James Hadley Chase

It was the easiest £3,000 Nelson Ryan had ever made - but suddenly he realised he was being played for a sucker. A telephone call, seemingly innocent enough, led him to the murder of a Chinese call-girl who talked too much. It also pitched him straight into the teeming, sordid night life of colourful Hong Kong.From now on, Ryan would stick at nothing to get the killer who'd crossed him up.

The Russians will pay $4,000,000 for the top secret formula to a revolutionary new metal ... and the CIA will do anything to stop them.American inventor Dr Paul Forrester is the man that both sides want. He alone can decipher the vital code but, for two years, Forrester has been in a mental asylum - ever since that bloody day when he walked in on his beautiful wife and her lover.So it's Nona Jacey, Forrester's former lab assistant, who becomes a helpless pawn in the power struggle to possess the scientist. Because she is the only person that holds the key to unlocking Forrester's mind ...

Clay Burden married his wife Rhonda because he was tired of being on his own. Val had walked out on him - and if he couldn't have Val, maybe marriage might make him forget her. Six years later, working in Paradise City, Clay meets Val again. Married to the sinister Henry Vidal, she's changed: still beautiful and passionate, still compelling, but tense and nervous and driven by odd fears and anxieties.When Clay leaves his job and joins the Vidal empire, what begins as a sneaking feeling of unease hardens into stone cold certainty. Val must be released from the hypnotic influence exerted over her by her husband - even if Clay has to murder to set her free ...

Steve Manson's magazine dealt in corruption: he attacked the rich, the powerful and the famous - and he made enemies. In a job like that, you couldn't afford to have dirty secrets of your own. With the whole town itching for you to make a slip, it was like living in a goldfish bowl.But Steve had lived clean - until his beautiful, extravagant wife was caught shoplifting, and suddenly he was up to his neck in the dirtiest secrets of all - blackmail and murder.

Keith Devery, burdened with a criminal record, arrives in Wicksteed, a prosperous little town on the Pacific coast. He is looking for any job that will provide eating money. It is when he meets Beth Marshall - whose husband, a local drunk, is to inherit $1,000,000 - that he realises there's a way to get back in the big league.Together they ruthlessly plot the perfect murder, but Keith soon finds himself at the centre of a double-bluff. Beth has plans of her own once the money is hers ...

Kidnapping has become a national pastime in Italy - but is there another reason why billionaire Carlo Grandi has put his beautiful daughter behind an electric fence, guarded by killer dogs and two fast-shooting guards?Mike Frost, always on the look-out for big money and beautiful women, gets the job as second gun - and soon realises he is guarding a hell cat. When kidnappers sold him the idea of being the inside man, Frost hadn't known which he wanted most - that beautiful body or the $5,000,000 it could bring him.

A man will do almost anything when a rich and beautiful woman offers him fifty thousand dollars just to make a telephone call. But when that telephone call is part of a fake kidnap plan to extract five hundred thousand dollars from one of the richest men in the world, only a sucker would gamble on the deal paying off in his favour.Harry Barber is a sucker. After three and a half years in jail for a crime he didn't commit, with no job and no money, he is the perfect target of a brilliant plan to frame him for the brutal murder of a young girl.

Not my thing is a powerful, compulsive novel of betrayal and death from James Hadley Chase, the master of mystery and adventure. Ruthless tycoon Sherman Jamison is determined to have an heir. He will let nothing stand in his way. Yet, not only is his wife unable to provide him with a child, but as a devout Catholic she will not consent to the divorce her husband so desperately wants. And so Jamison decides to get rid of her ... permanently.

