Showing results by narrator "Matthew Davies" in All Categories

Ten short stories by author Christopher J F Gibson. The author has here put together a kaleidoscope that often takes a wry look at ourselves.... Of course there are some stories that feature cats.

One quiet snow-covered Sunday morning in Bruges, a prominent business executive is found dead in the streets, apparently due to an alcoholic hemorrhage, but for Inspector Van In, there is something about the autopsy that does not add up. When he questions the businessman's friend, a Dutchman, he too is found dead the next morning, burned to death in a house fire.

Grace Flynn has found the sword she has been longing for, the fabled blade of "Tristam". She has just one problem - it is locked away in the Tower of London. With the aid of the scoundrel Nereus Neptune she must enter a most heavily guarded place to reach her goal. Hopefully she fares better than the infamous Colonel Blood, who failed to rob the tower in 1671.

The last thing he expected to find in Ireland that summer was the inspiration to go on with his life, and certainly not in the form of an adolescent heiress. New York socialite Peg Shannon has everything - wealth, position, beauty, and limitless prospects for happiness. Or so the world believes. Aspiring London violinist Kendall Gregg is talented, handsome, and charming. While hardly well-to-do, he has connections and ambition which should take him far. Or so it appears.

London, 1666. Orphaned by the Great Plague, Sam is soon starving on the streets - and desperate enough to steal. He's quickly recruited as one of sinister Uncle Jack's children, and taught to steal. If he gets caught by the law, the punishment will be death - and if he crosses Uncle Jack, it could be just as bad. Still, it's a living for Sam and his fellow thief Catherine - until the long, hot London summer means a blaze at the Pudding Lane bakery runs out of control.

Twelve little oddities - an assortment of the bizarre, unexpected, charming, unsettling, and downright peculiar. Into darkness or light, there are many ways to escape.

In his new collection, Bitter Waters, Brenchley has assembled stories queer and weird: a man with morbidly sensitive hearing sets sail to chart dangerous rocks called the Silences; a ship's chandler from among his shadowed stock gives an old friend a compass that guides through Hell rather than point north; a eunuch and his dwarf lover leave the Sultan's harem to visit the baths of a city poisoned by magic; a youth who climbed the echelons of power thanks to his looks and guile finds being on the losing side of war has forced his to return to his sordid, early life.

London 1888, Jack the Ripper is on the loose terrorizing the citizens of Whitechapel. The Queen of England sends a mysterious agent to uncover the truth of the vile monster hunting England's streets. The trail of blood leads to an even bigger mystery and to a darker enemy of the Crown itself. While on Mont Orgueil, Grace Flynn, a prisoner of both England and France, awaits her execution for a very long list of crimes.

When Alice’s Uncle Sam brings home a mysterious calendar that’s short on chocolate but big on surprises, she is thrown into an advent she never dreamed of. Codes arrive by text message and open the doors in the calendar, drawing Alice and Sam into fantastical new worlds that are wondrous, frightening and beautiful - and strangely familiar.

A moving and tender meditation on loving, living and dying by one of our greatest Anglican spiritual writers.

Greta knows two things to be true. The first: Trolls don't venture into the forest, especially during the day. The second: Kings don't save peddlers' daughters from those trolls, and they certainly don't deposit them atop royal horses and personally escort them home. But sometimes, they do. And sometimes afterward, life gets very complicated....

Companies that are thriving, not just surviving, are much more than a set of ruthlessly efficient and mechanistic processes. They are a social system operated by people for people. The quality of relationships, both inside and outside the organization, is a far more important driver of sustainable success or failure than the quality of its control systems. The head is important, but it is the heart that matters most.

The stories collected in the twelve volumes of Andrew Lang's Fairy Books of Many Colors have captivated generations of readers. In The Blue Fairy Book, the first in his legendary series, Lang compiled and edited tales from the Brothers Grimm, Madame d’Aulnoy, and French, Scandinavian, and Middle Eastern sources. He captured the folkloric traditions and dark origins of dozens of the world's best-known fairy-tale characters, including Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow-White, Cinderella, and Rumpelstiltskin.

Today, the economic environment is global, highly sophisticated, and in continuous flux. Thus, the challenge for business leaders is to stay ahead of market flow and change, in order to gain competitive advantage. Creating Competitive Advantage explores why this pioneering can be the safest and best course for organizations to get ahead and guides leaders on how to forecast trends without increasing risk. It introduces the new concepts of market flow visualization and the line of probability, pioneering the safe course, and analytically supported intuition.

Life doesn't pick winners and losers. That's for the corporations to decide. And they picked Liam Argyle for a carefree life of fame and fortune as host of the world's most popular reality show competition. After two seasons of parading about the world's biggest victims on The Grass Is Greener, he's been forced to put a happy face on one tragedy too many - and he won't turn a blind eye to the horrors of the corporate dystopian world of the 2070s any longer. Now, Liam is out to destroy the very people who made him a star.

A bewildering feature of so much contemporary political violence is its stunning impersonality. Every major city center becomes a potential shooting gallery; and every metro system a potential bomb alley. Victims just happen, as the saying goes, to "be in the wrong place at the wrong time". We accept this contemporary reality - at least to some degree. But we rarely ask: where has it come from historically? Killing Strangers examines how such violence became "unchained" from interpersonal relationships.

Being able to take innovative and creative approaches to new challenges is crucial for leadership success. Decision Making and Problem Solving will help you to learn key techniques and models to confidently make the best decisions and solve the hardest problems. Using checklists, exercises, case studies and tried-and-tested methods, leadership guru John Adair provides a clear framework that can generate ideas and inspire confidence in your team - so you can spot the solution in every problem, and create ideas to rival even the best strategists.

The long hidden heart of the Twisted Curse had been found, concealed in a realm that no angel can enter, where magic runs wild and time is just another direction. The Twisted Curse is the key to ending the Eternity War and it can only be broken by someone willing to traverse the depths of Faerie. Unfortunately, Mitch has other things on his mind.

Meet the hapless Jeremy: a man in his late 50s, he scrapes together a living in Paris by writing soft-core pornography under the saucy guise of "Nathalie Cray". When his all-but-estranged sister tells him their father is on his deathbed, Jeremy reluctantly travels back to his parental home in the depths of the English countryside. Confronted with a life that he had always been eager to escape, his return marks the start of an emotionally fraught journey into the family's checkered past.

A masterful reimagining of Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol with this darkly entertaining and moving exploration of the twisted relationship between Ebenezer Scrooge and Jacob Marley.