Showing results by narrator "Scott Graham" in All Categories

Embarking from England as part of Commodore Anson’s expedition to the Pacific, HMS Wager was wrecked on a desert island to the southward of Chiloe. Following the wreck, the crew suffered dreadful privations from famine and descended into mutinous factionalism, theft, and murder. This account by young midshipman John Byron describes the events of the wreck and mutiny. It also narrates his journey home in company with Captain Cheap and a small group of loyal officers and seamen.

The great medical jurist Dr John Thorndyke must unravel three intricate cases, as a wealthy American attempts to prove a preposterous claim to an English earldom, based only upon a startlingly tall old family tale; a hundredweight of platinum, worth a fortune, is stolen; and, most bizarrely of all, a severed human head is discovered in a box in the left luggage office of London's Fenchurch Street Station...

The first twelve cases for M. McDonnell Bodkin’s insightful but self-deprecating detective Paul Beck, a man who claims no more genius than “a little common sense,” and says of himself that “I just go by the rule of thumb, and muddle and puzzle out my cases as best I can.” Including tales of card-sharping, deception, and theft; of treachery in the British Cabinet, and a plot to undermine the nation’s silver currency; and of ingenious and cold-blooded murder.

On the morning of 30 June 1860, young Francis Saville Kent, not yet four years old, was found to be missing from the family home, Road Hill House, in the village of Road in Wiltshire. A search was mounted, and the child’s body was soon found, wrapped in a blanket from his cot and stuffed into a privy in the grounds of the house. His throat had been cut to the bone by some sharp instrument.

The story concerns the young and vivacious Emma Watson, one of six children of a widowed clergyman. Emma has spent most of her life under the care of a wealthy aunt of liberal views, and has received a good education. However, when her aunt enters into a second marriage, Emma is forced to return to the family home, where she is affronted by the crass hunting for husbands undertaken her sisters, Penelope and Margaret.

The unlikely heroine of this novel is the bashful and unadventurous Fanny Price, who occupies a Cinderella-like position in the residence of her wealthy cousins, the Bertrams, at Mansfield Park. Fanny is the butt of ridicule for the young Bertram sisters (Maria and Julia), and is relentlessly bullied by her manipulative and penny-pinching aunt, the widowed Mrs Norris.

Three gentlemen not wholly useless to their country—a lawyer, a banker, and a cabinet minister—have suddenly fallen into a state of profound ennui. Each seeks to rediscover the comfort of their lives through ‘the tonic of difficulty': adopting the nom de guerre of ‘John Macnab', they take to poaching in the Highlands of Scotland, issuing challenges to three landowners and declaring their intention to take a salmon or a stag on their lands between specific dates. But can they overcome the challenges they have set themselves, and escape with their reputations intact?

Twenty-two more tales of murder and mystery featuring HC Bailey's golden age detective Mr Reginald 'Reggie' Fortune: surgeon and general practitioner, a man of limitless interests and vast knowledge, and the ideal advisor to the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard. Includes all stories from Mr Fortune, Please (1927), Mr Fortune Speaking (1929), and Mr Fortune Explains (1930).

Young Jack Easy, full of his wealthy philosopher father's impractical notions of the rights of man and perfect equality—and failing to find much sympathy for them on land—resolves to join the navy, reasoning that "although the whole earth has been so nefariously divided among the few, that the waters at least are the property of all." He soon finds, though, that life in the Royal Navy is not quite the egalitarian ideal that he had expected, and is a good deal more eventful.