When Helga Rolfe flies into Nassau to join her elderly millionaire husband, Herman, she finds plenty of bad news awaiting her. Crippled, suspicious Herman has long suspected she's been playing around since their marriage, and is proposing to write some nasty-looking terms into his will. Herman is right, of course - Helga's weakness is for handsome, sexy men like Harry Jackson, whom she meets on the beach the day she arrives. But Harry is not quite what she thinks - and because of him she suddenly finds herself in a nightmare world of blackmail, voodoo and violence ...'I always enjoy his books ... he just keeps me reading' George Macdonald Fraser

Joey Luck and his daughter Cindy are small-time criminals going nowhere fast, until they join forces with Vin Pinna, a hardened criminal on the run from Miami. They soon begin to set their sights higher and turn their hands to kidnapping. But their hostage, ex-movie star Don Elliot, seems to have different ideas. When he wants in they form a 'quartet in crime', and this time the stakes are higher still - eight Russian stamps worth a million dollars.'Realistic and suspenseful far beyond his average' Observer

Poke Tohola, a Seminole Indian, is on to a smart racket. His formula is that fear is the key that unlocks the wallets and handbags of the rich. But Chuck, a cop-killer at 18, and Meg, beddable but dumb, don't work to formula. The three of them turn Paradise City into Panic City. Then Detective Tom Lepski lumbers in ...'An old master on top form' Sunday Telegraph

This swift-moving story of murder and suspense culminates in an unexpected and dramatic climax that is the hallmark of a James Hadley Chase novel. Chris Burnett - successful, wealthy and married to the daughter of a multi-millionaire - receives severe brain injuries in a car accident. While convalescing Burnett disappears for 24 hours, during which time a prostitute is brutally murdered and mutilated. Evidence found by a private inquiry points to Burnett. His wife, blackmailed by the inquiry agent, sets out to prove her husband's innocence ...

Successful dramatist Victor Dermott rents an isolated ranch-house in the Nevada Desert. For two months all is ideal, then one bright summer morning he wakes to find his dog, his guns, his servant vanished - and the telephone dead. The terror has begun ...'Agonising tension sustained throughout a first-rate story' Evening Standard

When a small-time clerk insures his life for $50,000 and then suddenly dies ten days later, it doesn't take a genius to work out something suspicious is going on. So when Maddox, the top man in the insurance business, finds out, he is determined to get to the bottom of it. And this means trouble for someone. In fact, it means trouble for the beautiful, auburn-haired Meg Barlowe, a woman with a serious past.'The thriller maestro of the generation' Manchester Evening News

Mark Girland's problems begin when a beautiful blonde is found lying on a dark deserted quai in Paris - the initials of the top Chinese atomic scientist tattooed on her upper thigh.The girl is suffering from acute amnesia. Girland, desperate for money, is ordered by the CIA to get any information he can - by posing as her husband.But the appeal of the mission begins to wear thin when Girland discovers he has involved himself in a life and death race to extract vital atomic secrets from the scientist's beautiful mistress.

Serge Maisky has a record as long as your arm. In and out of jail all his life, he's dreamed for years of the big steal that will set him up for good. He's all set to make it. He's bribed one of the girls who work in the vaults of the Paradise City casino. Nothing is going to stand between Maisky, his four specially recruited accomplices and all that loot. So when the lovely Sheila and her unassuming husband, unwittingly take off with Maisky's reward, Maisky gets mad. Real mad ...

Secret Agent Mark Kirkland has been given the task of locating and retrieving three pornographic films. His mission must remain top secret as the films, rather embarrassingly, feature the daughter of the future president of the United States.His quest leads him to the depths of Bavaria, where he finds Soviet agent Malik and sidekick Lu Silk also rather interested in the whereabouts of the films. Who will find them first? And, once found, who's to say they won't immediately disappear again?The thriller maestro of the generation" Manchester Evening News

A brilliant but sadistic safe-breaker; a beautiful seductress; an expert young hunter and an ace pilot with a shady past - this is the team that undercover operator Armo Shalik assembles to steal the priceless Borgia ring from millionaire Max Kahlenberg's closely guarded fortress in the remote and deadly African bush. But when Kahlenberg finds out they are coming, the gang's expedition turns into a strictly one-way safari - to slaughter ...'Insanely readable' Observer

Jack Crane arrives in Paradise City to find a job lined up for him by his ex-boss Bernie Olson. Bernie, a bomber pilot turned personal pilot to multi-millionaire Lane Essex, wants Jack to fly Essex's new luxury plane in a hijack plan.Planning a hijack shouldn't be that difficult, but they soon discover they didn't account for every eventuality. There's a stowaway passenger on board - Lane's gorgeous wife Victoria - who decides to join the party ...