Edward D Hoch

Two computer cops race to protect a presidential election against tampering Radiation leaks in Chicago. Assassination attempts on Venus. Bombings in Washington, DC. Any crime that involves a computer falls under the jurisdiction of New York's Computer Investigation Bureau, and in the far-off days of the mid-twenty-first century, more criminals rely on digital tools than ever before. For Earl Jazine and Carl Crader, technology is not just their beat;...

Five classic tales of murderous evil-and the immortal who was chosen to fight for what is right In a small town near Washington, DC, seventy-three villagers make the spontaneous decision to leap from a cliff to their deaths. They leave no explanation behind, but local rumor suggests they were being manipulated by an ancient, evil power. In a monastery in West Virginia, a monk fears his brothers-and is finally pushed from the window of one of the towers....

When the homicide boys are baffled, only Captain Leopold can unravel the mystery On his way to the circus, a young boy named Tommy pauses for fifteen minutes in a grassy vacant lot. It begins to rain, and by the time the storm has passed, Tommy is dead in the tall grass, strangled with a strong piece of rope. Police suspicion falls on a shifty ex-con employed by the circus, but Captain Leopold isn't satisfied with this too-simple solution. Something...

Three stories starring Simon Ark-one of history's most unusual detectives In a college in upstate New York, a professor is carrying out devilish experiments. At Grand Central Station, a student named Cathy Clark corners a friend of her sister's who runs a large publishing company. She tells him of the evil at Baine University, but he dismisses her panic as undergraduate paranoia, so Cathy vows to take matters into her own hands. A few weeks later,...

An incredible assortment of stories from one of history's masters of short fiction On the morning of the merger, fog shrouds the offices of Jupiter Steel. On the twenty-first floor, the board of directors gathers to follow the commands of Billy Calm, an unequaled titan of finance. But a few minutes before the meeting, Calm jumps out a window. The chief of security rushes to the street, but where there should be a body, he sees only slush; Billy Calm...

When ancient evil emerges, it can only be stopped by a two-thousand-year-old sleuth Ten years ago, Douglas Zadig emerged from the mist on an English moor, his clothes tattered, his speech slurred, and his mind completely blank. Since then, he has reinvented himself as an expert on good and evil, publishing book after book of a philosophy that is entirely lifted from the ancient writings of Zoroaster. Zadig comes to Maine on the lecture circuit, and...

When a government official dies on the operating table, the president calls in the computer cops On Venus, a radical exile escapes from a maximum-security prison, pledging to return to Washington and assassinate the president. Transport between Earth and the solar colonies is tightly regulated, but the exile knows a shortcut: the top-secret transvection machine, an experimental device that could theoretically be used to teleport men from planet to...

A dozen marvelous tales of deduction, featuring history's most famous detective In a heavily mortgaged country house, an heiress's sinister guardian attempts to trap her in a bedroom with a rare Indian swamp adder-a murder averted only by the timely intervention of Sherlock Holmes. Five months after the events of "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," Holmes and Watson are called back to Stoke Moran by a frightened gypsy who claims that the viper has...

The reader is given an opportunity to solve two mysteries before young sleuth Tommy Preston unravels each case.