Showing results by narrator "Simon Mattacks" in All Categories

The festive season is in full swing - parties, champagne and Christmas crackers abound. You're having a breather at the hotel bar when a stunning young woman catches your eye. Could she really be interested in you? She flutters her eyelashes and takes your hand. Her Christmas party dress glitters with sequins. What you don't know is that your life is now in her hands - as she leads you up to her room there's only one thing that will determine whether you live or die. Are you a good person? Are you really?

When an Olympic medalist is the subject of an attempted assassination, former SAS trooper Jeff Bradley knows his past is once again casting a shadow over his new life. A note left by the assassin confirms his suspicions: Bradley made an enemy back in Kosovo, and the man is out for revenge. But Jeff knows the killer is not working alone: higher up the ranks sits Avni Leka, a terrorist warlord who will stop at nothing to achieve his bloody goal.

Harry Sanders is found dead in a derelict pub. The authorities call it a tragic accident, but Victor recognises the signs of something far more sinister. He knew Harry from his own days on the streets—and Harry had been scared, convinced someone was following him. Working with private investigators Kasper and Zofia Dąbrowski, Victor inherits Harry’s dog, Cleo, causing friction with Oscar, his own wilful dog, and uncovers a disturbing pattern. Homeless men with dogs are disappearing across the city.

Thomas Finbow is sent to help with a tragic fire at one of his master's tenant farms, but is soon embroiled in something far more sinister. The body of Simon Haylock is dragged from the blazing barn - and it appears he was dead before the fire even started. All is not well on the Berkshire Downs, as a number of fearful murders are discovered, baffling the authorities and striking fear into villagers' hearts.

While on official UNESCO business in The Vatican Museum, Dr Max Hunter finds himself pulled into a dark conspiracy of Biblical proportions! Summoned to the inner sanctum of the Vatican in the middle of the night, Hunter discovers his friend and colleague, Professor Marco Vitali, has been brutally murdered, using his dying moments to draw a message on the floor in his own blood – a clue for Max to follow!

1957. A catastrophe occurs at the pharmaceutical lab in Coventry where 16-year-old Wilf is working for the summer. A catastrophe that needs to be covered up at all costs. 2017. Phiney is shocked by the death of her grandfather, Wilf, who has jumped from a railway bridge at a Coventry station. Journalist Mat Torrington is the only witness. Left in utter disbelief, with a swarm of unanswered questions, Phiney, Mat and Wilf's wife, Dora, begin their own enquiries into Wilf's death.

Being perceived as a threat or, worse, hunted as food makes an animal attack a unique ordeal. Suddenly you’re helpless, at its mercy. When an animal strikes it is lightning fast, determined and can’t be reasoned with. Often brutally violent, such an attack can leave horrific injuries, both physical and emotional that endure long after the encounter. In Bite Club, we meet brave people from around the world who have come face to face with sharks or other deadly predators and lived to tell the tale.

As a rousing Strauss piece is reaching its crescendo in Maningpool Civic Hall, the talented yet obnoxious conductor Sir Noel Grampian is shot dead in full view of the Municipal Orchestra and the audience. It was no secret that he had many enemies - musicians and music critics among them - but to be killed mid-flow suggests an act of the coldest calculation. Told through the letters and documents sent by DI Alan Hope to his wife as he puzzles through the dauntingly vast pool of suspects and scant physical evidence in the case.

When Mac and Marie marry and find a home of their own, Mac takes a snap of themselves outside their newbuild bungalow, the garden bare and the paint on the front door still wet. It becomes a tradition, this snap, and slowly the photographs build into an album of a fifty-year partnership. Every year they take a photo and though things change around them—the garden matures, the fashions change, they grow older—the one constant is their love. Every year, come rain, come shine, from the Seventies through the decades, every photo tells the story of their love.

Josh is a sweet, well-meaning university student with a big heart. After he impulsively steals two research mice from a campus laboratory, he hides them in the basement of Harewood Hall, a venerable building in the retirement village where he works. The mice are happy, Josh is happy—until he discovers that his charges might be carrying a deadly disease. Enter a curious cat called Harley, a devilish dog called Bobby, the arrival of some mysterious packing boxes and a strange spike in the village's water bill.

