The Desperate Game

AVAILABLE DIGITALLY FOR THE FIRST TIME Meet Guinevere Jones—a woman with a talent for love and trouble—from New York Times bestselling author Jayne Ann Krentz writing as Jayne Castle. It’s hard to keep a small business afloat, just ask Guinevere Jones, owner of a struggling temp agency. And security consultant Zac Justis isn’t making her life any easier. After he blackmails Gwen into helping him solve a computer crime, she finds herself caught in a web of suspense, danger—and love.

Lovely, savvy Guinevere Jones joins forces with rugged private detective Zachariah Justis to uncover a baffling computer crime and find a ruthless high-tech killer

Long before Battle Royale or The Hunger Games, the author of The Planet of the Apes imagined a world governed by science and brutality gone mad in this long-neglected, dystopian sci-fi classic, now in a new translation Despairing at the state of world degeneration, a group of the world's most renowned intellectuals form the new Scientific World Government, aiming to put the world to rights. Elected into power, they quickly start making changes for the better, eliminating world hunger and cancer, encouraging scientific thought, and banning frivolous entertainment. But while congratulating themselves on a job well done, they fail to notice that actually, people are not happy. The suicide rate has sky-rocketed and, strangely, it turns out the public wants a little risk and conflict in their lives. So to cater to the masses, the Department of Psychology forms a plan: they will stage an entertainment show the likes of which the world has never seen before. It starts with gladiatorial style battles, bloodthirsty and brutal, where the victors become celebrities of unseen proportions, and quickly escalates into entire historical battle re-enactments involving chemical warfare and mass destruction. The Scientific World Government has unleashed a monster. What has the world let itself in for?

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

"[...]diamonds in desk) MRS. S. (aside, and smiling) To do the wretch justice he has a certain mode of expressing himself—— POS. I hope he don't mean to keep on fumbling that writing desk about much longer, because the bottom of the cane chair has just given way. Surely, Cousin Somerton never could have been such a simpleton as to lock all her money up there. RAT. Ah, at last—(taking the pocket book out of the desk, and advancing to MRS. SOMERTON)—the pocket book. POS. She's a ruined woman and so am I! (dropping his head against the side[...]".

Sanger Rainsford is a big-game hunter, who finds himself washed up on an island owned by the eccentric General Zaroff. Zaroff, a big-game hunter himself, has heard of Rainsford’s abilities with a gun and organises a hunt. However, they’re not after animals – they’re after people. When he protests, Rainsford the hunter becomes Rainsford the hunted. Sharing similarities with "The Hunger Games", starring Jennifer Lawrence, this is the story that created the template for pitting man against man. Born in New York, Richard Connell (1893 – 1949) went on to become an acclaimed author, screenwriter, and journalist. He is best remembered for the gripping novel "The Most Dangerous Game" and for receiving an Oscar nomination for the screenplay "Meet John Doe".