Showing results by narrator "Ronan Raftery" in All Categories

Cosma was just an ordinary teenager. Yet her death brings sinister secrets to light, sending shockwaves through her friendship circle – and beyond. Cosma Passadakis was the glue that held her clique together. When her body is found in a ditch at the side of the road, the lives of her boyfriend, Nico, and friends, Eva, Shirin, and Luke are turned upside down. Who had it out for Cosma? The police start investigating – and so do her friends. In the process, they discover that nothing was as it seemed in Cosma’s picture-perfect life. Who was their classmate, confidante, and friend really?

Since 2015 the Pin Drop Short Story Award has discovered new and exciting talent from around the world and showcased new works from more familiar names. This anthology collects the 2017 final short-list, including the winning entry, ‘Morelia Spilota’ by Cherise Saywell - an absorbing tale of a priest, a hitchhiker and a snake together and alone in the Australian countryside; which of them should be most wary of being bitten, and by whom?

Joe is 17, a gifted artist and a brilliant older brother to 12-year-old Finn. They live with their Ma and Da in a Dublin tower block called Bojaxhiu, or 'the Jax'. It's not an easy place to be a kid, especially when your father, Frank, is the muscle for the notorious gang leader Dessie 'The Badger' Murphy. But whether it's daytrips to the beach or drawing secret sketches, Joe works hard to show Finn life beyond the battered concrete yard below their flat. Joe is determined not to become like his Da. But when Finn falls ill, Joe finds his convictions harder to cling to.

The superb follow-up to Eoin Colfer's highly acclaimed Plugged, written with the warmth and wit of his Artemis Fowl series. Dan McEvoy doesn't set out to get into violent confrontations with New Jersey's gangster overlords but he's long since found that once you're on their radar, there's only one way to slip off it. So he's learned his own way to fight back, aiming to outwit rather than kill unless he really has no choice. But when Dan's glam step-gran Edit shows up on the hunt for his dishevelled aunt Evelyn, it quickly becomes clear that family can provide the deadliest threat of all.