Showing results by author "Stephen Leather" in All Categories

Dan 'Spider' Shepherd was sipping his first coffee of the day as the sweat from his morning run slowly dried on his skin. Kept on standby in Cyprus, Shepherd and his patrol mates are getting fed up with the lack of action. When they're offered the opportunity to spend some time in Nepal, they jump at the chance. Whilst there, they meet an SAS living legend, and are roped into a mission.

Dan Shepherd stared at the canvas ceiling above his bed as the dawn light slowly strengthened. His tent was pitched on the edge of the airfield outside Sarajevo in Bosnia. 1995, and Dan 'Spider' Shepherd is on active service as a paratrooper in war-torn Sarajevo. Frustrated by the army, when he is tasked with accompanying an SAS patrol in the area, he realises that the SAS is where he belongs.

As a psychologist for the Los Angeles police department, Jamie Beaverbrook has seen it all. Or so he thinks until the night a full moon brings out the crazies, including Terry Ferriman. Trouble is, Terry isn’t exactly crazy. But how else can the police explain finding the girl in an alley off Sunset, crouched over a man’s lifeless body, her mouth smeared with blood? After an interview that is unsettling at best, the good doctor decides to dig deeper into Terry’s story. What he discovers is that a world he previously imagined to exist only in horror movies is actually flourishing in the shadows of L.A. Vampires are real....

"We’re professional soldiers,” said Shepherd. “We fight for queen and country. There’s a hell of a difference between us and mercenaries.” Spider Shepherd and the rest of his men are called upon to stop a bunch of South African mercenaries who have disobeyed orders and plundered diamond fields in Sierra Leone from reaching the Liberian border.

"Sorry, boys, my hands are tied. The order comes from Special Force HQ, and I can’t countermand it. So I’m giving you a warning order for an imminent active service operation. You’ve got forty minutes to call your wives and girlfriends and sort your kit." After the tragic loss of one of his patrol on an ill-advised training exercise in the Arctic Circle, Spider Shepherd and his comrades are angry at their incompetent commanding officer.

Als ein fünfzehnjähriges Mädchen kauernd und blutverschmiert über der Leiche eines Mannes gefunden wird, dessen Kehle herausgerissen wurde, kann es Polizei-Psychologe Jamie Beaverbrook kaum glauben, als ihre psychologischen Tests unauffällig sind. Auch wenn Beaverbrook nicht an Vampire glaubt, sieht er sich mit der Möglichkeit konfrontiert, dass die Schatten von Los Angeles eine Welt bergen, die denjenigen Zuflucht bietet, die nie altern und für die Blut mehr wert ist als Gold.

"It isn’t a part-time job, it’s a full-time, unrelenting commitment, and to become one of the inner elite you must expect to make sacrifices at the expense of family, friends, and your career.” Dan Shepherd is on a jungle training course in Belize as part of his SAS selection. Along with Liam, Geordie, and Jimbo, he is chosen for further training to see if he makes the cut for the Sabre Squadron Troop. Taken out on real operation patrol, the men run into trouble with Guatemalan troops in the disputed province.

"So the men you will train as my bodyguards will be selected not on the basis of their physical fitness but purely on their loyalty to me. The men outside are all Bedu, of my own tribe. Their loyalty to me is absolute and unquestioning.” Spider Shepherd and his team are sent to the Middle East to train tribesmen as bodyguards for the ruling sheikh. He is slowly trying to modernise, but his rule is being threatened by his cousin, whose father was deposed in a bloodless coup.

Long-term Bangkok resident and former New Orleans cop Bob Turtledove has a knack for getting people out of difficult situations. So when a young man from Utah goes missing in Bangkok, his parents are soon knocking on Bob's door asking for help. But what starts out as a simple missing person case takes a deadly turn as Bangkok Bob's search for the missing Mormon brings him up against Russian gangsters, hired killers, corrupt cops and kickboxing thugs.

What goes around comes around. Jack Nightingale learned that as a cop and discovered that it was just as true in the world of the supernatural. His life changed forever on the day he failed to stop a young girl throwing herself to her death. Ever since, he’s been haunted by thoughts that he could have done more to save her. Now her cries for help are louder than ever. Is she trapped in eternal torment? Or are the forces of darkness torturing and deceiving him in order to regain the ultimate prize – his soul?

