Maxim Gunn Series

Maxim Gunn, agent extraordinary, takes on one last official mission before resigning from the Organization. Wanda Liszt, arch criminal: beautiful and deadly, has found Sheba's Necklace, the legendary rope of emeralds that bestows great powers on its possessor. Her plan: Chaos in Africa, after which she, as Great White Queen, will rule it as her mighty empire. Gunn must stop her.

Witchcraft in the twentieth century? Computer controlled demons? Maxim Gunn didn't believe it either - until his old enemy Wanda Liszt, miraculously returns from the dead with another plan to control, the world. Ambushes, a booby trapped tomb, a demonic attack by the fiend Wanda controls keep Gunn on his toes until the crashing finale is reached.

The alignment of all nine planets will bring the Serpent Force, a mysterious power known to the ancients to its maximum effect. One man has the secret and must be stopped. Maxim Gunn races from Stonehenge to the temples of Greece and the Mayan ruins in the Yucatan. Earthquake, unseen powers, duels with the forces of evil, leave Gunn little time for sight seeing. It’s a race that must be won.

Was there really such a place as Atlantis? And was there a super race ahead of its time, or something so different we wouldn't want to know? Trapped for millennia until a submarine earthquake frees them, a few survivors emerge on a mission of revenge against the “Dry Landers” whom they blame for the Great Catastrophe. Gunn and Sergeant Magoon are in a desperate fight to stop them.

It was a fortress carved out of a living cliff in a time before history, and dedicated to the Sun God. Devlin, revolutionary and anarchist has taken it over and kidnapped a Princess, kidnapped for an unbelievable reason that has nothing to do with money. Maxim Gunn is called upon to do the impossible: find her and get her back before she is sacrificed to the god.

Northern Nigeria. A wild, harsh land. A master criminal with a master plan. Magunta, the Witch Doctor, Wizard and master criminal who first appears in THE CHAOS PROJECT plans to take over West Africa by resurrecting the infamous Leopard Men. Fear is his key, and the Great Black Leopard his weapon. Gunn is called in by his old friend, the Emir of Ladi, and tracks the leopard to its mountain lair.

Maxim Gunn, having attended to a little matter of Malay pirates in the Malacca Straights, gets a call from a Doctor Rainbird in Perth, Western Australia. There’s a problem of a missing American physicist who has an unusual speciality. There’s also the mystery of Manfred Markstein, a billionaire mining magnate who might not be all that he seems. Gunn meets Markstein at a cocktail party. He gets an eerie feeling about the magnate, and trusting his sixth sense breaks into the man’s riverside mansion where he finds a hell of a lot more than he bargained for. The house seems deserted. But then an extraordinary thing happens. Markstein catches Gunn searching his study and, amazingly, morphs into a six-foot-tall reptilian. That would have shocked anyone else rigid. But Maxim Gunn isn’t anyone else. A house-wide fight ensues, ending in the kitchen, and Gunn makes his escape. But he found some information that leads him north to the Iron Cauldron and the abandoned Lost World mine. At least, it was abandoned until Markstein bought it a couple of years earlier and imported a load of miners and engineers to reopen it in secret. Enter Ferdinand Quiggley riding a camel named Matilda, the epitome of the mad, wandering prospector. But again, not is all as it seems because Quiggley works for the Australia Security Intelligence Organisation, and has had Markstein in his sights for a while. The problem is how to get into the Lost World mine to find out what Markstein is up to. The place is surrounded by an electrified fence and patrolled by armed guards. Gunn and Quiggley are pointed to a back way into the Lost World, and a very smart young Aboriginal called Jacky Winter. With Jacky’s guidance they make a nightmare trek in a Land Rover across mudflats, through swamps, swollen creeks and deal with a bunch of security men from the mine. Entry into the mine compound over the electric fence scares the hell out of Quiggley as they make a daring night time hang glider raid. A landmine blowing up a kangaroo, and a couple of stun grenades, distract the guards as Gunn and Quiggley dive for the adit entrance. And then it all starts to get black and sticky. Hunted through the mine by guards, they finally get cornered and caught. And wouldn’t you know it, Gunn falls down the main shaft – and wakes up strapped to a table under the eagle eye of the reptilian. It seems he belongs to a race called Dragons, who are at war with the Kagons, a really nasty minded bunch who want to use Earth as a base for their galactic wars. The trouble is the Dragon’s scout ship had engine trouble, made a forced landing, and what with one thing and another he wound up making Markstein an offer he couldn’t refuse and borrowed his body, along with his reputation, money and power. All he needed was someone to fix the drive and cloaking device on his ship. And that’s where the beautiful physicist Mariska Quantrill comes in. It seems she specializes making stuff vanish. Well, it’s called time phasing, and maybe even time travel if you want to stretch it. The Dragon in Markstein’s form made her an offer she couldn’t refuse in the shape of unlimited research funding. She took the bait, found the problem, and promptly got herself taken to the Lost World mine to fix it. She is not amused. Neither is Gunn, but one look at Mariska makes it all worthwhile, and it seems the feeling is mutual. Mariska booby-traps the scout ship, Gunn deals with the guards and they get the hell out of the mine just before a seismic explosion occurs. But it’s not over. There’s a mega-cyclone brewing. They fight their way through a mind and body-numbing storm to the safety of some caves, and later Gunn sets off for a date with the Dragon. “He lifted the rifle again, carefully snugged it into his shoulder and fed a cartridge into the breech. Markstein was clear in the sights as Gunn took up first pressure.”

