Showing results by narrator "Gordon Griffin" in All Categories

Detective Inspector Michael Angel and his team of regulars are searching for a serial killer on the loose in the Yorkshire town of Bromersley. The available clues are as sparse as they are puzzling: A character in early Roman attire is observed at every murder and a laurel leaf is left on every corpse. DNA evidence links a woman of oriental origin to the murders but this profile doesn’t fit any of the suspects. The investigations become more mystifying as Inspector Angel races against the clock to find the killer.

When a skeleton is discovered in a deep grave at the edge of an area of woodland, the police discover that it is one of their own officers who disappeared whilst on duty some 30 years earlier. DS Harry Vicary and DI Archibald Dez have little evidence to go on, but as the investigation unfolds they meet ex-police men and women who left the force at the time of the DC’s disappearance, and did so in fear of their own safety, and who, even after all this time, are reluctant to talk.

Surprises are guaranteed, as elephants appear in a London side street; a gang of geriatrics goes on a hearing aid heist and an underworld boss searches for a harp. Join the author in a brush with Adolf Hitler and take a walk on Beachy Head, the UK's favourite suicide spot.

A tip-off leads police to dismantle a pile of rubble in the village of Pendwick, in search of a hidden body. As expected, a corpse is found and is identified as being that of a local businessman who has been missing for 10 years.

Hennessey and Yellich - along with an ever-expanding team -head up the ensuing murder investigation. And then two further bodies are discovered - along with a particularly nasty brand of political extremism involving just a few too many respected local businessmen.

When two badly burned bodies are discovered, the York police begin to wonder if there is a link. Are they crimes of passion or revenge? The result of a family feud? Hennessey and Yellich thoroughly investigate the private and business lives of the deceased, but find little to go on. Then Hennessey's gut feeling as to the identity of the killer, based on years of experience and intuition, is shaken when another burned body is discovered...and another.

It is a shock to the staff at the Barleybridge Animal Hospital when Dan, one of the farm vets, is seriously injured in a car accident. It is even more of a shock when Scott Spencer, back from Australia, steps in to cover for him. Scott slips seamlessly into the Practice routine, not guessing what secrets are about to be revealed: secrets that will turn his life upside down and amend his callous attitude towards women.

Between 1881, when Churchill was just six, and 1921, the year of his mother's death, Winston Churchill and Jennie Jerome were prolific and energetic correspondents. Their exchange of letters has never before been published as a volume of correspondence, and many of these intimate letters - between two highly gifted writers - are being published here for the first time. A significant addition to the Churchill canon, Darling Winston traces Churchill's emotional, intellectual and political development as confided to his main mentor.

Drawing on the wisdom of 2,500 years of contemplative non-religious writing on all that it means to be human - from the origins of the universe to small matters of courtesy and kindness in everyday life - A. C. Grayling, Britain's most popular philosopher, has created a secular bible. This book is designed as a narrative and also to be dipped into for inspiration, encouragement and consolation, The Good Book offers a thoughtful, non-religious alternative to the many people who do not follow one of the world's great religions.

Sex, Spies and Scandal is the story of John Vassall, a civil servant who was unmasked as a Soviet spy in 1962. Having been photographed in compromising positions while working at the British embassy in Moscow in 1954, Vassall was blackmailed into handing over secrets from the British Admiralty to his Soviet handlers, both in Moscow and in London, for more than seven years.

Returned to an England she barely knows and a postwar world she doesn't understand, Marian searches for something on which to ground her life. Family and friends surround her, and a RAF officer attempts to bring her the normality of love and affection, but she is haunted by the guilt of knowing that her contribution to the war helped to develop the atom bomb. Where, in the complexities of peacetime, does her loyalty lie?

Kings Richington is an affluent, self-satisfied little town, nestling on a quiet stretch of the Thames. So when a mutilated body is found floating in the river, the influential residents close ranks and demand a discreet police cover-up. DI Jack Dawes is assigned to the case and soon upsets some powerful people but their attempts to put a stop to his intrusive enquiries are foiled when the town is shaken by more murders.

Never again confuse your vintage with your viticulture, your ullage with your oenology, your sabrage with your cepage. Bask in the admiration of your fellow drinkers, pronounce confidently on the provenance of whatever is in your glass (or your mouth) and hold your own against the most sneering of sommeliers. Written by experts and offering listeners the opportunity to pass off appropriated knowledge as their own, the Bluffer's Guides provide hard fact masquerading as frivolous observation in one witty, easy listen.

Robert Sackville-West brings together the extraordinary, moving accounts of those who dedicated their lives to the search for the missing. These stories reveal the remarkable lengths to which people will go to give meaning to their loss: Rudyard Kipling's quest for his son's grave, E. M. Forster’s conversations with traumatised soldiers in hospital in Alexandria, desperate attempts to communicate with the spirits of the dead, the campaign to establish the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior and the exhumation and reburial in military cemeteries of hundreds of thousands of bodies.

From the master of British crime writing comes Frank Elder’s last case. When his estranged daughter Katherine suddenly appears on his doorstep, Elder knows that something is badly wrong. The breakdown of her relationship with a controversial artist has sent her into a self-destructive tailspin which culminates in murder. And as Elder struggles to protect Katherine and prove her innocence, the terrors of the past threaten them both once more.

1893. Wigan is in the grip of a harsh winter and a devastating national miners' strike. Arthur Morris, a wealthy colliery owner whose determination to cut the miners' pay is one of the main causes of the strike, is found brutally murdered in an alleyway. A sinister letter prompted the victim to leave his dinner guests and hurry out into the freezing night to Scholes, a rough working-class district where he is universally hated.

Why did literary legend Wynn Staniland suddenly become a recluse in the 1980s? Most assumed he stopped writing because of his wife's bizarre suicide. And now a promising young author called Zac Wilkinson is working on Staniland's biography and hopes to reveal the true story to a waiting world. When Wilkinson is found brutally murdered, DI Wesley Peterson finds links to the unexplained poisoning of a middle-aged couple - and Staniland appears to be the connection.

Lord Thurlby can only ever recall previous visits of Lavinia Muir, his mother’s goddaughter, with a shudder. So it is with undisguised horror that he hears she is to come and stay again. Her arrival on the common stage, accompanied by the flirtatious Isobel Macclesfield, does nothing to allay his fears. When he learns that Lavinia has become entangled with the rakish Lord Riseholm, his reservations appear to be justified.

Bert Trautmann is famed as the goalkeeper who broke his neck in an FA Cup final and played on. But his early life is no less extraordinary: he grew up in Nazi Germany and fought for the Germans in World War Two. In 1945 he was captured and sent to a British POW camp where, for the first time, he saw a better way of life. He embraced England as his new home and before long became an England football hero. This is his extraordinary story.

An editor receives a manuscript purporting to be the lost diary of history's greatest lover, Don Juan. An orphan left on the steps of a convent, Don Juan grew up within the church but his ambitions towards the priesthood fell to the wayside when he was seduced by a young nun. Evicted from the convent, he was taken under the wing of the libertine Don Pedro, the Marquis of Mota, who coached him in skills both courtly and amorous and then employed him as a spy at court.

When Carmel Hennessy begins a new job in North Yorkshire, she finds the historic city of Eborby gripped by fear. A killer is on the prowl who binds and asphyxiates his victims before leaving their naked bodies in isolated country churchyards. The press are calling him the Resurrection Man. Tragic events from the past link Carmel with DI Joe Plantagenet, who believes the case may have occult connections.