Showing results by author "Tim Weaver" in All Categories

Italo Calvino's beloved cosmicomics cross planets and traverse galaxies, speed up time or slow it down to the particles of an instant. Through the eyes of an ageless guide named Qfwfq, Calvino explores natural phenomena and tells the story of the origins of the universe. Poignant, fantastical, and wise, these 34 dazzling stories - collected here in one definitive anthology - relate complex scientific and mathematical concepts to our everyday world.

One year ago Alex Towne's body was found. One month ago his mother saw him on the street. One week ago David Raker agreed to look for him. He'll wish he hadn't. Mary Towne's son, Alex, had been missing for six years before he finally turned up - as a corpse in a car wreck. But now she's convinced he's still alive.

Seventeen-year-old Megan Carver was an unlikely runaway. A straight-A student from a happy home, she studied hard and rarely got into trouble. Six months on, she's never been found. Missing persons investigator David Raker knows what it's like to grieve. He knows the shadowy world of the lost, too. So, when he's hired by Megan's parents to find out what happened, he recognizes their pain - but knows that the darkest secrets can be buried deep.

Ten seconds before the crash, Cate and Aiden Gascoigne are recorded on CCTV. The couple are laughing—happy, untroubled. Then their car plunges into a ninety-foot ravine. The impact should kill them. And if that doesn't, the fire will. Within seconds, the vehicle is an inferno—with the Gascoignes trapped inside. But when fire crews arrive at the scene, they find something impossible. The vehicle is empty. Cate and Aiden have vanished. Now only missing persons investigator David Raker can solve the mystery.

One year ago Alex Towne's body was found. One month ago his mother saw him on the street. One week ago David Raker agreed to look for him. Now he wishes he hadn't. Mary Towne's son, Alex, went missing six years ago. Five years later he finally turned up - as a corpse in a car wreck. Missing persons investigator David Raker doesn't want the work: it's clearly a sad but hopeless case of mistaken identity brought to him by a woman unable to let go of her son.

When Leonard Franks and his wife, Ellie, leave London for their dream retirement in the seclusion of Dartmoor, everything seems perfect. But then their new life is shattered. Leonard heads outside to fetch firewood from the back of the house - and never returns. Nine months later, with the police investigation at a dead end, Leonard's family turn to David Raker - a missing persons investigator with a gift for finding the lost. But nothing can prepare Raker for what he's about to uncover.

For millions of Londoners, the morning of 17 December is just like any other. But not for Sam Wren. An hour after leaving home, he gets onto a tube train, and never gets off again. No eyewitnesses. No trace of him on security cameras. Six months later, he's still missing. Out of options and desperate for answers, Sam's wife, Julia, hires David Raker to track him down.

Emily Kane arrives at her sister Carrie's house to find the front door unlocked, dinner on the table, and the family nowhere to be found - Carrie, her husband, and two daughters have disappeared. When the police turn up no leads, Emily turns to her former boyfriend David Raker, a missing persons investigator, to track the family down. As Raker pursues the case, he discovers evidence of a sinister cover-up, decades in the making and with a long trail of bodies behind it.

Exhausted single mother Rebekah Murphy leaves her daughters with a friend in the city to accompany her brother on a work assignment on a picturesque island. An hour after arriving, her and her brother are attacked. He vanishes, she's left for dead and, by the time she makes it back to safety, it's already too late: the island has closed for the season - and it'll be seven months before anyone returns. But even with her brother missing, even with no boats, phones or people, Rebekah will soon realise that finding a way back to the mainland is only the start of her nightmare.

A woman drives to a beautiful headland overlooking the Devon coast. She is never seen again, and no trace of where she went can be found. The woman's sister calls missing persons investigator David Raker. As Raker tries to find her whereabouts - fearing the worst - he learns that she was recently widowed from a reclusive film director. It seems that, going through her husband's belongings, she found a secret so dark and shocking that it forced her to leave her entire life behind. Chasing the truth will consume Raker and place him in grave danger....