Maxim Gunn was not amused when Sir Richard Trelawney showed him a photo of the Great Snake of Sheba. Wanda Liszt was dead. He knew she was. He’d killed her, buried her under a cliff that had hidden the Tomb of Gilgamesh. And the Snake, the fabulous rope of pure emeralds said to have belonged to the Queen of Sheba, was at the bottom of a Swiss Lake. Gunn knew that too because he’d put it there. But it appeared she was alive. McCreedy the grizzled ex-hunter had seen her a week earlier in Nairobi. It seemed the devil had not claimed his own at the Great Tomb of Gilgamesh. The woman was alive, and she had the Snake, again. Wanda Liszt has an obsession, she dreams of power, power so huge it defied the imagination. She wants Africa, nearly twelve million square miles, over a billion people, and riches beyond compare. And with the Great Snake of Sheba as her talisman, she just might achieve it. But first she needs to bathe in the Green Fire, to find the immortality she so desperately craves. “Do not look for the great Cave of the Winds on any map for you will not find it. However that does not mean it does not exist: it simply means that it is hidden from the eyes of all but those who have reason to know.” So said McCreedy, and after a lifetime in the North West Frontier District of Kenya, if anyone should know it would be him. Gunn finds Wanda Liszt in Venice, where they have a civilized dinner and he gets shot at. And then it’s on to Sicily and an assassin’s attack in which he neatly turns the tables before following the trail to a Templar Castle where he witnesses an incredible magical transformation in which Wanda appears to take on the persona of a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian priestess. In Cairo he has dinner with Oksana, High Priestess of the Temple of Am-mut, the Devourer, the Eater of the Souls of the Dead, who looks a hell of a lot like Wanda. And then the race is on as the trail of breadcrumbs left by one of Wanda’s entourage, a punk killer for hire called Sadie. And that’s where it starts to get even more interesting. Moonlight racing along the Nile on the wonderful mare, Sheba, a fight to the death in the Crocodile Temple of Am-mut, and a hair raising ambush. And that’s just for starters as Gunn hasn’t got close to his goal. Gunn is mystified, but follows the trail, which takes him south along the Nile, to Khartoum, to a monk’s cell on Lake Tana and a flight with a black Texan pilot named Louis Beauregard, who takes him to the western shores of Lake Turkana, the Emerald Sea, and finally to the Northwest Frontier District of Kenya, a land where the impossible is commonplace, and danger is a constant companion. Out of the blue of a shimmering heat haze appears a warrior monk, Omar, who knows of Gunn and his mission, and tells him it has been foretold that he would stop Wanda’s mad dreams of empire. Together they cross some seriously bad land, scale impossible cliffs, and finally, after travelling down a road to nowhere laid by no one knows who, they look down on the mouth of the Cave of the Winds and see the start of the gathering of the kings and chiefs of all the tribes of Africa, who are coming to pay homage to Oksana the High Priestess and Empress. Destiny awaits. The odds are enormous, the chance of success microscopic, but Maxim Gunn only knows that he must stop her before it is too late. Oksana presents herself to the assembled chiefs, the great Green Fire roars, waiting or accept or reject her as She Who Must be Obeyed in another incarnation...And Gunn attacks, with Omar at his side and the surprising reappearance of Sadie who joins the fight like a tigress. And then there is the great magnificent Zulu, M'hlopekazi with his bloody axe cutting a swathe through the masses. Finally Gunn escapes with Oksana and on the moonlit plains of Northern Kenya, far below the Cave of the Winds, the story comes to a touching and surprising end.