Showing results by narrator "Julia Franklin" in All Categories

As Christmas draws nearer, Simmy Henderson is invited to a party in Glenridding at the heart of the Lake District. However, the festivities are overshadowed by two alarming discoveries: a man's body in the beck above the village, and a vulnerable newborn baby, apparently abandoned by its mother. Caught in the crosscurrents and tensions of the inhabitants of Glenridding, Simmy is drawn into the investigation. The season of goodwill has been eclipsed by far darker emotions, and a murderer must be found.

Prunella Pearce, Bree, and the other ladies of the Winterbottom Women’s Institute are planning to spend Halloween at the Montgomery Hall Hotel murder-mystery weekend, just as the Hall’s past comes back to haunt it. The hotel is now in the incapable hands of Tarragon Montgomery, with its faltering finances overseen by elderly matriarch Cecily. Meanwhile, the local actress hired to play Psychic Selma for the weekend has been replaced by an impostor. But who is she and what is her agenda?

Needing to find a job, Betty Dean is sent into service at Stowford House. The work is gruelling, and her dreams of making something of herself seem out of reach. When Betty is forced to leave after a scandalous incident, she feels that her life is over—until a new job throws her a lifeline. Meeting Connie and Jean brings the joy of friendship, even if Betty struggles with having to keep secrets from her new pals. When soldier Duncan Kennedy enters Betty's life, it seems that she may finally find the love she's always wanted. But opening herself up to someone new isn't easy.

Actress Enora Andressen is facing the perfect storm. Her favourite French director, Remy Despret, has lost his touch and is keeping dangerous company. Her agent, Rosa, has been seduced by a kiss-and-tell novel of doubtful provenance. While H, sicker by the day at home at Flixcombe Manor, is battling both Long Covid and something far darker. Devoting herself to H, Enora needs good news, and it arrives in the shape of a fascinating Remy idea based on Flixcombe's role during the Second World War.

In 1851, Joshua Browning sets off to join the Californian gold rush, leaving his wife and twin sons behind to run Hatherton Farm. Squire Cameron Marshall soon plots a way to regain the few acres of land, which he believes are rightfully his. Gracie Browning soon finds herself at the mercy of the unscrupulous Squire. For the sake of her cherished sons, Gracie is compelled to make some huge sacrifices. With no alternative than to flee from their homeland, a terrible catastrophe inflicts a momentous change to the Browning family.

The world is struggling in the face of a relentless virus. When Hayden Prentice develops symptoms during a stay in his native Portsmouth, Enora Andressen and her son, Malo, must do their best to save his life. Because H, already in deep financial jeopardy, trusts no one. Except his kith and kin. But survival comes at a savage price. Not just the fortune that Enora must somehow raise to pay for his home nursing, but the murderous attentions of a stalker from H's past, determined to pay him one last visit and exact vengeance for a long-ago debt of blood....

Written in 1905, this is Vernon Lee’s final genuinely weird tale, and it tells the 18th-century legend of Sister Benvenuta, a nun who wrote letters to a model of infant Christ. Whilst unexpectedly funny in places, this short story has dark undertones.

The return of the veiled lady to Chilcote Priory fills Mrs Peterson with dread. The ghostly apparition was too rare for them to accept the house is haunted, and they had managed to brush it under the carpet, but when it scares their latest maid senseless, Mrs Peterson thinks the ghostly visitor has a message this time.

From the vaults of the British Library comes a new anthology celebrating the best works of forgotten, never-since-republished supernatural fiction from the early 20th century. Waiting within are malevolent spirits eager to possess the living and mysterious spectral guardians - a diverse host of phantoms exhumed from the rare pages of literary magazines and newspaper serials to thrill once more.

Amelia is constantly overshadowed by her beautiful cousin, Ernestine. When two men both fall for Ernestine, they dare each other to stay in an ominous vine-covered pavilion, and it is up to Amelia to come to the rescue in this eerie feminist tale.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman is known for her themes of female entrapment and patriarchal control, and she gives this a Gothic twist in "The Giant Wistaria". A wealthy young couple and their friends rent a manor house, excited by the prospect that it’s haunted, and they are not disappointed when they all experience the same vivid dream.

