Showing results by narrator "Philip Franks" in All Categories

As a young police officer in Palestine during the closing months of the Mandate - the cradle of Middle Eastern terrorism - Richard Thornhill saw and did things which still haunt his dreams and make him fear for his sanity. Is he himself a killer? Now, when a retired police officer is found dead in the ruins of Lydmouth Castle, the past has come back to claim Detective Inspector Thornhill and he is under suspicion of another murder. His wife, Edith, and former lover Jill Francis join forces in an uneasy alliance to try to help him.

From the number one best-selling author of The Ashes of London and The Fire Court, this is the fourth instalment in the acclaimed Lydmouth series. The Korean war rumbles in the background throughout this novel as a reporter is found murdered at the Bathurst Arms, squatters are evicted from a military camp and there are new developments in the three-year-old hunt for a missing teenager. And in spite of all that's going on, Jill Francis, a local journalist, and DI Richard Thornhill find they can no longer resist their feelings for each other.

When Mattie Harris' body is found drowned in the river, everyone in Lydmouth knows something is wrong. Mattie wasn't a swimmer - it can't have been a simple accident. She was drunk on the last night of her life - could she have fallen in? Or was she pushed? Mattie was a waitress, so when Lydmouth's most prominent citizens become very anxious to establish that her death was accidental, Jill Francis' suspicions become roused. In the meantime she is becoming ever closer to Inspector Richard Thornhill and discovering that the living have as many secrets as the dead.

When a spinster of the parish is found bludgeoned to death in St John's, and the church's most valuable possession, the Lydmouth chalice, is missing, the finger of suspicion points at the new vicar, who is already beset with problems. The glare of the police investigation reveals shabby secrets and private griefs. Jill Francis, struggling to find her feet in her new life, stumbles into the case at the beginning. But even a journalist cannot always watch from the sidelines.

From the number-one best-selling author of The Ashes of London and The Fire Court this is the first instalment in the acclaimed Lydmouth series. Workmen in the small market town of Lydmouth are demolishing an old cottage. A sledgehammer smashes into what looks like a solid wall. Instead, layers of wallpaper conceal the door of a locked cupboard which holds a box - and in the box is the skeleton of a young baby.

Love and need make unexpected bedfellows, and both are blind. As the grip of a long hard winter tightens on Lydmouth, a dead woman calls the dying in a seance behind net curtains. Two provincial newspapers are in the throes of a bitter circulation war. A lorry driver broods, and an office boy loses his heart. Britain is basking in the warm glow of postwar tranquillity, but in the quiet town of Lydmouth, darker forces are at play. The rats are fed on bread and milk, a gentleman's yellow kid glove is mislaid on a train and something disgusting is happening at Mr Prout's toy shop.

When the body of Rufus Moorcroft, a middle-aged widower with a distinguished war record, is found in his summerhouse, the verdict is suicide. But both reporter Jill Francis and her lover, Detective Richard Thornhill, approaching the case from different angles, discover there's more to it than that. The sixth instalment in the acclaimed Lydmouth series.

After the coldest night of the year, they find the man's body. He is dangling from the Hanging Tree on the outskirts of a village near Lydmouth, with his trousers round his ankles. Is it suicide, murder, or accidental death resulting from some bizarre sexual practice? Journalist Jill Francis and Detective Inspector Thornhill become involved in the case in separate ways.

Avid antiques collector Pierre-Francois Chaumont unearths the find of a lifetime at a Paris auction house: an 18th-century portrait of a gentleman who looks just like him. Researching into the painting's history, he has the chance to abandon his tedious existence and walk into a brand new life.

These 25 new stories mark Graham Swift's return to the short form after seven acclaimed novels and confirm him as a master storyteller. They unite into a richly peopled vision of a country that is both a crucible of history and a maze of contemporary confusions.

