Raymond Hawley – Side Effect

Raymond Hawley – Side Effect (New English Library, 1980)

Blurb

‘A tremendously exciting read, backed up with all sorts of chillingly precise scientific data’ – Daily Express’

‘A high-class thriller which grips like the forceps in the hands of an insane medico’ – The Guardian

‘A clever, fast-moving and horribly possible story, with the nastiest twist in its tail I’ve ever met’ – Daily Telegraph

`Frightening… faultless… stylish in the way that Deighton, Le Carre and Greene are stylish’ – Dublin Evening Herald

‘Escalates from horror to horror …. ends with a pay-off that cuts like a razor blade’ – Daily Mirror

Raymond Hawley – It

Raymond Hawley – It (Nel, 1984)

Cover designed by Raymond Hawkey: Photograph of death-mask by Peter Williams

Blurb:

Barely four months after the first hardback publication of It, the former head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency was forced to make the unprecedented public admission that – as revealed in It – his government was funding a multi-million dollar research program into the paranormal.

Already, as with his earlier, eerily prophetic bestsellers Wild Card and Side-Effect, Raymond Hawkey’s long researches among the labyrinths of the paranormal had touched on a flinching nerve of truth carefully hidden from an unsuspecting world.

It is the story of Dr Sarah Stuart, a coolly beautiful Scots parapsychologist who, while working in America, is made an offer she dare not refuse -for a Presidential request, carefully conveyed by a senior figure in Naval Intelligence, is an order.

Operation Endor, she is told, concerns the urgent debriefing of a mind of great evil and depravity, but with unequalled access to secret, globally important information.

Operation Endor needs her. Her orders are to raise the ghost of a dead Russian defector.

****

A team of paranormal researchers are attempting to entice the ghost from the body of a recently deceased Russian defector. They’re doing so on behalf of the C.I.A. who urgently need to debrief him. The comrade, in life the epitome of evil, evidently takes great exception to having his hideously mutilated remains left lying around while the parapsychologists conduct their mumbo jumbo, although he’s taken a shine to their leader, Dr. Sarah Stuart. She’s certainly has  a tough time of it as a consequence …..