Recently widowed and inspired by a boyhood fascination with Sherlock Holmes, the middle-aged Inspector Gilles Maintenon of the Surete is on a walking vacation of Dartmoor when he stumbles upon death in mysterious circumstances. When the woman he is falling in love with is brutally murdered, Gilles swears that he will never rest until the case is solved, the killer is caught, and justice is done.

Inventor Theo Duval appeared to be having the perfect life. A locked room with the only key in the decedent's pocket, a book on hypnotism, and one very rich and very dead inventor, present Inspector Gilles Maintenon of the Surete with a problem. Why would a young, healthy, successful man, one with a beautiful fiance, and a thriving company ever want to kill himself?

If there's one thing the evil Dr. Emile Schmitt-Rottluff can't get enough of, it's samples of your precious bodily fluids. He's the gaslight era's virtuoso of illicit cloning and mind-bending manipulation of the human genome. He's got his eye on Jeb Snead, one of the toughest men who ever lived, and his sexy mutant girlfriend, Miss Kitty.

Althea is the source of piezo-temporal crystals, which distort time and make interstellar space-flight possible. The planet is uninhabited, and the Company has a monopoly. Everyone has a secret, and with such a small wintering party, life can be pretty boring until everything goes terribly wrong. On Althea, staying alive is half the battle.

Widowed Janet Herbert has two children to raise. Out of work and with unemployment benefits running low, she needs a knight in shining armour to sweep her off her feet and carry her away on a big white stallion. The stranger in town is very handsome-and very French. But the more she learns, the more uncertain she is. Jean Gagnon has just done seven years for a crime he says he didn't commit.

Twelve thousand years later, low on reaction mass, with 20,000 colonists aboard, Ark One is coming in hot. Captain Sandra Jensen and Astrogator Dooley Peeters have a plan to save her. There is the question of how they will be received, on an Earth that has returned to barbarism. That is, if they can slow her down enough to get a shuttle away.

Was it something Olympia said? Betty Blue, personal companion to Olympia Cartier and worth an estimated $3.8 million, is a robot in SimTech's PAL 9100 Series. Betty Blue opens the front door one evening and simply walks away. Why would she do such a thing? Is it a malfunction, or did something else happen? She's like a daughter to Olympia and her industrialist husband Doyle. Olympia is deeply worried about Betty, lost and alone in America, which is a very different place in the year 2030.

Author Aldrich Tobias, the man the critics love to hate, sits in La Prison Sante, awaiting the guillotine. The President of the Republic has asked Detective-Sergeant Gilles Maintenon to take another look into the case. According to Aldrich Tobias, 'The artist is mad-always mad." Maintenon is about to find out what that really means."

Una coleccion de historias satiricas de la mente perversa de Louis Shalako."

Une colleccion de histoires courtes de l'esprit malefique de Louis Shalako.