Showing results by narrator "Andrew Cullum" in All Categories

May 1915. Kingdom Lock and his faithful sidekick, Siddhartha Singh are gunned down on the streets of Basra and suspicion falls on German spy, Wilhelm Wassmuss. Major Ross believes Wassmuss is behind the assassination of a Turkish officer, the death of whom has been blamed on Lock. Meanwhile, Lock has discovered that Amy Townshend is pregnant and that the child is his. But the general's daughter stubbornly refuses to break off her engagement.

Meet Arshile Grekov. A reclusive Russian oligarch, he lives in Holland Park in exceptional opulence after successfully extricating his gigantic fortune from Russia. He is deeply worried. His doctors are confounded by his slowly failing health, and his beloved son, a loud, druggy, dissolute Etonian, is secretly involved with a white-Russian princess. As a former spy, he knows he will always remain of intense interest to the paranoid Russian government.

In Order of Merit, we encounter a famous classical guitarist who is loved by audiences all over the world, not only for his masterful technical skill and compelling, instinctive musicality, but also for his charismatic stage personality. However, his consummate showmanship is all just a cover for his other, more sinister occupation - away from the concert platform he is also a professional hitman, cold, ruthless and efficient.

A suicide. A drowned man. A sudden death. For some people it's just another day's work. In Amsterdam there's a council department known affectionately as the Lonely Funerals team. It exists to arrange burials for the abandoned or unknown dead, with the care and dignity that every life deserves. Pieter Posthumus hasn't been doing the job long, but he's determined to do it well. He finds that he cares deeply about the people whose files land on his desk.

It is 1914, and while battles rage across Europe, three empires fight for dominance in the Middle East. In the midst of the chaos is Kingdom Lock. Working for the British Intelligence Service, Lock is sent to Persia by the Australian Infantry Force. His mission: to prevent a German spy from inciting rebellion among the Muslim tribes and from seizing control of the oilfields. But before then, having recently rescued Amy Townshend, the daughter of a British officer, he now finds that he must save her from the clutches of death once more.

All Christian White wants is a quiet life. So when Billy Sutherland, Christian's old friend and sometime guardian angel from their 1960s hippie days, asks Christian to help him collect on a 40-year-old IOU from his shady past, Christian does everything he can to talk Billy out of it. Because the IOU is for a huge load of high-grade hashish. The hash is in war-torn Afghanistan. And Christian owes Billy enough that he's going to find it very hard to refuse.

Detective Inspector Paolo Sterling has more headaches than usual. Someone is abducting men and subjecting them to horrific acts of rape and torture, but who? More to the point - why? After three days of cruelty and starvation, they are released. Why will none of them give any information which would help the police to find the perpetrator? The victims refuse even to admit they were held captive.

The third gripping instalment in the DI Paolo Sterling crime series. Detective Inspector Paolo Sterling has just six weeks to solve a series of murders by insulin injection, with nothing to connect the victims except the manner of death and a note left at each crime scene. The murderer, determined to avenge a wrong from many years earlier, gets close to his prey by assuming various identities. Can Paolo win in his race against the pretender?

Brought up believing that sex is the devil's work, a killer only finds release once he has saved his victim's souls. Abiding by his vision, he marks them as his. A gift to guide his chosen ones on the rightful path to redemption. Detective Inspector Paolo Sterling is out to stop him, but Paolo has problems of his own. Hunting down the killer as the death toll rises, the lines soon blur between Paolo's personal and professional lives.

The criminalisation of homosexuality over centuries has been one of the shocking injustices of European history - it existed from the middle ages and before and well into the 20th century. The death penalty (hanging or burning) was a commonplace feature in legal systems. These two remarkable texts - one from England in the 18th century and one from Germany in the 19th century - show how there was a growing awareness of the prejudice and the cruelty of its effect.