Showing results by narrator "Sean Barrett" in All Categories

August 1958. DI Stratton has just been posted to Notting Hill. Stratton's new manor is rife with racial tension. The end of the war saw a flood of Caribbean migrants. Now, a decade later, working-class Teddy Boys are showing mounting hostility towards their black neighbours. Notorious landlord Danny Perlmann, a Polish refugee, is taking full advantage and is making a fortune off the high rents he charges. Caught in the middle of this war over rents and turf is Irene, a young runaway on the verge of going on the game.

After almost five years of conflict, London's exhausted inhabitants are living in a world of dereliction. War-weary DI Ted Stratton is no exception, but he cannot help being drawn in by his latest case. Called on to investigate when a doctor is found dead in Fitzrovia's Middlesex Hospital, Stratton soon realizes that someone involved is not who they appear to be. Meanwhile Jenny, Ted's wife, is working at the local Rest Centre.

Just as a major environmental summit is about to start in Hamburg, a massive storm hits the city. When the flood waters recede, a headless torso is found washed up. Initially, Jan Fabel fears it may be another victim of a serial rapist and murderer who stalks his victims, then dumps their bodies in waterways around the city. But the truth of the situation is far more complex. Fabel’s investigations lead him to a secretive environmental Doomsday cult called “Pharos”, the brainchild of a reclusive, crippled billionaire.

Sasha Grover-Williams hated her wealthy father's dubious business affairs - and ended up dead on a railway track. But did she jump or was she pushed? That's the burning question for Chief Inspector Beverley Wharton. She and her pathologist lover, Dr John Eisenmenger - an expert in forensics - are immediately plunged into a messy world of corruption and violence. Who is the father of the Sasha's foetus that unexpectedly comes to light? How can Beverley be mired in the charge of collusion?

Jan Fabel is a troubled man. His relationships with the women in his life are becoming increasingly complicated. If that weren’t bad enough, after a gap of ten years, a female serial killer – the Angel of St Pauli – again makes the headlines when an English pop star is found in Hamburg’s red-light district, dying of savage knife wounds.

May, 1942. A group of soldiers uncover a tomb in Libya. Buried in the ancient dust they find a macabre crown of thorns and the devastatingly powerful Spear of Destiny. They've discovered the last resting place of Christ. Sixty years on, Gerald Usherwood and his old army pal Max Chippendale reunite with friends and family. Dark shadows visit them in the night and make them pay for the secrets they stole.

London, June 1940. When the body of silent screen star Mabel Morgan is found impaled on railings, the coroner rules her death as suicide, but DI Ted Stratton of CID is not convinced. As he starts asking questions, it becomes clear that Morgan's fatal fall may have been the work of one of Soho's most notorious gangsters. When Stratton's path crosses with MI5 agent Diana Calthrop, they uncover a criminal network and a secretive pro-Fascist organisation.

Two high profile victims - a former left-wing radical turned environmental campaigner and a geneticist researching the possibility of inherited memory - are found murdered within 24 hours of each other. Both men have been scalped. Jan Fabel and his murder team have nothing to go on other than a single red hair left as a signature at each scene - each hair cut from the same head at least 20 years previously. Connections begin to appear: a long disbanded terrorist group; a mummified body; and a killer....

Shocking, but laced with wry humour, Vladimir Pereverzin’s extraordinary story is of an ordinary man whose comfortable life is upended. Refusing to give false testimony against Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, he is plunged into lengthy, brutal incarceration in Russia’s nightmarish prisons and penal colonies, including some in which political prisoner Alexei Navalny has been held.

Twenty floors above the shimmering lights of the Hamburg docks, public prosecutor Chastity Riley is celebrating a birthday with friends in a hotel bar when 12 heavily armed men pull out guns and take everyone hostage. Among the hostages is Konrad Hoogsmart, the hotel owner, who is being targeted by a man whose life - and family - have been destroyed by Hoogsmart’s actions. With the police looking on from outside - their colleagues’ lives at stake - and Chastity on the inside, increasingly ill from sepsis, the stage is set for a dramatic confrontation.

After a long and fruitful life, the Buddha is now 80. For 50 years after his Enlightenment, he has been walking the hot, dusty roads of Northeastern India with just a robe and bowl, tirelessly and selflessly teaching and inspiring. He knows death is approaching. This is the background to the Maha-Paranibbana Sutta, the original account of the Buddha’s last months. It is extremely moving because it is so personal, detailed and vivid.

Sixteen classic stories.

What is it like to broadcast the fateful words "Mayday, Mayday, Mayday," then jump into the unknown? The members of one of the world's most unusual brotherhoods provide the answers in this incredible book. Formed during the Second World War to celebrate the survival of pilots who had been forced to bail out over water, the Goldfish Club has taken on new members ever since. They share one pivotal moment, but their experiences beyond this couldn't be more different.

This is the incredible story of 89-year-old Chelsea Pensioner Sergeant Major Colin Thackery who, in 2019, made history by becoming the oldest person to win Britain's Got Talent. The show gave a glimpse into Colin's history, but the truth of his unique and eventful life is far more gripping and surprising than viewers could have imagined.

Here are some of the best of Churchill’s letters, many of a more personal and intimate nature, presented in chronological order, with a preface to each letter explaining the context. The recipients include a vast range of people, including his schoolmaster, his American grandmother and former President Eisenhower. They are taken from within the Churchill Archive in Cambridge, where there is a mass of Churchill’s correspondence. Several of the letters included have never appeared in book form before.

In these four supernatural dramas, first broadcast on radio in 1984, a house hides more than meets the eye; a B & B landlady helps her guests forget their troubles; a Japanese man inadvertently awakens a vengeful spirit; and a mother and baby become unsettled in remote mill.

Georges Simenon's autobiographical notebooks, in which he recorded his observations, experiences, anxieties and 'all the silly ideas that pass through my head', are one of the most candid self-portraits of a writer ever put to paper. Here, as the celebrated author ruthlessly examines his tortuous writing methods, his past, his fame, his intimate relationships and his fears of ageing, the result is an unsparing, often painfully revealing insight into a man trying both to find and to escape himself.

Ultimate soldier. Ultimate mission. But can the SAS distract the Nazis to allow airborne landings to go ahead? September 1944: in the wake of the successful Anvil landings, the Allies plan airborne landings in the Orléans Gap. To soften the enemy beforehand, they decide to drop a squadron of men and jeeps in Central France, to hit enemy positions and distract attention from the landings taking place elsewhere.

A long buried and shocking secret has been uncovered. In 1940, President Roosevelt and Canada's Mackenzie King secretly agreed to abandon the Allies and make peace with Hitler if the Nazis successfully invaded Britain. Decades later, Soviet agents are ready to use this information to shatter the NATO alliance and use the ensuing geopolitical chaos to strengthen their position in Europe. Only one man stands in their way.

It is in Semana Santa - Holy Week - in Southern Spain, and the heat is building up in the city. When a hideous double murder is discovered on the first day, the men of the force - and a visiting female academic, Maria Gutierrez - know they are in for a long week.