On the night Tom Brenner and his nine-year-old son Leo visit the Seven Peaks theme park, they head straight for the ghost house. They go in. But they don't come out. Somewhere inside the ride, impossible as it seems, the two of them simply vanish. When Rebekah Murphy was three, her mother walked out of their childhood home and never returned. Nearly four decades on, Fiona Murphy is still missing. But then, out of the blue, a letter arrives in the post. It says it's from Fiona.

When a young man wakes up bruised, beaten and with no memory of who he, the press immediately dub him 'The Lost Man'. Ten months later Richard Kite remains as desperate as ever. Despite appeals and the efforts of the police, no one knows this man. Kite's last hope may be private investigator David Raker. But Raker has more questions than answers. Who is Richard Kite? Why does no one know him? And what links him to the body of a woman found beside a London railway line two years ago?

On Halloween night, the residents of Black Gale gather for a dinner party. As the only nine people living there, they've become close friends as well as neighbours. They eat, drink and laugh. They play games and take photographs. Except those photographs will be the last record of any of them. By the next morning, the whole village has vanished. With no bodies, no evidence and no clues, the mystery of what happened at Black Gale remains unsolved two and a half years on. But then the families of the missing turn to investigator David Raker - and their obsession becomes his.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Dead Tracks by Tim Weaver, read by Joe Coen and Hannah Arterton as well as Tim Weaver. A serial killer more terrifying than you could ever imagine... Seventeen-year-old Megan Carver was an unlikely runaway. A straight-A student from a happy home, she studied hard and rarely got into trouble. Six months on, she's never been found. Missing persons investigator David Raker knows what it's like to grieve. He knows the shadowy world of the lost, too.

On a beautiful summer's day, at a remote lake in the middle of Dartmoor, three members of the Fowler family take a dinghy out onto the water, leaving mother Sarah at the shore. Less than sixty seconds later, she checks to see where they are. The boat is drifting in the middle of the lake. It's empty. Sarah's family have completely vanished.

Colm Healy used to be one of the Met's best detectives. Until, haunted by the unsolved murders of a mother and her twin daughters, his failure to find an elusive killer left his life in ruins. Missing persons investigator David Raker is the only friend Healy has left. As they reopen the investigation together, Raker learns the hard way how this case breeds obsession - and how an unsolvable puzzle can break even the best detective. Their search takes them down a trail of darkness, unravelling a thread of tragedy, and forces them to sacrifice everything they have left.

For millions of Londoners, the morning of 17 December is just like any other. But not for Sam Wren. An hour after leaving home, he gets onto a tube train - and never gets off again. No eyewitnesses. No trace of him on security cameras. Six months later, he's still missing. Out of options and desperate for answers, Sam's wife, Julia, hires David Raker to track him down. Raker has made a career out of finding the lost. He knows how they think. And, in missing person cases, the only certainty is that everyone has something to hide.

It's a night just like any other in the Conister home - but then Paul heads upstairs and never comes back. When his wife, Maggie, goes to see where he is, she can't find him. His phone and wallet are by the bed. The windows are locked from the inside. Paul has vanished. Missing persons investigator David Raker is an expert in locating the lost. So when he's hired by Maggie, he knows that in every disappearance - however impossible it seems - there's an answer. What he doesn't know yet is that his search for Paul Conister will become linked to three other mysteries.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of You Were Gone by Tim Weaver. Three days after Christmas, a woman walks into a police station. She has no phone and no ID, just a piece of paper with the name of investigator David Raker on it. She tells officers that Raker is her husband. When he turns up at the station, Raker is stunned. The woman looks exactly like his wife. She knows all about their marriage, their history, even private conversations the two of them had. There's just one problem: Raker's wife has been dead for eight years....

When Leonard and Ellie Franks leave London for retirement in secluded Dartmoor everything seems perfect. Until their new life is shattered. One evening Leonard heads outside to fetch firewood - and never returns. Nine months later, with the investigation at a dead end, Leonard's family turn to David Raker - a missing persons investigator. Nothing could prepare Raker for what he uncovers.