Showing results by narrator "Nicolette McKenzie" in All Categories

With the war over, Clare Wishart must make some decisions about what to do with Merle Place. Back in her care after use as a military hospital, it is in need of expensive renovation. Completely out of her depth, Clare tries to sell the house, hampered by her cousin, Donald, who has invited himself to stay indefinitely. Clare's one joy in life is writing, so she is delighted when she is asked to write a novel.

Following in the pioneering footsteps of the women who have gone before her, Ruby and her new husband James brave a long and treacherous journey to start their new life together. However, they soon discover that there are many more dangers than just those that meet the eye. When James is tempted away by the gold rush, Ruby must join forces with the Aborigine girl Kumali and learn to adapt.

Vienna, 1920: Professor Sigmund Freud is known for his interest in the human psyche, but psychoanalysis is still an emerging field with its share of critics. When Constable Karl Gruber seeks out Sigmund Freud's help in dealing with a gruesome murder case, the professor sees a new opportunity to explore the many facets of human behavior and thinking. Together with his stubborn daughter Anna, Sigmund Freud sets out to help Constable Gruber and solve the unusual and mysterious cases of Vienna. This collection contains episodes 1-4 of "The Sigmund Freud Files".

A mysterious homicide case leads to Constable Karl Guber to seek out psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud for the first time. The daughter of the director of the Wiener Burgtheater has been murdered under gruesome circumstances: the corpse has been drained of all its blood. Detective Gruber suspects that a vampire is on the loose in Vienna.

Judith is suddenly all alone in the world. Her husband, Jack, has left her - why, she doesn't really know. Her two sons are in Australia, and both her mother and her best friend Naomi have recently died. Embarking on a journey to Exmoor to meet the famous artist Robert Haussman, with an oddly assorted group of fellow-enthusiasts, Judith finds herself a prey to all sorts of irrational fears. Chief amongst them is the increasing conviction that Jack is dead. Why did he leave her? Where has he gone? And why does Robert Haussman exert such a strange influence on her?

Would a man really use his dying breath to play Russian roulette with his soul? If what Fred Howerd revealed under the seal of confession is true, then a grave miscarriage of justice has been allowed to lie festering for over 20 years - and that, for the Whitebridge police, is political dynamite. DCI Monika Paniatowski argues with the Chief Constable that it will be almost impossible to solve a case which is almost history. But the real reason for her reluctance to take it on is more to do with her own past....

1912, Henley-on-Thames. Twenty-Four-year-old Marianne Lefevre is alone in the world: her parents both dead and her brother in faraway India. She is pleased to be taken on as governess in the affluent Matlowe household and hopes the position will become permanent. But as Marianne grows closer to the young twin girls and to the rest of the staff, she becomes increasingly concerned. Why are the children forbidden to go near the boat house at the end of the garden?

Forced to flee Revolutionary France after the brutal guillotining of her beloved father, Isabella de Savigny arrives at Nethergate, the Suffolk house of her cousin, hoping for sympathy and succour. Instead, as a poor relation, she is forced to live the life of a servant and suffer the casual cruelty of lady’s maid Martha Pratt. When she is seduced and abandoned by the son of the house, Isabella is forced to marry Martha’s brother, and her struggle to survive truly begins. However, her misery is lessened when her daughter is born....

1933. Esmé Carr travels to Australia with her best friend in search of adventure. Left behind is Esmé's adolescent niece. Meggie Elliot has an imaginative and independent frame of mind, but there is mystery surrounding her birth - one she intends to unravel, despite her mother's warnings to leave the past alone. When the truth surfaces it's not what Meggie wants to hear, and Esmé must reconcile the rift between mother and daughter.

A poignant, touching and epic tale of lost love, set against the drama and danger of World War Two. 1947. One wet and chilly November afternoon a woman stands at the edge of a lake forced into a heartbreaking choice between her past and her future. 2008. Police diver Martha makes an incredible discovery in a local lake of a package containing a series of lost mementoes which reveal a story of intrigue, betrayal and heartbreak. As the threads of the past and present are drawn together, Martha's world, and that of her family, is changed forever.

November 1920. Russia may have endured the Revolution, but a brutal war still rages. Distant relatives of the Romanovs, the Kirilov family is closer to danger than most. When tragedy strikes, four-year-old Lydia is separated from her family. Struck by the child's plight, the diplomat Sir Edward Stoneleigh brings her to England, where she grows up well-educated, wealthy and surrounded by a loving family.

Castroux, France, 1939. In a bare farmhouse above the village, Oriane lives in desperate poverty. When the Germans invade, her simple world crumbles. Passions erupt, moral boundaries break down , and rebellion is soon in the air. Castroux, France, 2000. In an idyllic gîte overlooking the river, Claudia sunbathes on the terrace. She’s pregnant, trapped, and terrified of the future. She confides only in a reclusive neighbour, Oriane, and discovers that she too carried a shameful secret.

It will be no easy task to fill the shoes of a local legend like DCI Charlie Woodend, the newly-promoted Monika Paniatowski tells herself – particularly when he’s still a very real presence in Whitebridge – but given a little time, she thinks she can grow into them. Yet time is the one thing she does not have. On her first day in the new job, a severed female hand is discovered on the riverbank. And not only that, but the killer has already alerted the press.

Shots echo through Vienna's streets at dawn. A sniper has holed up in a church tower and threatens to shoot anyone who dares to show themselves on the square below. Constable Karl Gruber can persuade Freud to help him find a diplomatic solution to the situation. Under time pressure and against strong resistance from Karl's police colleagues, Freud negotiates with the man who - just like Karl - fought in the front lines in World War I.

A new patient appears on Sigmund Freud's roster. The initial session soon takes a dramatic turn when the man pulls a gun on Freud. The day before, he murdered his own father, and now he demands absolution from the Professor. While Anna contacts Karl and they both hold an emergency session right outside the therapy room in an effort to put an end to the hostage situation, Sigmund tries to use all means at his disposal to persuade the man to surrender before a disaster occurs.

After yet another failure on the London dating scene, Kate escapes to the idyllic Exmoor village of Bursford and her "Cinderella Project" renovating a run-down cottage on the edge of the moors. Hopes of a quiet retreat are thwarted, however; in a village seething with intrigues, a new female face attracts a lot of attention. She becomes entangled with local landowners the Blackmores - in particular brooding Ed, his divorced playboy brother Jack, and their flighty stepmother, Camilla.

Che is raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother, the precocious son of radical Harvard students in the sixties. Yearning for his famous outlaw parents, denied all access to television and the news, he takes hope from his long-haired teenage neighbour who predicts "They will come for you, man. They'll break you out of here."

New Zealand, 1921. Bright, feisty, and pretty, 16-year-old Lottie O’Brien lives with her troubled family in an impoverished part of Wellington. Life at home is hard for Lottie, her younger sister Bella and brother Jack – their father has returned from the war a mental and physical invalid, for whom their mother has neither sympathy nor affection. Ambitious Lottie dreams of a better life and is befriended by her class teacher, Madeleine Carson, who introduces Lottie to her affluent family.

From the author of The Frozen Lake comes an enthralling novel of love, betrayal, and idealism as three very different young women go up to Oxford in the years immediately before World War Two. Vee - the clergyman’s daughter. Boyish, alluring, she plans to use her time at Oxford to put right everything that went wrong in her loveless childhood.

Hortense Beauharnais finds herself rubbing shoulders with royalty as her mother remarries to become Napoleon Bonaparte's wife. As Napoleon struggles for power on the battlefields of Europe, so Hortense charts her way through the French court - a chessboard world where the motives are jealousy and greed and the prizes are thrones of conquered countries.