A spate of robberies targetting elderly women is disturbing enough, but especially so in a town as peaceful and sedate as Leek. Then one attack turns to murder, and Detective Inspector Joanna Piercy is called to the eerily named Spite Hall. For the body on Nan Lawrance has been found bludgeoned to death, lying over the tapestry she was in the process of embroidering. But what could have made the robbers move from simple theft to murder?

Mirepoix, France. Summer 1981. In a small village in southern France, a wilful English girl is falling in love. Frances Langley has fallen under Benoit's romantic spell, and their summer of love finds Frances willing to do almost anything for the handsome art collector, even hiding a precious Klinkosch box for him, stolen by the Nazis decades before. England. Summer 2022. Years later, Frances' son, Harry, finds himself packing up the clutter and chaos of his late mother's home.

July 1914. Britain is in turmoil as WW1 begins to change the world. While the young men disappear off to foreign battlefields, the women left at home throw themselves into jobs meant for the boys. Hiding her privileged background and her suffragette past, Constance Copeland signs up to be a Clippie on the trams in Staffordshire, despite her parents' disapproval. Constance, known as Connie, soon makes fast friends with lively fellow Clippies, Betty and Jean, as well as growing closer to the charming, gentle Inspector Robert Caldwell.

Fearsome, eccentric and unpredictable, Patience Collier was an actress whose perfectionism shone through in her every performance, and who worked alongside many of the most celebrated actors and directors of her time. Drawing on material from Collier's extensive archive of diaries and letters as well as interviews with many of those who worked with her, The Performer's Tale paints an involving portrait of a gifted and eccentric woman weaving her way through the 20th century, mixing with artists, leftists and numerous figures from world of entertainment.

1919. WWI is over, and now living in Cambridge with husband Edmond, Amy Derwent is settling into her new life as wife and mother. Edmond's cousin, Vicky, spends her days tending to the soldiers suffering the after-effects of their time on the battlefield. Meeting Maxim Duclos, a young Frenchman, fills her heart with joy. But he’s hiding something. Vicky must choose to either follow her heart's desire and risk her family's disapproval or remain a dutiful daughter?

Actress Enora Andressen is catching up with her ex-neighbour, Evelyn Warlock, who's recently retired to the comely East Devon seaside town of Budleigh Salterton. The peace, the friendship of strangers and the town's prestigious literary festival...Evelyn loves them all. Until the September evening when her French neighbour, Christianne Beaucarne, disappears. Enora has met this woman. The two of them have bonded. But what Enora discovers over the anguished months to come will put sleepy Budleigh Salterton on the front page of every newspaper in the land.

Carrie Tollman awakes in the middle of the night with an intruder gazing down at her. He tells her he's killed before and he'll kill again. One word about what's happened, and he'll be back. Carrie is one of two carers looking after Enora Andressen's favorite scriptwriter. But Pavel is now paralysed, as well as blind, and it falls to Enora to track down this terrifying presence at Carrie's bedside.

The book opens with Neville celebrating her 43rd birthday and contemplating middle age now that her children are grown. Her mother, in her 60s, seeks answers to her melancholy in Freudianism. Her sister, Nan, a writer who has hitherto led a single and carefree life in London, experiences the loss of love and with it her plan for the future. And Neville's principled daughter, Gerda, who is determined not to follow her mother's generation into the institute of marriage, finds herself at an impasse with the man she loves.

DI Joanna Piercy is irritated at what she perceives to be an attempt to wrap her up in cotton wool during her pregnancy when she is asked to take on the case of Zachary Foster, a missing 96-year-old man suffering from dementia. Zachary has vanished from his residential care home on the edge of Leek during the night with his beloved old teddy bear. He can't have gone far, surely, but how did a frail, elderly man manage to abscond from a secure house at night? As Joanna investigates, it soon becomes clear that this apparently minor case is far more sinister than it first appears.