Showing results by narrator "Gareth Armstrong" in All Categories

Adapted from the Arthur Conan Doyle story "Silver Blaze".... Horseracing is the sport of kings, perhaps because racehorses are very expensive animals. But when they win races, they can make a lot of money too - money for the owners, for the trainers, and for the people who put bets on them to win.Silver Blaze is a young horse, but already the winner of many races. One night he disappears from his stables, and someone kills his trainer.

The Coffee House was a warm, brightly lit place. The serving girls were pretty and the men who visited the rooms seemed polite enough. But still there were whispers, ugly disquieting rumours about what happened at night when the big oak door was closed. The young doctor had never been inside the Coffee House - and indeed had no wish to - until he met the frail, shabbily dressed girl on the Newmarket coach.

In EDI (the European Department of Intelligence in Brussels) there are some very secret files - the Omega Files. There are strange, surprising, and sometimes horrible stories in these files, but not many people know about them. You never read about them in the newspapers.Hawker and Jude know all about the Omega Files, because they work for EDI. They think fast, they move fast, and they learn some very strange things.

Cajoled into auditioning for a local play by the formidable Mrs Dalrymple, Bert Hook finds that amateur dramatics are not quite as he imagined. He meets a rather surprising cast of characters: moody Michael Carey, a talented actor with a big future ahead of him; shoplifter Becky Clegg, who claims she has put her disreputable past behind her; and Jack Dawes, with a history of violent crime.

It is night in the South Seas near Tahiti, and the ship HMS Bounty has begun the long voyage home to England. But the sailors on the ship are angry men, and they have swords and guns. They pull the captain out of bed and take him up on deck. He tries to run, but a sailor holds a knife to his neck. "Do that again, Captain Bligh, and you’re a dead man!" he says.

Terry Walton has kept an allotment for over 50 years - man and boy - in the Rhondda valley in South Wales. He started when he was 4, helping on his dad's plot on the side of the mountain, when he was sent to cut bracken and collect sheep manure by the bucketful to feed the rows of vegetables. By the time he was 11 he had his own plot - the youngest ever to do so - and while still in his teens established an allotment empire to grow the vegetables and flowers he sold to local customers.

August, 1616. The whaling ship Heartsease has ventured high into the Arctic, but now must begin the long journey home. Only one man stays behind: Thomas Cave makes a wager to remain here, alone, until the next season. No man has yet been known to survive a winter this far north. As the light recedes and the ice begins to close in, Cave pits himself against blizzards, avalanches, bears - and his own demons.

He may have prevented the world from falling into ruin, but Alex knows his work is not done yet. There’s still a controlling intelligence out there, pulling together the strands of a new and even more destructive conspiracy. Battling with personal tragedy on one hand, and the intrusion of new-found celebrity on the other, Alex must re-emerge from self-imposed exile to reunite with Mariam–the woman he loves–and Amaury–his truest friend–to face the fight of their lives.