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Gemstone: And Other Fateful Tales

by John Margeryson Lord

203 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #07-1795; ISBN 1-4251-4300-8; US$16.25, C$16.25, EUR11.10, £8.39

Love, passion, sexual intrigue, pursuit of wealth, life, death, fortune and misfortune, are played out in these twenty different and fascinating fictional short stories; making for extremely enjoyable light reading.

About the Book

Gemstone – what exciting pictures the word conjures up in the imagination, but this is only one of twenty stories of pure fiction exploring many of the powerful drives of the human condition. Here is pure terror as an unexpected warning is received in a truly bizarre manner, in The Warning. In contrast we have the man who travelled back in time to meet a newly found love, in The Time Traveller. Or the futuristic tale of a murder by a beautiful android, in Death by Machine.

The stories take any one of a range of human emotions, passion, greed, intrigue, mental failure, ambition and even magic and present them with a final unexpected twist.

The characters are such as you may find anywhere but the situations in which they find themselves are unexpected, and entertaining.

All the stories are designed to be short enough for a 'quick read' – for example on a train journey, in a waiting room, in bed before lights out, and each is complete in itself. Whilst they are not works to stretch the intellect they should give stimulus to thought.

Gemstone: And Other Fateful Tales, to give it its Sunday title, is a companion volume to two others each of twenty equally intriguing stories, namely The Trap and Snow Queen. Each of these three books constitute a good 'pick-up and put-down' read.

About the Author

I am really plain John Lord.

Following an almost featureless Grammar School education I found myself in an engineering apprenticeship with the then world renowned Metropolitan Vickers. Then a job in military defense Radar presented itself and to my joy and amazement manufactured and added to the safety of the UK.

GEC took over and rather than being shipped off to the Midlands I chose to stay in my beloved Pennines and so found myself working in the mysterious world of computers (and I still don't know how to use one properly).

All my life I have loved the mountains of Great Britain spending almost 150% of my spare time rambling over them. Now retired my walking is severely limited but this lack has been more than replaced by concentrating on the local environment and wildlife.

I love fun and my stories are not intended to be taken seriously but are intended simply to entertain – so do please enjoy them.