Showing results by publisher "Oakhill Publishing" in All Categories

When a covert police operation in Northern Ireland goes badly wrong, Grace Macallan is reassigned to the newly formed Lothian & Borders Major Crime Team and forced to rebuild her career and her reputation. But when a brutal attack on a prostitute turns into a series of murders, the Major Crime Team is under pressure. The tabloid headlines are lurid, and the team badly needs a result. With a new life to build in a new city, a new boss as smooth as an 18-year-old malt and a high-profile lawyer as the chief suspect, Grace begins to wonder if telling the truth is always the right thing to do.

A jam-fuelled week of disaster starts with a single doughnut! Roman Garstang is obsessed with food - particularly Squidgy Splodge doughnuts - but things are not always as sugar-coated as they seem. Because of his Monday-morning jam doughnut, Roman's week takes a sticky turn. By Friday he has been banned from eating for 24 hours, accidentally shoplifted, had a lift in a getaway van, styled his teacher's guinea pig with a blue Mohawk, started a riot...and barely managed a single doughnut.

It is 1535, and Agnes Peppin, daughter of a West Country butcher, is banished from her family home. Forced to abandon her newborn child, she is meant to live out her days cloistered behind the walls of Shaftesbury Abbey. But King Henry VIII has proclaimed himself the new head of the church. Religious houses are being suppressed, and the great Abbey is no exception to the purge. Free to be the master of her own fate, Agnes descends into a world she knows little about, using her wits and testing her moral convictions against her need to survive by any means necessary....

At Police Scotland HQ, Grace Macallan has pitched up in Counter Corruption. But the demons of her past are never far behind. Meanwhile, Edinburgh's gangland is in turmoil, with territory battles causing serious havoc. Into the war steps DI Janet Hadden. An ambitious risk-taker, she knows how to throw opponents off balance. When she's thwarted, Hadden seeks help from a notorious underworld fixer - only for Grace to start an investigation that threatens to uncover all Hadden's secrets.

Ally is intelligent, studious and engaged in an eternal battle to gain her mother’s approval and affection. Her mother is a religious zealot, keener on feeding the poor and saving prostitutes than on embracing the challenges of motherhood. Even when Ally is accepted as one of the first female students to read medicine in London, it still doesn’t seem good enough. The first in a two-book sequence, Bodies of Light is a poignant tale of a psychologically tumultuous 19th-century upbringing set in the world of Pre-Raphaelitism.

Queen Victoria had over 30 surviving grandchildren, and to maintain and increase power in Europe, she hoped to manoeuvre them into dynastic marriages. Yet they often had plans of their own, and her matchmaking was further complicated by tumultuous international upheavals. Queen Victoria's Matchmaking travels through the glittering, decadent palaces of Russia and Europe, weaving in scandals, political machinations and family tensions.

Having shot someone in the chaos of 1963 Berlin, Joe Wilderness finds himself locked up, with little chance of escape. But an official pardon through his father-in-law, Burne-Jones, a senior agent at MI6, means he is free to go. His newest operation will take him back to Berlin, now the dividing line between the West and the Soviets. When the Russians started building the Berlin Wall in 1961, two 'Unfortunate Englishmen' were trapped on opposite sides. In 1965 there is a plan to exchange the prisoners on Berlin’s bridge of spies.

Hildy Good has reached that dangerous time in a woman’s life – middle-aged and divorced, she is an oddity in her small but privileged town. But Hildy isn’t one for self-pity and instead meets the world with a wry smile, a dark wit and a glass or two of Pinot Noir. When her two earnest grown-up children stage ‘an intervention’ and pack Hildy off to an addiction centre, she thinks all this fuss is ridiculous. After all, why shouldn’t she enjoy a drink now and then? But we start to see another side to Hildy Good.

Asha lives in the foothills of the Himalayas. She misses her papa who works in the city. When he suddenly stops sending his wages, a ruthless moneylender ransacks their home. Asha makes a pact with her best friend, Jeevan, to find her father. But the journey is dangerous: they must cross the world's highest mountains and face hunger, tiredness - even snow leopards. Yet Asha has the unshakeable sense that the spirit bird of her grandmother - her nanijee - will be watching over her. 

Agatha Christie, in London to visit her agent, boards a train preoccupied with the knowledge that her husband Archie is having an affair. She feels a touch on her back, loses her balance but is pulled to safety from the rush of the incoming train. So begins a sequence of terrifying events. Her rescuer is no guardian angel but a blackmailer, and Agatha must use every ounce of her cleverness to thwart an adversary determined to exploit her genius for murder to kill on his behalf.

