Showing results by narrator "Peter Wickham" in All Categories

Haunted by the brutal killing of his UN interpreter wife in Bosnia, ex-SAS operative Ed Coltrane is consumed with the need to hunt down her murderers. Drinking too much and spending too much on his search, his life is going into meltdown. Just as it seems he can fall no further, a former colleague informs him that one of his wife's killers is in London, as a guest of the British government. Certain unofficial figures in the corridors of power would like to see this man disappear, and they'd like Ed Coltrane to accept the contract.

Peter Maxwell didn't want to attend the GNVQ course. He didn't want to get mixed up in murder either - but perhaps it was all part of death's rich tapestry. And while a disparate gathering of teachers was breaking ice upstairs at the Carnforth Centre, someone else was in the basement - breaking skulls. But what the killer couldn't have foreseen was that one of the victims was an old flame of Maxwell's. So now it was personal. And when 'Mad Max' takes something personally, he doesn't get madder - he gets results.

Winter 1795. Lieutenant John Pearce, reckoning to have finally ditched his old enemy, Admiral Hotham, has found a new one in Henry Digby, previously a friend. Meanwhile, Pearce's pregnant and recently widowed lover is adamant they cannot be seen together for the sake of their unborn child as she seeks respectability in society. Aboard HMS Flirt as part of the squadron led by Horatio Nelson, Pearce and his Pelicans soon join them on a reconnaissance which results in the destruction of a key French battery.

When Professor Julius Arnell breathes his last in the British Museum Reading Room, it looks like death from natural causes. Who, after all, would have cause to murder a retired academic? Inspector Shelley's suspicions are aroused when he finds a packet of poisoned sugared almonds in the dead man's pocket, and a motive becomes clearer when he discovers Arnell's connection to a Texan oil millionaire. Soon another man plunges hundreds of feet into a reservoir on a Yorkshire moor.

There were five dead men in the cabin of the boat, lying under six fathoms of Caribbean water. But the men had not been drowned: they had been shot through the head at close range. John Fletcher had gone down to photograph a sunken ship, but he took photographs of the boat and its cargo of dead men instead. Soon he is having trouble with the island police, a private army of thugs and two CIA agents. Now Fletcher wishes he had followed his first impulse and said nothing to anyone....

In the peaceful seaside town of Broadgate, an impossible crime occurs. The operator of the cliff railway locks the empty carriage one evening; when he returns to work next morning, a dead body is locked inside - a man who has been stabbed in the back. Jimmy London, a newspaper reporter, is first on the scene. He is quick on the trail for clues and agrees to pool his knowledge with Inspector Shelley of Scotland Yard, who is holidaying in the area.

Hector Langdon volunteered for service in the army in World War I when he was no more than 17 years old, though he gave his age as 20. It was the kind of reckless action he was to take all his life, much to the regret of his solicitor father who wished him to follow in the same profession. So he drifted from one occupation to another after the war, never really settling down. It seemed he had to be forever on the move. Until he met Eva Gray, and even that meeting was to lead in the end to tragedy.

When a lifeboat marked 'Valparaiso I' is discovered, a strange mystery unfolds. The Valparaiso had been sunk by a Japanese submarine nearly a year earlier whilst carrying a million pounds of gold bullion. In the lifeboat is a man with a question mark tattooed on his left forearm; but he can shed no light on the situation because his memory has gone - or so he claims. Two other survivors from the Valparaiso, Rains and Jones, have doubts about the man's professed amnesia.

It was an oddly assorted company of passengers that boarded the S.S. Chetwynd in Hong Kong and Singapore to take passage to Freemantle. In this company, living in such close quarters, there was inevitably a certain amount of friction. But human passions would prove insignificant by comparison when the indescribable fury of the storm that hit.

At the center of The Dark Night of the Soul (La noche oscura del alma) is a poem written by the 16th century Spanish poet and mystic St John of the Cross. Consisting of eight stanzas, each of five lines, the poem outlines the journey in pursuit of divine union, within which the only source of light comes from the soul. This recording in English includes the poem itself and St John's two accompanying treatises (1584-1585), essentially commentaries, which offer line-by-line explanations of the poem. Many modern listeners have found guidance and consolation in this work.

London, 1895. Daniel Wilson and Abigail Fenton have been hired by the Natural History Museum to find out who deliberately smashed the fossilised skeleton of a small dinosaur. At first Daniel is reluctant to take the case, pointing out that they deal in murders, not vandalism. But then one of the attendants in the dinosaur room is murdered, his body found tied to a dinosaur skeleton and a note pinned to him saying 'The price of betrayal'. As Daniel and Abigail investigate, they must negotiate a web of legal and professional tensions.

The Beecheys were a close-knit family, eight brothers and five sisters under the loving eye of their widowed mother, Amy. As the First World War raged across Europe and beyond, the brothers were one-by-one swept up into its devastating path.

When Roger Bigod, heir to the powerful earldom of Norfolk, arrives at court to settle an inheritance, he meets Ida de Tosney, young mistress to King Henry II. In Roger, Ida sees a chance for lasting love, but their decision to marry carries an agonizing price. It's a breathtaking novel of making choices, not giving up, and coping with the terrible shifting whims of the king.

From the author of the acclaimed Crooked Heart comes another “smart, funny, ingenious, revealing tale of London life during the Second World War” (The Independent)—longlisted for the Orange Prize upon its original publication in England. It is 1940. France has fallen, and only a narrow...

Nearly a quarter of a million loyal Space Marines lost their lives on Isstvan V. The Dropsite Massacre lasted only a few hours, and yet the Iron Hands, Raven Guard, and Salamanders were slaughtered by those they had once called kin. Corax: Soulforge follows the defiant Raven Guard in the wake of Corax's failed plans to rebuild his Legion after the Dropsite Massacre.

Bath's top detective, Peter Diamond, doesn't believe in jinxes. So when he's asked to investigate a top TV show plagued by a series of misfortunes, Diamond is unmoved. He's no fan of the show—which glorifies criminals and mocks the police—and the incidents were spread across six years. It's clear this is the press making a sensation out of nothing. So Diamond puts the junior member of his squad on the case. But when young officer Paul Gilbert goes on location with the TV unit and witnesses another near-death incident, Diamond is forced to take an interest.

Through a particularly tragic series of events, couch potato Maeve Kelly has been forced to sign up for the Other Half, Bath's springtime half-marathon. What Maeve doesn't know is just how brutal some of the other runners are. As race day draws closer, an Albanian refugee named Spiro makes a run for freedom on the other side of town, escaping the chain gang that has held him hostage and its murderous foreman, who is known to his charges as 'The Finisher'.

As a New Year begins in Bath, Ben Brace proposes to his long-term girlfriend, Caroline. The problem is that she's the daughter of notorious crime baron Joe Irving, who is coming to the end of a prison sentence. And Ben's father George is Bath's Deputy Chief Constable. But mothers and sons are a formidable force: a wedding in the Abbey and reception in the Roman Baths are set in place before the career-obsessed DCC can step in.

When Alan left school at fifteen little was expected of him. An 'O' level in art is not the most obvious passport to success, but in the ancient greenhouses of the local nursery Mrs T's little lad found his spiritual home, learning his trade and the strange ways of human nature. But the comfort...

When a severed hand from the vault of Bath Abbey Churchyard arrives on Peter Diamond's desk, he is delighted to hear that, far from being a medieval relic, it is from the 1980s. But the vault is part of the house where Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was written, and a fanatical American professor is thwarting their investigation. Events are complicated even further when the professor's wife goes missing....