Showing results by narrator "Gareth Armstrong" in All Categories

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.

The thrilling follow up to The Irregular: A Different Class of Spy, featuring Wiggins - an ex-soldier who was trained as a child by Sherlock Holmes. Now an agent of the newly formed Secret Service, Wiggins is still determined to track down Peter the Painter, the murderer of his friend Bill. Meanwhile Captain Kell is under pressure to identify who is leaking vital information from the government, and his wife, Constance, is getting dangerously close to the more militant faction of suffragettes. 

A fugitive stalks the shadows of the Petitioner's City. Though his fellow Outcast Dead are no more, the lone wolf Severian still intends to escape from Terra by any means possible - but the enigmatic hunter Yasu Nagasena is in pursuit. As news of the massacre on Isstvan V continues to spread and Severian's trail doubles back to the place where it all began, both he and Nagasena must face some uncomfortable truths - and an even more uncertain future.

Welsh surgeon Daffyd Woodruff's life is blown apart by the arrival of unexpected news. In the remote town of Moose Creek where he lived and worked fifteen years before, he's told he fathered twins. Dafydd knows it cannot be true - but DNA tests don't lie. From nowhere the past has a stranglehold on Daffyd, threatening to unravel everything he's built up - his marriage, his career.

When Francis Armstrong moves into his fussily designed Victorian house in the heart of the Vale of York, his August stretches before him in a haze of leisurely house refurbishment. His decision to move a pile of rubble, however, brings DCI Hennessey and Sergeant Yellich springing to the scene at the double. Louise D'Acre helps them with the examination of the skeleton that has been uncovered, and everything seems to point to the murder of a woman who was reported missing 19 years previously.

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...

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.

This brilliant novel with universal resonance tells the story of three people trying to survive in a city rife with the extreme fear of desperate times, and of the sorrowing cellist who plays undaunted in their midst. One day a shell lands in a bread line and kills twenty-two people as the...

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.

Lady Yvette, the beautiful wife of local MP Sir Charles Millhouse, is found choked to death in a reservoir. Her clothes and an antique pearl collar she usually wore are missing. Within a short space of time another body is discovered, also choked to death. With no clues and little forensic evidence to go on, will quirky Yorkshire policeman Michael Angel's guile be enough to reveal the identity of the choker?

Richard Cullis is Director of Research and Development at the Gloucester Chemicals Company. Late one night, he is dramatically kidnapped and warned to suspend all animal experiments in the laboratories if he values his life. Some weeks later a company golf tournament has a startling conclusion when Richard collapses after dinner. Murder is suspected, but who administered the poison?

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.

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.

Meet Detective Inspector Michael Angel. An old-school policeman who sometimes rubs his colleagues up the wrong way. He’s got his flaws, but he never gives up on a case. Frank P. Jones, the celebrity art critic known nationally as 'The Man in the Pink Suit', is seen by four independent witnesses and recorded shooting industrialist Charles Tabor. Jones strongly denies the charge, but he has the motive, the opportunity, a Walter PPK/S automatic, and no alibi.

This is a story about a woman. And the truck driver who mistook her for a prostitute. The old man she robbed and the hunters who smuggled her across the border. The woman whose name she stole, the wife who turned a blind eye. This is the story of a mother searching for her child. This is a story you cannot stop thinking about.

Roger Dykmans, a university student, is living with his brother Hans, an international emissary who's secretly working against the Nazis. As time goes by, Roger finds himself increasingly drawn to Magda, Hans' Jewish wife. But their secret world is turned upside down when Magda and her young daughter, Anna, are arrested by the Nazis. The Gestapo make a deal with Roger: if he hands over information about Hans' operations, they'll set Magda and Anna free. Suddenly, Roger is faced with an impossible decision....

Given the choice, Martial would not have moved to Les Conviviales. But Odette loved the idea of a brand-new retirement village in the south of France. So that was that. At first it feels like a terrible mistake: they're the only residents and it's raining non-stop. Then three neighbours arrive, the sun comes out, and life becomes far more interesting and agreeable. Until, that is, some gypsies set up camp just outside their gated community....

A DCI Charlie Woodend Mystery - A charred body is discovered in an abandoned cotton mill, and the crime scene presents DCI Woodend and his team with many questions, but very few answers. As Woodend attempts to solve a murder with no clues, he must also battle against a police authority blocking him at every turn. And worse is to follow, because Elizabeth Driver, Inspector Bob Rutters lover, has almost finished the book which could destroy everything he has ever worked for.

He may have prevented the world from falling into ruin, but Alex knows his work is not done yet. There’s still a controlling intelligence out there, pulling together the strands of a new and even more destructive conspiracy. Battling with personal tragedy on one hand, and the intrusion of new-found celebrity on the other, Alex must re-emerge from self-imposed exile to reunite with Mariam–the woman he loves–and Amaury–his truest friend–to face the fight of their lives.

It was not love at first sight. It proved to be not much of a conversation…Nothing should have come of it. A passionate but ultimately tragic love affair starts when two students - one French, one English - meet at university at the beginning of the sixties. From its tentative early stages...