Showing results by narrator "Sarah Nichols" in All Categories

Raina Bretton is a rag woman in London's East End when a handsome stranger appears in a dank alley and offers her a glittering smile and a chance for adventure. Rothburne Abbey has a unique position for her, one that will take her away from her hardscrabble life and give her a chance to be a lady. Things she could only dream of might be coming true. But some dreams turn out to be nightmares. Though Raina has traded squalor for silk and satin, something about the abbey is deeply unsettling.

Society believes the worst of Justin Alastair, the notorious Duke of Avon. When he encounters a young boy, Léon, who is running from his abusive brother, Avon employs the boy as his page, parading him around parties and other society events in full view of his bitter rival, the Comte de Saint-Vire. But the truth is soon uncovered: Léon is a girl named Léonie and is actually the legitimate child of the Comte and his wife. While Avon is intent on his plan to reveal the Comte’s duplicity and ruin him, he is charmed by Léonie’s kindness, falls in love, and becomes a changed man.

A lonely young heiress becomes the poorest wealthy woman in Victorian England when her father dies without telling anyone where he hid his fortune. Can Tressa and the no-nonsense estate manager find the fortune before the greedy relatives get to it first? Tressa Harlowe's father did not trust banks, but neither did he trust his greedy extended family. He kept his vast fortune hidden somewhere on his estate in the south of England and died suddenly, without telling anyone where he had concealed it.

Matilda is the only legitimate daughter of Henry I of England. She’s also the granddaughter of William the Conqueror and is a descendent—through her mother—from the ancient line of Anglo-Saxon kings. She is made a widow in her early twenties and is the only surviving heir to the throne of England. Now she must marry Geoffrey of Anjou, a boy ten years younger, and share the task of leading an often rebellious state. Before long she gives birth to three sons and provides her father with the male heirs he’s longed for.

In London, early in the nineteenth century, five-year-old Mary Godwin, daughter of philosopher William Godwin, plays with her sister Fanny, mourns her deceased mother, and marvels as a hot-air balloon lands not far from the Thames River. Nearby, in Sussex, eleven-year-old Percy Shelley entertains his three sisters by telling them stories and performing tricks with chemicals and fire. A few years later, Mary and Percy meet and fall in love in the Godwin bookshop near Black Friar’s Bridge.

When amateur sleuth Augusta Peel receives a mysterious letter about a missing young woman, she can’t resist helping with the search. But the case takes a turn when an art student is found dead in a Bloomsbury square. Could the murder have something to do with Augusta’s investigation? The more questions she asks, the fewer answers she receives. Someone’s hiding something.

Returning home to England from New York, Margot finds her family in chaos. Her cousin Chloe is in prison awaiting trial for murdering her twin sister, Claudia, their mother has withdrawn into the imaginary world of her romance novels, Claudia’s 14-year-old daughter has regressed to early childhood and refuses to leave her bed, and to top it all off, the family cat has decided to live with the neighbors. As Chloe’s trial approaches, the atmosphere in the house becomes increasingly fraught, and Margot begins to wonder whether someone else is responsible for Claudia’s death.

A Catskills resort's production of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet takes a wickedly ironic turn when the leading lady, Lauren Richmond, is first poisoned and then stabbed. Who would extinguish the life of such a beautiful young thespian? It seems like just about everyone had a motive to pull the ropes on her final curtain call. At the center of this Shakespearean tragedy is Charlotte Fairfax, formerly the costume mistress of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

May 1940. Hitler invades France, a move that threatens all of Europe, and three lives intersect at Wickwythe Hall, an opulent estate in the English countryside - a beautiful French refugee, a take-charge American heiress, and a charming champagne vendeur with ties to Roosevelt and Churchill who isn't what he seems. There, secrets and unexpected liaisons unfold, until a shocking tragedy in a far-off Algerian port binds them forever....

A lifetime of craving cuddlier companionship than her hectoring mother has led 40ish Bettina Bilby to board her neighbors' felines - an expectant tabby, a pampered blue-eyed Balinese, a depressed ginger Persian with a cod-liver-oil addiction, and Adolf, an imperious mouser with a patchwork face - for a long holiday weekend.

Henry VIII ruled England from 1509 to 1547. As a young man, he was fond of sports and hunting and was said to be uncommonly handsome. Standing more than six feet tall, he loomed large in the lives and minds of his subjects as he navigated his country through the tricky diplomatic and military hazards of the 16th century.

England's first Queen Elizabeth gave her name to an age. Inheriting a bankrupt, famished, and powerless country, she healed its religious rifts, replenished its treasury, redefined diplomatic guile, defeated the Spanish Armada, and inspired a new flowering of English culture. Her father, Henry VIII, beheaded her mother, Anne Boleyn, and Elizabeth was declared a bastard. As Henry kept marrying and discarding wives, she had to be adroit and canny to avoid being snared in the schemes of courtiers plotting to win the crown.

After her hand is amputated following a tragic accident, Rachel Cooper suffers vivid nightmares of a woman imprisoned in the trunk of a hollow tree, screaming for help. When she begins to experience phantom sensations of leaves and earth with her missing limb, Rachel is terrified she is going mad. But then another hand takes hers, and the trapped woman is pulled into our world.

Trixie’s daughter Martha has taken up residence in the kitchen she shares with her friend Evangeline. Martha is frantically testing last-minute recipes to meet the deadline for her cookbook, helped by Jocasta, her overworked editor. When a strange man bursts into their lives, it’s revealed that Martha was not the first choice for the cookbook, and that the woman originally working on it died after eating something at a cooking demonstration. Unwanted guests descend on the already crowded and tense apartment, one of whom ends up dead.

Dame Cecile Savoy's "revolting floor mop" of a Pekinese has passed away at a ripe old age. Now, the aging British actress convinces her rivals on stage and screen, Trixie and Evangeline, to support her in her hour of grief...by accompanying her to a taxidermist. But it's a cab ride straight to a cat-astrope! No sooner do the three elderly thespians enter "Stuff Yours" than they discover a dead body, a live kitty in a cage, and flames bursting from the back room. Fortunately for a rare Japanese bobtail called Cho-Cho-San, Trixie grabs the cat before fleeing the scene.