earth below the mound on which the queen stood. The swift flame shot along it, leaving the fuse blackened and twisted as it burned. Jim clenched his jaws and waited for the explosion.

A powerful enemy. A land of second chances.

Jim Courtney is protected by all the wealth and influence that his family's successful business, the Courtney Brothers Trading Company, can provide in the Dutch-owned colonies of South Africa.

Louisa Leuven is an orphaned young woman who escaped the plague only to be unjustly imprisoned and transported to

Renowned magus Taita is now over a hundred years old, and has ascended to a new level of wisdom and understanding about his world. But he must prepare himself for the biggest threat Egypt has ever faced: the great plagues and the failure of the Nile, brought about by the fire witch Eos, an ancient force of sheer evil.

Taita must risk his soul to battle against Eos, or his homeland and everything he has ever loved will be lost forever. But there are other reasons for Taita to fight since success could also mean rewards he could never have thought possible. Continue reading

Hired to kill. Fighting to live.

Captain Bruce Curry has a simple enough mission, or so he thinks: lead his mercenary soldiers to rescue a town cut off by rebel fighting in the Belgian Congo. It soon becomes clear that the town's diamond supplies are the real focus of the mission he's been sent on. Although Curry soon finds something more valuable than diamonds, and will do anything to protect it.

But there's one thing Curry hadn't counted on that his most deadly enemies may not be the ones he's facing down the barrel of a gun, but the ones who are right beside him. Continue reading