Showing results by narrator "Jeff Harding" in All Categories

From the Stone Age to the Greek Tragedies, from Shakespeare to Robin Hood, we have always had our heroes. The hero is at the centre of formative myths in every culture and persists to this day in world-conquering books, films and TV shows. But why do these characters continue to inspire us, and why are they so central to storytelling? Scalpel-sharp on the roots of storytelling and enlightening on the history and science of myth, The Hero is essential listening for anyone trying to write or understand fiction.

A neo-noir crime novel from the legendary crime novelist James Ellroy. Los Angeles, 15th January 1947: a beautiful young woman walked into the night and met her horrific destiny. Five days later, her tortured body was found drained of blood and cut in half. The newspapers called her 'The Black Dahlia'. Two cops are caught up in the investigation and embark on a hellish journey that takes them to the core of the dead girl's twisted life....

Christmas 1951, Los Angeles: a city where the police are as corrupt as the criminals. Six prisoners are beaten senseless in their cells by cops crazed on alcohol. For the three LAPD detectives involved, it will expose the guilty secrets on which they have built their corrupt and violent careers. The novel takes these cops on a sprawling epic of brutal violence and the murderous seedy side of Hollywood.

Thomas Nesbitt is a divorced American writer in the midst of a rueful middle age. Living a very private life in Maine - in touch only with his daughter and still trying to reconcile him to the end of a long marriage that he knew was flawed from the outset - he finds his solitude disrupted by the arrival, one wintry morning, of a box postmarked Berlin. The return address on the box - Dussmann - unsettles him completely.

Ex-Special Forces operator Tom Keeler is a rambling man. He’s just passing through the town of Alencourt, France, and in less than an hour, someone tries to kill him. Nice place, nice try. But it’s a case of mistaken identity, and they picked the wrong guy. The French police can’t be trusted, except for the beautiful Cecile Nazari. She finds out fast that keeping up with Keeler is a dangerous occupation. Because someone’s preying on the weak and unprotected. Someone murderous. But they never counted on coming up against a guy like Keeler. 

The phone rings. It's your daughter. She's been dead for four months. So begins East Texas police dispatcher Ian Hunt's fight to get his daughter back. The call is cut off by the man who snatched her from her bedroom seven years ago, and a basic description of the kidnapper is all Ian has to go on.

When Ellen Ripley finally returns to Earth, she learns that the planet LV-426 - now called Acheron - has been colonised. But LV-426 is where Ripley and the crew of the Nostromo found the original Xenomorph - the killing machine known as the Alien. Protected by the Colonial Marines, the colonists seek to terraform the storm-swept planet. Two such residents are Anne and Russell Jorden, seeking a fortune that eluded them on Earth.

Legendary editor, Maxim Jakubowski, delivers another chilling anthology collecting stories of cold-blooded murder, revenge and crimes-gone-wrong from the best of the best in crime fiction. Spine-chilling and gripping, these tales will grip you with their devious narrators and crafty twists.

At 40, Patty Bigelow thought she'd finally figured life out. Then her wayward sister Leila abandons her child, Tanya, on Patty's doorstep. The aunt and troubled niece slowly learn to live together, with the help of Dr Alex Delaware's counseling. Now, 15 years later, Tanya is back in Alex's office. Patty has died and left Tanya with a chilling legacy: a deathbed confession that her aunt murdered a man years earlier.

When Charlie Parker was still a boy, his father, a NYPD cop, killed a young couple, a boy and a girl barely older than his son, then took his own life. There was no explanation for his actions. Now Parker is working on his most personal case yet: an investigation into his own origins and the...

Nick Corey likes being the high sheriff of Potts County. But Nick has a few problems that he needs to deal with: like his loveless marriage, the pimps who torment him, the honest man who is running against him in the upcoming elections and the women who adore him. And it turns out that Nick isn't anything like as amiable, easy-going or as slow as he seems. He's as sly, brutal and corrupt as they come.

As a deputy commissioner for the ICC, Alan Decker’s job is to make sure the settlements on LV178 follow all the rules, keeping the colonists safe. But the planet known as New Galveston holds secrets, lurking deep beneath the toxic sands dubbed the Sea of Sorrows. The Weyland-Yutani Corporation has secrets of its own, as Decker discovers when he is forced to join a team of mercenaries sent to investigate an ancient excavation. Somewhere in that long-forgotten dig lies the thing the company wants most in the universe - a living Xenomorph.

Drawing on years of archival research both in the US and Iran - including access to Iranian government archives rarely available to western scholars - the Iranian-born, Oxford-educated historian leads us through the four seasons of US-Iran relations: the 'spring' of mutual fascination, the 'summer' of early interactions, the 'autumn' of close strategic ties and the long, dark 'winter' of mutual hatred.

Civilization has fallen. The public revelation that shapechangers are real, secretly living among ordinary people, has brought down the government and spread complete chaos. Shaw and Captain Case, both mutated by the monstrous Wendigo, must face the conspiracy of werewolves that successfully ended humanity’s dominance. Ex-detective Lenny and cryptid-hunter Dandy struggle to survive as America collapses around them. In this horrific new world, vicious armed gangs prey on the weak and helpless.

They were 'the last great band of the sixties; the first great band of the seventies'; they rose, somewhat unpromisingly, from the ashes of the Yardbirds to become one of the biggest-selling rock bands of all time. Mick Wall, respected rock writer and former confidant of both Page and Plant, unflinchingly tells the story of the band that wrote the rulebook for on-the-road excess - and eventually paid the price for it, with disaster, drug addiction and death.

Night & Day takes us from the dusty shelves of an uncanny library filled with fictional characters to a bunker deep beneath the earth where scientists seek revenge on old Nazis, from an English marsh haunted by a mother and her son to a country house where a grieving widower finds comfort in a most unlikely source. Concluding with the author's account of how an obscure horror film brought him closer to his lost father, and how nostalgia can help through our hardest times, this is a collection that will move, entertain, and keep you listening late into the night.

A murder at sea, a killer below deck? BELOW DECK meets KNIVES OUT in this breathless voyage into murder and mayhem on the high seas… Howie Temple is down on his luck and desperate for cash. Once an action movie star, he now lives off a crumbling reputation. On his way to film a new reality TV...

As Hitler was attempting to conquer the western world, his armies were methodically pillaging the finest art in Europe, from Michelangelos to Vermeers, all stolen for the Führer. The Monuments Men had a mandate from President Roosevelt to find these artworks, but no vehicles, typewriters, or authority. In a race against time to save the world’s greatest cultural treasures from destruction at the hands of Nazi fanatics, each man constructed his own treasure map....

A woman's body is found in marshland outside LA. By the next morning the police have discovered the decaying corpses of three more women. They were all prostitutes except for the most recent victim; a classically trained pianist employed by a wealthy family, Selena Bass seems out of place in the grim tableau. Psychologist Alex Delaware is drafted in by homicide detective Milo Sturgis to help with the case. Details of the crimes suggest a serial killer is prowling LA's gritty streets.

Reality TV star Buck Nance incites a riot in a bar and vanishes in the melee. His agent, Lane Coolman, has been accidentally taken hostage by two petty criminals who now think they can turn a quick profit by ransoming an LA talent agent.

The mystery of Buck’s disappearance draws in a range of characters from across the island, including a redheaded con artist named Merry who, using a razor blade and a high-speed car, has developed a signature way of luring in her victims.