Olivia and Julian are enjoying lazy days in their Spanish villa, a well-deserved break from their busy lives. Especially for Julian, who after a lifetime as a carer was thrust into the public eye following the tragic murder of his first wife. The languid heat and peace of the villa is broken only by clifftop walks, sun-drenched lunches and cooling swims. Until a chance encounter with Gabriel—an attractive man, many years their junior—changes everything. Soon their idyllic break turns into a dangerous, high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse. Will any of them get out alive?

Seth was a priest. He served for 10 years and 163 days. Then he decided to die. Beginning with his bungled suicide attempt, Faithless charts the incidents within Seth's ministry that led him to that point. From dealing with a cult leader to performing exorcisms in haunted houses, Seth has seen the unimaginable. He has escaped from the clutches of a man who showed signs of being possessed and helped rebuild families after unthinkable tragedy.

As children, Gareth and Helen went ignored and utterly unsupervised in their isolated English farmhouse while their mother obsessively tended to her beloved, exquisite garden. When they were little, Gareth would occupy himself by trapping insects under glass and Helen would find ways to entertain herself - but the older they grew, the more sinister their lives became, with no attentive parent to shield them from the predators of the world. Decades later, Helen is in the same crumbling house, unhappily married and looking after their bedridden mother, and Gareth finally returns home.

Libya, 2011. Into this maelstrom of violence arrive a covert team of MI6 officers and their minders. They land by helicopter straight into the hands of the Libyan rebels in Benghazi and the very unwanted glare of the world press. Only ex-Royal Marine and close protection expert James Royce manages to extradite his intelligence chiefs from the mess.

It's never going to be you. Then one day you hear the clatter of automatic fire at the mall. You have been drawn into the chaos and terror of an active shooter event. What do you do? Who do you turn to? Be a Hero is the essential guide to terrorist attacks that will help you survive. Former Special Air Service terror expert John Geddes will explain how to cope with a life-threatening event.

Former SAS soldier Jeff Bradley thought he had left warzones behind when he inherited a vineyard in rural New Zealand. But now his vineyard manager, Arben Shala, has gone missing in his native Kosovo. An enigmatic message tells Jeff that his friend is in grave danger.

Former Special Forces soldier Jeff Bradley is meeting with the mafia in Bari, Italy, to discover the whereabouts of his nemesis - criminal overlord Avni Leka - when he receives a message from an old friend. Barry is on board a tourist bus that has been hijacked by terrorists near Istanbul. Strapped with explosives, it is racing across Turkey to the northern borders of Syria, Iraq and Iran. The Turkish president will not negotiate. The Turkish military will not allow the bus to cross the border. The hijackers will kill themselves and their hostages if they cannot escape.

Sure to capture the imagination of devotees of true crime and the occult, this anthology of 13 true crime stories includes the mysterious slaying of Charles Walton, who was found slashed and pierced to death in an area notorious for its associations with black magic; the murder of Eric Tombe, whose body was located because of a recurring dream in which his mother saw Eric down a well; the terrorizing of Hammersmith, London, in the early 19th century by the nocturnal appearance of a "ghost"; and much more.

Organizational structures are ineffective when they do not delineate and define accountabilities. Brian Dive focuses upon the implications of clear accountability for leadership, with an in-depth analysis of “distributed leadership” - a concept neglected in the leadership literature to date. Dive explores the relationship between leadership, accountability, and organizational structure. He argues that the majority of leadership-related problems arise not from ineffective individuals but from organizational structures that lack accountable jobs.

Jack Witney served 25 years in prison although he shot no one and was released on appeal, only to be murdered in his Bristol flat a few years later. John Duddy died in Parkhurst after 15 years. But Harry Roberts, by his own admission the instigator of the crime and the most notorious, was released from prison after 48 years in 2015, making national front page news. What could possess an apparently rational and sane man, albeit a habitual criminal, to commit such a callous and ruthless act? How can an ordinary person understand what he did? Should he be forgiven?