Crime, like any other business, is conducted for profit. When someone figured out a way to make a profit out of engineering prison breaks, a new crime was born. The Freedom Trap deals with a highly organized gang of scarperers whose business it is to spring selected long-term prisoners who can afford the price. It was the rapid growth and spectacular success of this latest industry that prompted Long Mountbatten’s much-publicized investigation and report. But when rumours started circulating that Slade, the notorious traitor-spy last encountered in Mr. Bagley’s Running Blind, when he was jailed for forty years, was planning his escape from a top-security wing, M.1.5 felt they could not wait...

‘It’ll be simple,’ Slade had said. ‘You’re just a messenger boy.’ To Alan Stewart, alone on a lonely road in Iceland with a murdered man in front of him and a mysterious parcel which Slade. Secret Service chief, had commissioned him to deliver in his car, it looked anything but simple. And that was only the beginning. Desmond Bagley’s new thriller is set in one of the most sparsely populated countries, and among some of the most dramatic scenery in the world, where communication in the wastes of the Obyggdir depends on wireless and transport on a Land-Rover’s ability to traverse impossible terrain. But the natural obstacles of boiling geysers, fast-flowing rivers, sheer cliffs, steep-sided...

On a lush Caribbean island, a group of four men and two women find themselves caught between a hurricane and a revolution. Meteorologist David Wyatt knew the hurricane would hit. The West Indian natives were never wrong when they began tying down their roofs, regardless of what his tracking instruments showed. What Wyatt couldn’t forsee war the tumultuous conjunction of force — both natural and man-made — the was about to make Mabel his personal hurricane, one that would sweep his either to death or glory. Wyatt’s hurricane! It comes just as the island’s rebel leader, unaware of its approach, is massing his forces in the mountains for an attack on the city below. As the wind and the war...

He knows that he is Giles Dennison of Hampstead, but that is the only thing he knows for sure. He wakes up one morning in an Oslo hotel and the face in the mirror is not his own. This is only the beginning of an adventure in which he is trapped, with no hope of escape.

Sir Robert Hellier, millionaire film tycoon, was too busy making money to realize that his only daughter had become a drug addict until he learned she had died from an overdose of heroin. Now Sir Robert wanted action; he wanted blood. Not the blood of the sleazy drug-pushers who had supplied his daughter, but the blood of the big-time international suppliers of the market in Europe and the States. And Sir Robert was prepared to stake a large part of his personal fortune to cut heroin off at source. Enlisting the help of Dr Nicholas Warren, London drug specialist who knew as much about the problem as any police force, Sir Robert prevailed upon him to select a seemingly ill-assorted group of...

An enquiry following an avalanche which destroyed a small New Zealand mining town, reveals a divided community which had ignored all danger signals. Ian Ballard, the young managing director of the mine, finds his career and even his life, depends upon his ability to clear his name. A million tons of snow and a hundred thousand tons of air were on the move, plunging down towards the mists of the valley. By the time the mist was reached, the avalanche was moving at over two hundred miles per hour. The air blast hit the mist and squirted it aside violently to reveal, only momentarily, a few buildings. A fraction of a second later, the main body of the avalanche hit the valley bottom. The white...

This riveting novel of adventure is based on a true story, one of the most daring hijacking exploits in recent history, which, despite the conviction of over a score of men and women for alleged complicity, continues to baffle both the Italian police and Interpol. When the Allies landed in Italy during the last war, Mussolini’s vast personal treasure, consisting of four tons of gold, millions in currency and jewels, and some of the most important Government archives, was moved north in a German S.S. convoy. As the convoy neared the Liguarian coast, it vanished. It has never been recovered. Desmond Bagley has cleverly reconstructed this coup and devised an ingenious fiction about the...

The old brass tray which had lain around the Devon farmhouse of the Wheales for centuries was considered of no account — until it was exhibited in a local museum and found to be of pure gold and of great archeological value. A photograph in the local paper started a rush of bidders from America. In the midst of the bidding came sudden, violent death. The tray was one of a pair, which together held the key to the Vivero Letter, written four hundred years before by a Spanish conquistador held captive in Yucatán by the fearsome Mayas. Ownership of the letter, which promises unimaginable riches to whoever can discover the secret of the twin trays, is disputed by two rival archaeologists....

In a sense, Bob Boyd was born at the age of 23 — the day a terrible car crush completely erased all memory of his previous life. Recovery had been a slow grim struggle and in the years since Boyd, following the advice of the hospital psychiatrist, had successfully suppressed all curiosity about the man he once was. Until, in a small timber town in British Columbia he is jolted by a name — Trinavant. Sluggishly, echoes from the dead past strike a disturbing chord. Boyd begins to make enquiries and in so doing disturbs a deadly hornet’s nest. The powerful Matterson family, for whom he is doing a land survey as part of a dam-building project, have spent years obliterating all memory of the...

The setting of High Citadel is the towering peaks of the Andes. A non-scheduled passenger plane is hi-jacked in mid-air and forced down among the forbidding mountains. The surviving passengers, stranded at 16,000 feet, embark on a perilous descent — only to find themselves trapped by a formidably armed Communist force whose prey is one particular passenger, the ex-president of Cordillera, and his lovely niece. But it soon becomes clear that the ambushers are intent on wiping out all the other survivors as well: “dead men tell no tales.” As the trapped men and women grimly realise the odds at stake, two intensely exciting stories unfold. On the lower slopes, a desperate delaying action is...