Showing results by narrator "David Thorpe" in All Categories

Lord Oliver Marsden has a secret. He's been in love with his childhood friend for years, though Vincent's never shown an interest in him beyond friendship. Ruggedly handsome, wealthy, and successful, Vincent is everything Oliver is not. And Vincent doesn't prefer men. Then Oliver discovers Vincent hires a man during his visits to a London brothel. Desperate to be with Vincent, Oliver orchestrates a deception, switching places with the brothel's employee.

Jennifer Hughes doesn’t have an extraordinary life, but that doesn’t matter - she loves her family and enjoys her job as a teacher. In her eyes, her unextraordinary life is utterly perfect. But then, in the blink of an eye, Jennifer finds herself cut off from everything she knew and loved, confined to a strange new world and forced to watch from a distance as her family and friends pick up the pieces. Can Jennifer hold her perfect life together, even though she’s not living it herself?

Skeletons have a habit of revealing themselves eventually.... When a human skeleton is discovered on the boundary of a 20-year-old property development, it seems there are a large number of people who may know the identity of the corpse and how it got there. But 20 years is a long time, and those individuals were very different people back then. Skeletons are being revealed in all senses, and there are many prominent local figures who are beginning to feel uncomfortable and afraid.

A positive spin on the supernatural, ‘Pirates’ sees ageing industrialist Peter Graham return to his former family home in Cornwall after more than 40 years. The ghosts of the house represent happy memories of his childhood.

1861, Victorian England. When Matthew and Harriet Rowsley are invited to a party at Clunston Park by Matthew's cousin, Colonel Barrington Rowsley, Harriet is nervous - surely the aristocratic guests will snub her? Her fears are realised on their first evening when the only person who deigns to speak to her is the spiteful Grafin Weiser and confirmed when she commits a faux pas at the cricket match the following day. Grafin Weiser is then found murdered and the finger is quickly pointed at Clara, an eleven-year-old maid, as the culprit.

Trish Noble, a nurse and devotee of her local church, walks into a Bath police station and confesses to killing her husband. She found him drunk again, saw red and hit him in the side of the head with a teapot. Detective Peter Diamond struggles to see the woman as a cold, callous killer, but when the post-mortem reveals stab wounds to Glenn Noble’s back as the cause of death, it becomes clear there’s more to this case than meets the eye.

A dawn swim turns deadly in a brand-new short story starring DCI Vera Stanhope.... Two bored cell-mates play a game with chilling results.... A hen night in an isolated cottage brings new meaning to 'I will survive'.... Why not treat yourself to a slice of murderously moreish fiction, and join us in wishing the squad many deadly returns. With stories by Ann Cleeves, Martin Edwards, Kate Ellis, Margaret Murphy, Chris Simms and Cath Staincliffe, as well as John Baker, Chaz Brenchley and Stuart Pawson.

What has counting meant to different cultures and different individuals? In this book, historian and mathematician Benjamin Wardhaugh explores stories from all over the world and from every period of human history, from the African Stone Age to cyberspace; from Assyrian kings to Chinese peasants. Weaving these histories together, Wardhaugh shows the ways in which counting has been continually reinvented over time, through language, writing, counters and machines.

Permit me, lovely listeners, to take you back in time. The first thing that I want you to do is to close your eyes and breathe deeply. Okay, great, now open them again very slowly. Are you ready? Good, then let us begin. Featuring Lady Eliot, a brand-new detective agency with a terrible mystery to solve, an awful burglary, Mungo's heroics, Lady Eliot falling in love, a dazzlingly beautiful song about eggs and the awful, villainous penguin Count Visbek.

Private detective Francis Quarles visits a man with a valuable collection of manuscripts written by murderers. During his stay, the man is killed after drinking cyanide-laced port. A cryptic literary clue in the front page of a book offers the only indication of who may be responsible.

At two pm on a Monday in 1966, Ned Balfour wakes in Corsica beside a beautiful woman. In the same instant, back in London, fellow art dealer and Dachau survivor Sam Weiss falls 10 storeys to his death. Ned refuses to believe that Sam's death was intentional, and his investigation thrusts him into the deceit and fraudulence of the art world, where he unmasks more than one respectable face. First published in 1967, this thrilling tale of vertigo, suspicion and infidelity is a long-forgotten classic with an intriguing plot twist.

With the death of Edward the Confessor, the crown of England is hanging in the balance. And in the north Harald Hardrada, the Norwegian Viking leader, is determined to take his chance of capturing the country. But newly-crowned King Harold Godwinson will not let that happen without a fight. Charismatic and the leader of a mighty army, he is determined to make Hadrada the last Viking in England. And so the bloodiest battle yet fought on English soil is about to begin. At stake is sovereignty, freedom, and honour.

She was the daughter of a preacher and a gypsy. A strange and elusive child with powers of prophecy, she grew into an even stranger woman. From those around her she inspired love and admiration or furious hatred. Nothing in between. And somehow Jassy could transform even those who loved her into her enemies. Barney Hatton, the dispossessed heir of Mortiboys, loved her but not enough. Lindy, a girl who worked there, loved her too much.

Unpick the complexities of our digital world and discover how to live well within it. Over the last decade, through digital media, we have crossed a number of significant thresholds: the interconnection of over half of the world’s adult population through mobile telephony and the internet and the devotion of more than half the waking hours of a western generation to mediated experience.

Best-selling crime author Joseph Newton is on board a train when he meets a man fascinated by the idea of a murder so perfectly simple it would be impossible to solve. Critical of the elaborate plots in Newton’s novels, the man is keen to demonstrate to the author just how he would carry out the seemingly undetectable crime.

Born to Be Wild began with the death of Oz Blackstone, movie hero and idol of millions, and tells how it might not have happened. The Last Chickenpig carries on the yarn as 17-year-old Tom, Oz's son with his soul-mate Primavera Phillips, goes in search of the father he has mourned since his early childhood.

Twin Lakes is a complex of holiday homes in a scenic part of England. “Rest Assured”, says the sign at its entrance. And the people fortunate enough to occupy the luxury homes are indeed able to relax in a beautiful setting. Then a series of mysterious threatening notes are delivered to one of the lakeside homes. DS Bert Hook conducts an informal investigation and the notes cease to appear. All is peaceful once more until a brutal death shatters the peace.

When a broken effigy of Christ washes up on a beach in Flanders, it is displayed in the local church. Strange miracles start drawing people to the town to worship, but then these unexplainable events start to turn sinister.

Amra and Holgren's comfortable - if decidedly unexciting - life is rudely interrupted when Amra receives an old enemy's head in a box. A longstanding debt calls her back home to Bellarius, the scene of many childhood horrors she would much rather forget about. Bellarius must be saved from utter destruction and civil war. After Amra suddenly vanishes, Holgren crafts a plan that teeters between impossibility and insanity. But first, he'll have to deal with three separate armies vying for control, all of which view him as either a threat, an inconvenience, or a potential tool.

Sinclair Breckenridge is my husband. We’re up and coming leaders to The Fellowship and parents to be. But my new life doesn’t come easily. Not when long buried secrets––and far more than I bargained for––finally reveal my mother’s killer. Sin vows to do anything to keep our little ones and me safe, even if his promise means denying me of the one thing I want most in this world. He doesn’t understand it’s the death of my dream. And that’s a problem.