Why does a wealthy Scottish financier set up a drugs deal with the IRA? Jeopardise his career, endanger his family and lover by tangling with the East End underworld and a ruthless mercenary? The motive is simple: revenge for a cold-blooded act of murder. His adversary is a dangerous gangland boss whose connections stretch from the Highlands to London and beyond. More than a match for a newcomer, especially when his plans contain a fatal flaw, which will be discovered only when it is much too late…

Jack Solomon is a messenger of death. Working in the fractured remains of Yugoslavia, his task is to identify the victims of ethnic cleansing and to tell families that their loved ones are gone. Years of working in the killing fields have desensitised the former London policeman to the horrors of war, but when a truck containing 26 bodies is pulled from a lake, Solomon is unable to walk away from the case. He sets out to find the only survivor of the massacre, a young girl on the run from the killers. From the brothels of Sarajevo to the high-stakes world of Internet prostitution, Solomon discovers that the killers are closer to home than he thinks....

New York City. With a population of almost 19 million people, it’s easy to remain anonymous - even if you’re a serial killer, torturing and murdering beautiful young women. The killer has another victim right now, locked in a basement somewhere in the city. For NYPD detectives Turner and Marcinko, it’s their job to sift through those 19 million and narrow their list to the one before it’s too late. And they’re sure they have the right man in their sights.

The plan is so complex, the target so well protected that the three snipers have to rehearse the killing in the seclusion of the Arizona desert. Cole Howard of the FBI knows he has only days to prevent the audacious assassination. But he doesn’t know who the target is or where the crack marksmen will strike. Former SAS sergeant Mike Cramer is also on the trail, infiltrating the Irish community in New York as he tracks down Mary Hennessy, the ruthless killer who tore his life apart.

Premier League footballer Gabe Savage is on the way to one of the most important matches of his life when he gets a phone call from his wife. She has been kidnapped along with their young son. And the message from her captors is brutal: 'If your team wins, your family dies.' With the kickoff only hours away, there is only one person Gabe can turn to - his brother, Ray, a vicious London gangster. But a dark family secret means that he hasn't spoken to Ray for years. Can Ray help? And will he?

Young, talented, in love with life - why should Sally have thrown herself 15 floors to her death? But as suicide is the verdict of the uncompromising Hong Kong authorities, Sally’s brother, a London-based crime reporter, begins his own investigations. As he delves into the details of Sally’s unaccountably opulent lifestyle and her mysterious work as a journalist, he is forced to recognise a very different girl from the fun-loving kid sister he remembers.

Jack Nightingale fights his battles in the shadows - in the grey areas where the real world meets the supernatural. But when he arrives in San Francisco to take on a group of Satanists bent on opening a doorway to hell, the danger is out in the open and all too real. The Apostles - a Satanic coven using murder and torture to pave the way for a demon to enter the real world - realise that Nightingale is on their tail and unleash their own brand of monsters to take him down.

"For eight hours Spider Shepherd had been lying up in a sand dune overlooking the six-lane highway that slashed through the desert like a knife. It was a moonless night, the blackness dotted with so many stars that looking up made his head spin." Fresh from a sniper mission in the Middle East, Spider Shepherd is sent to Afghanistan on a new assignment. Teamed up with former trainer Spud and Lex, a young Para, he receives intel that the man the Americans seek is hiding in the White Mountains.

"Spider Shepherd squatted on his heels outside his tent, drinking his first brew of the day from a battered mug as he watch the wind stirring dust devils from the dirt floor of the compound." When an inexperienced officer sends out innocent paratroopers to be betrayed by a surrendered Taliban sniper, Spider Shepherd is the man chosen to clean up the mess. With his old friends Jock and Geordie to help, along with SAS hopeful Lex, can they take their revenge? Or are they just putting themselves in the kill zone?

"The bosun explained that E & E was so important to the regiment that every badged soldier and officer must do an E & E every couple of years.... It was the ultimate test: You were good, or you were caught." The final hurdle in the SAS selection process - the E & E exercise. The aim is to evade capture and to resist interrogation when finally caught. So when Spider Shepherd is captured, he doesn’t immediately think anything is wrong.