Showing results by narrator "Simon Mattacks" in All Categories

The body of an elderly man is found in an abandoned World War Two pillbox beside the Bridgwater and Taunton Canal. With no obvious motive and no credible suspect, DI Nick Dixon starts digging into the victim’s past. The more he digs, the deeper Dixon is drawn into a case that takes him from the cave systems beneath rural Somerset to the heart of government, and threatens to expose a military cover-up at the highest level. Blocked by a wall of silence, Dixon must unravel a dangerous conspiracy before the killer strikes again.

It’s a trauma like no other. Being perceived as a threat or, worse, hunted as food makes an animal attack a unique ordeal. Suddenly you’re helpless, at its mercy. When an animal strikes it is lightning fast, determined and can’t be reasoned with. Often brutally violent, such an attack can...

Vivian Lestrange - celebrated author of the popular mystery novel The Charterhouse Case and total recluse - has apparently dropped off the face of the Earth. Reported missing by his secretary Eleanor, whom Inspector Bond suspects to be the author herself looking for publicity, it appears that crime is afoot when Lestrange's housekeeper is also found to have disappeared. Bond and Warner of Scotland Yard set to work to investigate a murder with no body and a potentially fictional victim.

The discovery of a severed head in a golf course bunker triggers a frantic race to find a serial killer that brings the town of Burnham-on-Sea to a standstill. A connection is made with a series of unsolved murders harking back to the 1970s, and Detective Inspector Nick Dixon finds himself caught in a race against time that takes him the length and breadth of the country.

A trainee jockey has been kicked to death by an aggressive stallion at the local stables. Deemed an accidental death, the case is closed. But when the jockey’s brother returns from active service, he sparks an armed siege, demanding the investigation be re-opened and the truth uncovered.

Isobel Swan, a sixth form student, has been murdered. First, her ring finger is severed, then her throat is cut. With the investigation going nowhere fast, Detective Inspector Nick Dixon is sent undercover as a trainee teacher into Isobel’s boarding school. But to find the killer, he must first confront his inner demons and lay to rest the ghosts lurking in his own past. If he can… As Dixon digs deeper, the stakes have never been higher and a murder has never felt so personal.

Lily Black was presumed dead for years. Now she’s returned to the unquestioning arms of her loving husband, Kane. Where she’s been is a mystery, but the deadly danger she’s brought with her is manifest to all. Aliyah, Kane’s mother, has worked hard to position herself in power. No one escapes her bitter ambition, not her children and certainly not a woman who may not be who she claims.

Princess of Mycenae, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, sister of the sacrificed Iphigenia and the cursed Orestes. Electra is forced to flee her home after witnessing the shocking revenge-murder of her father, by her mother, on his return from the Trojan War. Life beyond the palace is frightening, and the scandalous behaviour of her foreign companions disturbs her, but she needs the help of the Trojan Cassandra, and her two lovers, to survive. Driven by her own desire for vengeance, Electra's life becomes one of adventure, peril, pleasure, tragedy and love.

A routine missing person enquiry takes a grisly turn when a young couple drag a box containing human remains out of a Somerset river. The victim was a surveillance expert investigating an exaggerated injury claim—a murder with an obvious motive, until a police officer is implicated and suspended. Still brooding after his recent brush with police Professional Standards, Detective Chief Inspector Nick Dixon is on extended leave, helping his pregnant fiancée, Detective Sergeant Jane Winter, fight for her place on the major investigation team.

Rory Connor was a gambling man and he had a gambler's luck. From the day he was born, his mother had known that Rory would be the one to make something of his life. At seven years old he was earning money from odd jobs and by 14 he was in full-time work. By the time he was 19, he had escaped the factory to become a rent-collector. Now, at 23, ambition was in full flow and he was always looking to bigger and better games to play.

A gripping thriller from best-selling author J.A. Baker! Welcome to Winters End... Winters End should have been the perfect place for me and my husband Neil to start again. To leave the terrible secrets and guilt of our past far behind us. But from the moment we arrived in the small, isolated...

After twenty years apart, Matthew and Helena have rekindled their college romance and are away in Iceland on their first holiday together. Swept up in the romance on a mountain hike, one moment they are taking the perfect photo, the next Helena is hanging from the cliff edge…

Princess of Troy, sister of Hector and Paris, Priestess of Apollo. Blessed by the Sun God with the gift of prophecy, and then - for rejecting his advances - cursed by him to never be believed. Diomenes, the enemy Achaean with the healing hands, and Cassandra become puppets of the gods. Their passions are thwarted, their gifts rendered useless for the sake of a wager between two immortals. And now doomed, magnificent Troy is burning. If Cassandra and Diomenes find each other, can their love survive the games of malicious gods, victorious warriors and hated kings?

Sorceress, Princess of Colchis, Securer of the Golden Fleece. Medea - her very name is a byword for infamy. Legend has it that she murdered her own children for revenge. But love in Ancient Greece was often a dangerous game; and legends are not always what they seem. Medea, devoted wife of Jason, was also a loving mother, a loyal friend of Herakles and a brave adventurer with the Argonauts. A woman both betrayer and betrayed, the real story of Medea is strange, sensual and heroic.

Ann Cleeves Classic Crime - engaging mysteries to savour, beloved characters to meet again The Baby-Snatcher is the sixth and final mystery novel in the Inspector Ramsay series by Ann Cleeves, author of the Shetland and Vera Stanhope crime series. Marilyn Howe’s and her mother Kathleen are an...

As a rousing Strauss piece is reaching its crescendo in Maningpool Civic Hall, the talented yet obnoxious conductor Sir Noel Grampian is shot dead in full view of the Municipal Orchestra and the audience. It was no secret that he had many enemies - musicians and music critics among them - but to be killed mid-flow suggests an act of the coldest calculation. Told through the letters and documents sent by DI Alan Hope to his wife as he puzzles through the dauntingly vast pool of suspects and scant physical evidence in the case.

Ann Cleeves Classic Crime - engaging mysteries to savour, beloved characters to meet again Killjoy is the fourth mystery novel in the Inspector Ramsay series by Ann Cleeves, author of the Shetland and Vera Stanhope crime series. The youth theatre cast are in their places but Gus Lynch’s female...

Ann Cleeves Classic Crime - engaging mysteries to savour, beloved characters to meet again A Day in the Death of Dorothea Cassidy is the third mystery novel in the Inspector Ramsay series by Ann Cleeves, author of the Shetland and Vera Stanhope crime series. For Dorothea Cassidy Thursdays were...

Ann Cleeves Classic Crime - engaging mysteries to savour, beloved characters to meet again The Healers is the fifth mystery novel in the Inspector Ramsay series by Ann Cleeves, author of the Shetland and Vera Stanhope crime series. Isolated farmer Ernie Bowles was found lying on his kitchen...

As children, Gareth and Helen went ignored and utterly unsupervised in their isolated English farmhouse while their mother obsessively tended to her beloved, exquisite garden. When they were little, Gareth would occupy himself by trapping insects under glass and Helen would find ways to entertain herself - but the older they grew, the more sinister their lives became, with no attentive parent to shield them from the predators of the world. Decades later, Helen is in the same crumbling house, unhappily married and looking after their bedridden mother, and Gareth finally returns home.