Showing results by narrator "Gareth Armstrong" in All Categories

When Captain Robert Kineally went missing from Haverton American Army base in Devon in 1944, it was generally assumed he had lost his nerve and deserted. But now, 20 years after the war, a body found on the near-derelict base seems to tell an entirely different story.

DS Charlie Woodend has a murder to solve. Trouble is, nobody seems to want him to solve it. Not Eddie, a Liverpudlian thug sent to threaten him; not DCI Bentley; not Deputy Commissioner Naylor, whose word is law in Scotland Yard; not even the dead girl's mother herself. But Woodend cares. He will find the murderer, he promises himself, even if that means putting his career and perhaps even his own life on the line.

The discovery of Bradley Pines body off a busy road signals the end of his bid to win a local election. But why would the killer risk dumping the body so publicly? With the election looming, and Charlie Woodends old enemy Marlowe replacing Pine as candidate, Woodend is required to produce a result.

August, 1098. After countless battles and sieges, the surviving soldiers of the First Crusade are at last within reach of their ultimate goal: Jerusalem. But rivalries fester, and new enemies are amassing against them in the Holy Land. Demetrios Askiates, the Emperor's spy, has had enough of the Crusade's violence and hypocrisy. But when a routine diplomatic mission leads to a deadly ambush, he realises he has been snared in the vast power struggles which underlie the Crusade.

A. N. Wilson has been thinking about the Bible, and reading it, since he read theology for a year at university. Martin Luther King was 'reading the Bible' when he started the Civil Rights Movement. When Michelangelo painted the fresco cycles in the Sistine Chapel, he was 'reading the Bible'. In The Book of the People, A. N. Wilson explores how readers and thinkers have approached the Bible and how it might be read today.

In a lush meadow, bounded by dense forest and a sparkling river, the flags of several tents flutter in the breeze, rich with the promise of halcyon days. Yet all is not as tranquil as it may seem: The balance of power wrought between the occupants of The Great Field, as it is properly known, is a delicate one, and relationships are stretched to breaking point when a new, large and disciplined group offers to share its surplus of milk pudding.

Gurney Close isn’t the sort of place where anything untoward should happen. It’s just a small, newly-built cul-de-sac with three nice houses and a bungalow overlooking the river Wye. The people who move in – three married couples and a divorcee – don’t expect much excitement beyond some neighbourhood friendliness. With this in mind, they organise a party to celebrate moving in. Everything goes well and a good time is had by all – until one of them is found dead the next morning.

To many Queen Victoria was a ruler shrouded in myth and mystique, portrayed as an aging, stiff widow. But in truth Britain’s longest-reigning monarch was passionate, expressive, humorous, and unconventional. A. N. Wilson’s exhaustively researched and definitive biography includes a wealth of new material from previously unseen sources, showing us Queen Victoria as she’s never been seen before.

In the final days of summer in 2013, a young woman is shot dead in her apartment. Three floors above, the blue lights of the police cars awaken Leo Junker, a longtime police officer. Leo works in the internal affairs division as the lowliest form of officer - a spy. Leo is even lower, however, having been suspended after committing a terrible mistake. He can't stay away for long.

This is the story of John Stone, financier and armaments manufacturer, a man so wealthy that in the years before World War One he was able to manipulate markets, industries and indeed whole countries and continents. A panoramic novel with a riveting mystery at its heart, Stone's Fall is a quest to discover how and why John Stone dies, falling out of a window at his London home.

The triumphant third volume of the unique and magical Duncton Chronicles. The ruthless war against the Stone has almost been won by disciples of the Word - only wild Siabod and mysterious Beechenhill still hold out, and everywhere the followers of the Stone go in peril of their lives. Yet in the shadows of Duncton Wood a new light is shining. For the Stone Mole has come to revive the moles’ faith in themselves and in the ancient power of the Stone to defeat and deny the evil Word. But it is a task that will demand a greater sacrifice than any mole has yet to face....

A man is found hanging from a bridge. A second is found hanged from a crane. DCI Charlie Woodend soon discovers that the men did military service together in Cyprus. When a third ex-soldier disappears, DS Monika Paniatowski is sent to Cyprus, where she uncovers a long-buried tale. Back in Whitebridge, Woodend is determined to solve the case before tragedy strikes again...

It is 1876. Nineteen-year-old orphan Esperanza Gorst arrives at the great country house of Evenwood to be interviewed for the position of Lady's Maid by the 26th Baroness Tansor, the former Miss Emily Carteret. But Esperanza is no ordinary servant. She has been sent by her guardian, the...

It is night in the South Seas near Tahiti, and the ship HMS Bounty has begun the long voyage home to England. But the sailors on the ship are angry men, and they have swords and guns. They pull the captain out of bed and take him up on deck. He tries to run, but a sailor holds a knife to his neck. "Do that again, Captain Bligh, and you’re a dead man!" he says.

Dark Echo is an unlucky boat. Despite this knowledge, Martin Stannard falls under her spell and prepares to sail her across the Atlantic with his father. But his lover, Suzanne, is uneasy and begins exploring the yacht's past. What she finds is terrifying. Dark Echo isn't just unlucky, it's evil. It was built for Harry Spalding, a soldier and sorcerer who committed suicide yet still casts his malevolent spell nearly a century after his death.

In Missee Lee, the original cast of the famed series is sailing under the stars and the command of Captain Flint in the South China Sea when Gibbet, their pet monkey, grabs the captain's cigar and drops it in the fuel tank. In minutes, the ship is ablaze (and doomed), and our seven luckless protagonists are adrift in two small boats. They make their way to land, only to find themselves the captives of one of the last remaining pirates operating off the China Coast. However, Missee Lee, as it turns out, is no ordinary pirate....

Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced American woman for whom Edward VIII abdicated in 1936, ended her life as the prisoner of her lawyer who would not allow anyone - friend, foe or journalist - to visit her in her Paris flat. Rose Tremain takes this true story and transforms it into an imaginative and ironic fiction. Her thesis is that Wallis, gaga and bed-ridden, has forgotten the king who gave up an empire for love of her. The other stories in this magnificent collection range over a variety of themes, equally original and unexpected.

In EDI (the European Department of Intelligence in Brussels) there are some very secret files - the Omega Files. There are strange, surprising, and sometimes horrible stories in these files, but not many people know about them. You never read about them in the newspapers.Hawker and Jude know all about the Omega Files, because they work for EDI. They think fast, they move fast, and they learn some very strange things.

Adapted from the Arthur Conan Doyle story "Silver Blaze".... Horseracing is the sport of kings, perhaps because racehorses are very expensive animals. But when they win races, they can make a lot of money too - money for the owners, for the trainers, and for the people who put bets on them to win.Silver Blaze is a young horse, but already the winner of many races. One night he disappears from his stables, and someone kills his trainer.

Three soldiers, bound together by a single terrible event in the final days of the First World War, and a scheme to stun an entire country. Wounded and traumatised by their wartime experience, Albert Maillard and Édouard Péricourt return from the fighting on the Western Front and find themselves struggling in a society where reverence for the dead can never erase the revulsion for those who survived.