Showing results by narrator "Juanita McMahon" in All Categories

All Linda wants to do is sleep. She won’t look at her husband. She can’t stand her daughter. And she doesn’t want to have this baby. Having this baby means moving on, and she just wants to go back to before. Before their family was torn apart, before the blame was placed. Alienated by their own guilt and struggling to cope, the Sadler family unravels. They grow up, grow apart, never talking about their terrible secret. That is until Linda’s daughter finds out she’s pregnant. Before she brings another Sadler into the world, Bea needs to know what happened twenty-five years ago.

As dusk falls, a young man staggers through a park, far from home, bleeding from a stab wound. He dies where he falls, cradled by a stranger, a woman's name on his lips in his last seconds of life. DI Manon Bradshaw can't help taking an interest - these days she handles only cold cases, but the man died just yards from the police station where she works. She's horrified to discover that both victim and prime suspect are more closely linked to her than she could have imagined.

November, 1957: Six teenage girls walk in the churning Derbyshire mists. Their voices carrying across the fields, they follow the old train tracks into the dark tunnel of the Cutting. Only five appear on the other side. October, 2014: a dying mother, feverishly fixated on a friend from her childhood, makes a plea: 'Find Valerie.' Mina's elderly mother had never discussed her childhood with her daughter before. So who was Valerie? Where does her obsession spring from? DC Connie Childs is partnered up with new arrival to Bampton, Peter Dahl.

When Cathy Broomfield’s youngest daughter, Kirsty, disappeared, Cathy hoped she had gone to stay with friends, to escape her brutal and bullying husband. But as the days passed with no word from Kirsty, a loving daughter who spoke to her mum every day, Cathy became increasingly anxious...until the day the police arrived at her door to tell her they had found a body. Her worst fears had been realised.

Paul lives in the Welsh countryside with his wife Elise, and their two young children. Over in London, Cora plans to move back to Cardiff, to the house she has inherited from her parents. She is escaping her marriage, and the constrictions and disappointments of her life. Connecting them is the London train, and a chance meeting that will have immediate and far-reaching consequences for both Paul and for Cora.

A young man is found hanging from a tree, with nothing to identify him. Was he driven to suicide, or was he silenced? Somebody knows, but they’re not saying. With potential witnesses too scared to talk to her, can DI Manon Bradshaw discover the truth before more innocent people die?

London, 1893. When Cora Seaborne's controlling husband dies, she steps into her new life as a widow with as much relief as sadness. Along with her son Francis - a curious, obsessive boy - she leaves town for Essex, in the hope that fresh air and open space will provide refuge.

There is one great love in everyone's life. For Ducky, Princess Victoria Melita, hers was a Romanov cousin, a member of the doomed Russian royal family. Her father is Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria's second son. Her mother is Grand Duchess Marie, the daughter of Tsar Alexander III. Ducky seems doomed to be a pawn on her grandmother's dynastic chessboard. But Ducky is not so easily controlled.

Audrey Garnet lives a sheltered life in the exclusive Argentinian community of Hurlingham. That is, until Cecil and Louis Forrester arrive, travelling from England to make their fortunes. Admired by all for her beauty and grace, Audrey quickly catches the eyes of both brothers, but it is talented-but-troubled outsider Louis with his musical flair whom she is drawn to most. Cecil, however, is a better match – a decorated war hero who has charmed the entire community, including Audrey’s parents, forcing Audrey to keep her true feelings a secret.

Forty-four years ago, as any schoolgirl can tell you, the moth's eggs hatched and an army of caterpillars spread their tiny toxic threads on every breath of wind. Since then, men have been cloistered, protected from birth against the deadly poison. But now there's a vaccine—a way that men can leave the facility without dying or suffering from psychosis. Emerging, into their new world, eyes wide with wonder at every new experience, the truth soon becomes clear. This world was not made for men. And they are not safe.

The war has ended, and Rita Fairweather is waiting for George Bolton, her childhood sweetheart, to return home to Devon. She wants their future to be a continuing reassurance of their past. But George comes back as a man changed by the horrors he has experienced. Unable to settle back into a small-town life, George decides to travel to Argentina. And Rita promises to wait. But George faces irresistible temptation and an agonising choice. As the years pass, Rita keeps her word, but how long should she wait for the love of the life?

Out they came, away from natural predators, nesting in damp corners and in the tops of trees, crossbreeding with common cousins and laying thousands upon thousands of eggs. 'Then...the eggs hatched and an army of hungry caterpillars spread their tiny toxic threads on every breath of wind.’ The threads spell doom for humanity - half of it, at least. All around the world, men are dying in their sleep or turning into rage-fuelled killers. The world, as we know it, ends. However, humanity adapts and society moves on.

Meet the daughters of Iris Parker. Dee, sensitive and big-hearted; Rose, uptight and controlled; and Fleur, the reckless free spirit. At the reading of their mother's will, the three estranged women are aghast to discover that their inheritance comes with very tricky strings attached. If they are to inherit her wealth, they must spend a series of weekends together over the course of a year and carry out their mother's bucket list.

Six months ago, city girl Sophie Mills gave up everything to move to Cornwall. All to be with the man she thinks she loves, and his two daughters who she knows she loves. But adjusting to life as a semi-permanent mother in the countryside isn't quite as easy as Sophie imagined it would be.

'Piercing the shadows of the naked stage was a single shaft of rosy limelight, and in the centre of this was a girl: the most marvellous girl - I knew it at once! - that I had ever seen.' A saucy, sensuous and multi-layered historical romance, Tipping the Velvet follows the glittering career of Nan King - oyster girl turned music-hall star turned rent boy turned East End 'tom'.

In 1960s Marrakech a young girl travels to meet her estranged grandmother. Vicky Baudin steps on to the train through Morocco looking for the truth about the woman who gave her father up for adoption decades before. Clemence Petier lives in a kasbah on the edge of the Atlas Mountains, her background shrouded in mystery. But the past holds secrets that threaten them both. A face from Clemence’s childhood threatens to expose everything she has built a life to hide.

Mid-December, and Cambridgeshire is blanketed with snow. Detective Sergeant Manon Bradshaw tries to sleep after yet another soul-destroying Internet date – the low murmuring of her police radio her only solace. Over the airwaves come reports of a missing woman – door ajar, keys and phone left behind, a spatter of blood on the kitchen floor. Manon knows the first 72 hours are critical: you find her, or you look for a body.

In Edwardian Suffolk, a manor house stands alone in a lost corner of the Fens: a glinting wilderness of water whose whispering reeds guard ancient secrets. Maud is a lonely child growing up without a mother, ruled by her repressive father. When he finds a painted medieval devil in a graveyard, unhallowed forces are awakened. Maud's battle has begun. She must survive a world haunted by witchcraft, the age-old legends of her beloved fen - and the even more nightmarish demons of her father's past.

On Emilia Morris's thirteenth birthday, her mother Rachel moves into a tent at the bottom of their garden. From that day on, she never says another word. Inspired by her vow of silence, other women join her and together they build the Community. Eight years later, Rachel and thousands of her followers around the world burn themselves to death.

Set in and around the women's prison at Milbank in the 1870's, Affinity is an eerie and utterly compelling ghost story, a complex and intriguing literary mystery, and a poignant love story with an unexpected twist in the tale. Following the death of her father, Margaret Prior has decided to pursue some 'good work' with the lady criminals of one of London's most notorious gaols. Surrounded by prisoners, murderers, and common thieves, Margaret feels herself drawn to one of the prison's more unlikely inmates.