August 1914: In the sweltering heat, the fate of Europe hangs in the balance. Germany is hurling her forces into a carefully planned invasion of Belgium and France. Bound by an 1839 treaty to protect Belgium from any invader, Britain came to its defence. With the British Expeditionary Force numbering just 120,000 men, and dwarfed by the vast manpower of Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II remains unfazed by this ‘contemptible little army'. But the BEF was, man for man, the best trained army in Europe.

1600: A new century dawns. War with Spain has dragged on for 15 years, the conflict in Ireland for six. Unease stalks England in the dying years of Elizabeth I’s reign, and Elizabethan intelligencer Martin Marbeck is bored. Then a message from his spymaster, Sir Robert Cecil, arrives: the existence of a spy has been discovered, code-named Morera, and Marbeck must uncover the true identity of this traitor quickly, before rumours of the young King Philip III forming a new Armada prove themselves to be true.

Book One in the best-selling 'Uncle Albert' science/adventure series. Famous scientist Uncle Albert and his niece Gedanken enter the dangerous and unknown world of a thought bubble. Their mission: to unlock the deep mysteries of time and space... In this action-packed adventure story, discover why you can't break the ultimate speed barrier and find out how to become older than your mother, how to put on weight without getting fat, and how to live forever without even knowing it.

In the mid-20th century the relationship between America and Britain had a chequered past. Theirs was a history of protection and oppression, of rebellion and ultimately war. But then the shared crisis of the Second World War brought Britain and America closer than ever before or since and saw an unprecedented level of military cooperation. How was such a radical shift possible?

On November 12, 1912, a rescue team trekking across Antarctica's Great Ice Barrier finally found what they sought - the snow-covered tent of the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott. Inside, they made a grim discovery: Scott's frozen body lay between the bodies of two fellow explorers. They had died just eleven miles from the depot of supplies which might have saved them.

Robert Nobel, the school pariah, triumphs over his own fears and the school bully in this extraordinary tale of self-empowerment, legend and death. Robert is a boy who can do anything - or so old Edith Sorrel at the nursing home tells him. Robert doesn't think so, knowing as he does that he is the school geek. But something compels him to do what Edith asks - to visit old Chance House, where a boy once fell to his death from the top floor flat, to confront his fears and find some answers.

Trapped in a London flat, Beth remembers a transgressive love affair in 1960s Paris. The most famous writer in Russia takes his last breath in a stationmaster’s cottage, miles from Moscow. A father, finally free of his daughter’s demands, embarks on a long swim from his Canadian lakeside retreat. And in the grandest house of all, Danni the Polish housekeeper catches the eye of an enigmatic visitor.Rose Tremain awakens the senses in this diverse collection of short stories.

An Englishwoman is found dead in a house near Rome. Her distraught husband enlists the help of his closest friend, Chris Bronson, who discovers an ancient inscription on a slab of stone above their fireplace. But who are the liars? And what is it they are lying to protect? Pursued across Europe, Bronson uncovers a trail of clues that leads him back to the shadowy beginnings of Christianity; to a chalice decorated with mysterious symbols; to a secret code hidden within a scroll. And to a deadly conspiracy which – if revealed – will rock the foundations of our modern world.

Miss Mackenzie by Trollope was the runner-up in Radio 4's 'Neglected Classics' vote. Margaret Mackenzie is a single woman in her mid-thirties who receives a large inheritance when her brother dies. She must then deal with what comes with the fortune, including several suitors, who may, or, may not, simply be after her money.

In the second novel in the Pop Larkin series, the Larkin family descends upon Brittany in France. Like fish out of water, they find that things don't quite turn out their way: The weather is less than ideal, the food is awful, and the hotel is in a bad state of repair. But things slowly improve as Pop manages to sweet-talk Mlle Dupont, Angela Snow and her sister, Iris; and Charley and Mariette celebrate their first wedding anniversary. A Breath of French Air is a delightful book full of nostalgia, fun, and frivolity.