August 1941: As war sweeps across Britain and millions of men enlist, women must fight the battle on the home front. Fran always thought she would marry her childhood sweetheart and live in Massingham, the beloved pit village she has always called home. But the opening of a munitions factory in the north-east of England presents a new opportunity. Against her father's wishes and with best friends Sarah and Beth by her side, Fran signs up to join the ranks of women at the factory. It's dangerous work, but the friends discover that their lives are only just beginning. 

Sisters Ella and Roberta O’Callaghan live in separate wings of their crumbling Irish mansion. They haven’t spoken for decades, torn apart by a dark family secret from their past, and communicate only through the terse notes they leave for each other in the hallway. Debbie, an American, is searching for her birth mother, hoping to discover who she really is and what happened to her. With the bank threatening, Ella tries to save the family home by opening a café in the ballroom, much to Roberta’s disgust.

Cambridge spy Guy Burgess was a supreme networker. He also set a gold standard for conflicts of interest, working variously for the BBC, MI5, MI6, the War Office, the Ministry of Information and the KGB. Yet Burgess was never challenged by Britain's spy catchers: his superiors were convinced he was too much of a liability to have been recruited by Moscow. Now, with a major new release of hundreds of files into the National Archives, Purvis and Hulbert reveal just how this charming establishment insider was able to fool everyone for so long.

Scarred by the troubles in Belfast, Billy Nelson returns to his loyalist roots following his discharge from army service. But an outbreak of gang violence forces Billy to move on to Edinburgh, where he muscles in on the capital's drug trade. As the balance of power tips, underworld rivalries between Edinburgh, Glasgow and Belfast spill onto the streets. With a spate of horrific incidents and a trail of victims, the pressure is mounting for Grace Macallan, new superintendent of the Crime & Counter Terrorism Directorate.

Grace Macallan is at breaking point, and a new investigation is testing her to the limit. An undercover officer is missing and a woman is washed up, traumatised and barely alive, on the shores of Berwickshire. As she untangles the woman's story, Grace is drawn into a cold-blooded criminal world headed by Pete Handyside, a notorious gangland boss who will fight hard and dirty to control his empire. But a traitor in his midst is intent upon betrayal, triggering an uncontrollable wave of violence. As she hones in on crucial evidence, Grace knows that one wrong move could end in tragedy.

A nine-to-five job away from the frontline isn't all it's cracked up to be for Grace Macallan. So when she's sent to investigate a suicide at Glasgow's notorious Barlinnie prison, Grace gladly escapes her desk. The dead inmate is Tommy McMartin, heir to a ferocious criminal family - though his murder conviction for killing his gay lover saw him cast out. The investigation drags Grace into contact with old McMartin adversaries - but the dynasty is under threat, and as it topples, buried secrets are unearthed.

Moving to a new house and school is hard for Lucy, but then she finds a family of stray kittens in an alleyway and doesn't feel quite as lonely. She especially loves the shy black-and-white one and calls her Catkin. Catkin doesn't like it when the other kittens are taken away. Lucy makes her a new home in their greenhouse, but the kitten can't stay there forever! How long can Lucy keep Catkin a secret?

In April 1956, at the height of the cold war, Khrushchev and Bulganin leaders of the Soviet Union are in Britain on an official visit. Chief Inspector Troy of Scotland Yard is assigned to be the official bodyguard and to spy on the Soviets. Soon after, a Royal Navy diver is found dead in a mutilated state in Portsmouth Harbour. Troy embarks on an investigation that takes him to the rotten heart of MI6, to the distant days of his childhood and into the dangerous arms of an old flame.

The setting is 1950s London, at the height of the Cold War. Kit Fournier is ostensibly a senior diplomat at the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, but is actually CIA bureau chief in London. The Arms Race informs much of the action in this fast-paced story which sees Kit go undercover to meet a dissident KGB agent, lose a loved one, have a crisis of soul and get blackmailed into becoming a double agent for M16....

Queen Elizabeth I is dying, and the king of England’s oldest and bitterest enemy, Scotland, is poised to take the throne. With all her old allies and advisors dead, she turns to the only man she can trust: Henry Gresham. Gresham finds himself unwillingly dragged into the political manoeuvring that will decide England’s next ruler. Involved in the race to be the first to tell James VI of Scotland that Elizabeth has chosen him as her successor, Gresham faces savage attacks on his home and those he loves.