Showing results by narrator "Jeff` Harding" in All Categories

A young woman who disappeared into the black night; a retired school teacher stabbed to death in broad daylight and two women butchered in a beauty parlour. Three murder cases, linked only by a perplexing lack of motive. But then LAPD detective Milo Sturgis and psychologist Alex Delaware are called to the scene of a bizarre "crime". A stolen car has been anonymously returned to its owner, undamaged and unblemished - except for a tiny, solitary bloodstain.

BBC Audio present six fantastic tales of twisted futures and times beyond tomorrow. Inspired by the pulp sci-fi of '50s America, these perfectly pitched parodies are redolent of the atomic age—when the space race was at its height, Cold War paranoia was at fever pitch and the future seemed both thrilling and terrifying.

On a dark night, out on the Houston bayou to celebrate his wife’s birthday, Jay Porter hears a scream. Saving a distressed woman from drowning, he opens a Pandora’s Box. Not the lawyer he set out to be, Jay long ago made peace with his radical youth, tucked away his darkest sins and resolved to make a fresh start. His impulsive act out on the bayou is heroic, but it puts Jay in danger, ensnaring him in a murder investigation that could cost him is practice, his family and even his life.

Stories tucked away on every floor. No. 10 Luckenbooth Close is an archetypal Edinburgh tenement. The devil’s daughter rows to the shores of Leith in a coffin. The year is 1910, and she has been sent to a tenement building in Edinburgh by her recently deceased father to bear a child for a wealthy man and his fiancée. The harrowing events that follow lead to a curse on the building and its residents - a curse that will last for the rest of the century.

There is no turning back.... Detective John Morrigan arrives at what appears to be a routine homicide in a botched armed robbery. However, as a key witness to the murder is herself violently killed less than 24 hours later, Morrigan discovers that someone very dangerous is responsible. As the Detective follows the trail, it leads him into a tangled web of duplicity stretching from the heart of his police department all the way to the upper echelons of political power.

When a human skeleton, with an animal skull instead of a head, turns up in Copenhagen, investigator Christian Porsing is immediately drawn into the case, but there are no clues to go on. By chance, Sigga Freitag, the former star profiler of the German police, is in Copenhagen and he impulsively...

A man receives a bill for a white chandelier that he never ordered and has never seen. This mysterious document turns out to be the hinge of his world, and his attempts to make sense of it lead him to facts about himself, his marriage and his orderly life that had previously been hidden from him. Set in New England and Florida during the 1920s, All He Ever Wanted gives us a marriage, betrayal and the search for redemption from the vantage points of both a husband and a wife.

Mick Hardin is back in the hills of Kentucky. He'd planned to touch down briefly before heading to France, marking the end to his 20-year Army career. In Rocksalt, his sister Linda the sheriff is investigating the murder of Pete Lowe, a sought-after mechanic at the local racetrack. After another body is found, Linda and her deputy Johnny Boy Tolliver wonder if the murders are related. Linda steps into harm's way just as a third body turns up and Mick ends up being deputised again, uncovering evidence of illegal cockfighting, and trying to connect all the crimes.

All the varieties of power—star, political, sexual, criminal and emotional—are on show in this definitive, untold story of Frank Sinatra and the Mafia. Drawing on an enormous archive of previously unseen records held by international law agencies, the FBI, the CIA and big-city police departments, Rothmiller and Thompson reveal Sinatra’s pact with the Mob in shocking detail. With additional evidence from decades of investigations and testimony, they expose Sinatra’s lifelong association with the Mafia, which he always denied, and its deadly collateral damage.

After 2,000 years of flawed history, here at last is a biography of Mary Magdalene that draws her out of the shadows of history and restores her to her rightful place of importance within Christianity. Throughout history, she has been both revered and reviled, a woman who has taken on many forms - witch, whore, the incarnation of the eternal feminine, and the devoted companion (and perhaps even wife) of Jesus. In this brilliant new biography, Bruce Chilton, a renowned biblical scholar, offers the first complete and authoritative portrait of this fascinating woman. His descriptions of who Mary was and what she did challenge the male-dominated history of Christianity familiar to most listeners.

Meet the man with the voodoo eyes:Solomon Boukman. He’d used voodoo, black magic, and extreme violence to control his people, and to keep anyone who ever heard his name in a state of fear. He’d zombified his enemies with potions and hypnosis and used them as his very own suicide killers. Some said he was the earthly incarnation of Baron Samedi, the voodoo god of death; others said he was The Devil incarnate…

Mankind has spread to the stars, only to become locked in warfare with an insidious alien race. All that stands against the alien menace are the soldiers of the Simulant Operation Programme, an elite military team remotely operating avatars in the most dangerous theatres of war. Captain Conrad Harris has died hundreds of times running suicide missions in simulant bodies. Known as Lazarus, he is a man addicted to death.

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.

Americans in the twenty-first century are becoming increasingly untethered from both reality and the essential principles and traditions that have shaped the nation’s historic success. A big part of why America isn’t working is because far too many Americans neither know nor care how it’s supposed to work.

What causes a woman to murder her family? Jo's idyllic life would make most people jealous. Until one day her daughter is abducted, and the only way to find her is to unravel her dark past. Ellie is a devoted wife...until she discovers the pain of betrayal. Now vengeance is all she can think about. Party girl Shayla knows how to hide her demons. But when she's confronted with a life-shattering choice, it will cost her everything. June knows suffering intimately, though the smile she wears keeps it hidden. Soon, the lives of these four women intersect, and one of them is about to snap.

No Orchids for Miss Blandish was crime author James Hadley Chase’s first novel, and an experiment in adapting American hard-boiled crime fiction by a British author. Inspired by James Cain and The Postman Always Rings Twice, it worked so well that it launched the former salesman’s writing career. He went on to write over eighty novels sold worldwide with a huge American, Asian and European following.

This extraordinary biography of the legendary screen star Marilyn Monroe was originally published in 1973 by Norman Mailer, one of America's most important writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century. Mailer, the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, was the first writer to explore the relationship between Monroe and Bobby Kennedy.

From atop the choppy waves to the choking darkness of the abyss, the seas are full of mystery and rife with tales of inexplicable events and encounters with the unknown. In this anthology we see a thrilling spread of narratives: sailors are pitched against a nightmare from the depths, invisible to the naked eye, a German U-boat commander is tormented by an impossible transmission via Morse Code, a ship ensnares itself in the kelp of the Sargasso Sea and dooms a crew of mutineers, seemingly out of revenge for her lost captain.

New technologies are an investment minefield. Putting money behind them means taking a risk on unproven ventures, often from inexperienced (and potentially unscrupulous) developers. While some will lead the investor to fantastic gains, many others turn out to be mere bubbles—a flimsy veneer of excitement and hype with little profitable at the core. But ignoring these technologies can be even worse, as this can mean failing to capitalise on the next great step in innovation.

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.