Showing results by narrator "Gordon Griffin" in All Categories

By the Booker-shortlisted author of Astonishing Splashes of Colour; a wittily observed slice of modern life as it plumbs the gulf between nostalgia and reality. Who is the Roundabout Man? He doesn't look like a tramp, yet he lives on a roundabout in a caravan and survives on the leftovers from a motorway service station. He calls himself Quinn, the name of a boy in a world-famous series of children's books. When Quinn's reclusive existence is invaded, he has to face his past, and the uncomfortable truth of who he really is.

A tip-off leads police to dismantle a pile of rubble in the village of Pendwick, in search of a hidden body. As expected, a corpse is found and is identified as being that of a local businessman who has been missing for 10 years.

Hennessey and Yellich - along with an ever-expanding team -head up the ensuing murder investigation. And then two further bodies are discovered - along with a particularly nasty brand of political extremism involving just a few too many respected local businessmen.

George Hennessey is beginning to accept the inevitable - that age is catching up with him and he needs to delegate to his young up-and-coming team. But there is no substitute for experience as he marshals his troops to investigate two parallel murders committed 20 or so years apart. First, a young man limps back from his father's funeral to report a murder he only now feels able to disclose. But naturally things are not quite as straightforward as they seem.

Ex-policeman turned private investigator Billy Rucker has been asked to trace Lucy Bradley, a teenage runaway on the streets of London. But when he finds her, she has been strangled and stabbed and abandoned in a disused house. Despite this being a case for the Metropolitan Police, Billy is persuaded by Lucy's father to track down her killer. And he soon finds himself embroiled in an investigation which leaves him with only one way out...

In the autumn of 1817, the arrival of the Ipswich coach and its occupants – a strange, ill-assorted company – changed the lives of those who lived at the Fleece Inn forever…. Will Oakley, landlord and host, with his two daughters, beautiful Myrtle, and the repellent Harriet, waited to receive his guests. Along with the usual farmers, merchants and the “quality”, there were others who fitted into none of these categories.

In the long, hot summer of 1969, two young men are involved in the accidental killing of their foreman on a Shropshire building site. Traumatized, they conceal his body and vow to never mention the horrific incident again. Four decades later, DI Frank Kavanagh and DC Jane Salt’s relationship is in trouble and she escapes to a friend’s home in that same Shropshire town. Here, whilst trying to avoid her own relationship problems, Salt gets herself embroiled in her friend’s love life and finds herself in serious danger.

When a deathbed confession leads to the discovery of a body in Foxfoot Wood, a 20-year-old missing person's case is now a murder investigation and a link is made with a bikers' gang, the Dungeon Kings.

Liverpool lawyer Harry Devlin never knew that five short lines could change his life - until he receives a notice announcing his sudden death on Midsummer's Eve. Someone wants him dead and he has only seven days to find out who it is.

A note that is discovered hidden in a wall cavity of a London hotel leads Detective Inspector Harry Vicary and his team to a burial site containing the charred bones of two men. Their investigation into this startling find quickly leads them into a dark and brutal world, where men and women are used and abused by those who rule through fear and intimidation. But who were the dead men and how did they meet their fate?

Inspector Alvarez is in a good mood, for once. The sun is shining, he has enjoyed an uniterrupted morning nap at his desk, his irasciable boss - Superios Chief Salas - is on holiday, and the local Mallorquin government’s proposal to increase tax on alcohol has been soundly defeated. But optimism, he soon has cause to reflect, is the road to disaster. In short order, he provokes the ire of Salas’ secretary and then of Salas himself - whose holiday does not seem to exclude phoning Alvarez to complain about his work. In no time at all, Alxvarez is mired down by a seemingly impossible task....

It is a shock to the staff at the Barleybridge Animal Hospital when Dan, one of the farm vets, is seriously injured in a car accident. It is even more of a shock when Scott Spencer, back from Australia, steps in to cover for him. Scott slips seamlessly into the Practice routine, not guessing what secrets are about to be revealed: secrets that will turn his life upside down and amend his callous attitude towards women.

It is 1919 and Great Britain is still struggling to its feet after the First World War. Progress is slow, even in quiet spots like the village of Broughton Underhill. But moving on is impossible when former police sergeant Herbert Reardon returns to the village, determined to finally find out what happened the night that his daughter was found drowned. However, as Reardon begins to investigate, it becomes clear that secrets still abound.

Gogol's great comic masterpiece paints an hilariously satirical picture of provincial life in 19th century Russia. Its publication in 1847 not only provided inspiration for succeeding generations of Russian writers, but fanned the already flickering flames of social discontent which were eventually to flare up and consume Russia in the revolution of 1917.

A police officer finds a badly injured man lying in a street in the centre of York in the early hours of the morning. The man subsequently succumbs to his injures without regaining consciousness. Hennessey and Yellich are brought in to investigate, along with the other members of the team, Ventnor and Pharoah.

When five corpses in various states of decomposition are found chained to the walls of an overgrown kitchen garden, George Hennessey and Somerled Yellich, assisted by Carmen Pharaoh, Thomas Ventnor and Reginald Webster, quickly begin their investigation into these shocking murders. The recently deceased owner of the large country house had been housebound for the last 25 years and would have had no idea of the appalling crimes that were taking place just yards away.

Inspector Alvarez is just considering whether he can surreptitiously leave work early when a colleague calls to tell him that an Englishman has been found dead in his car in his garage, the engine on and the tank empty. Alvarez, chafing over the prospect of an evening on the job, proceeds to the scene, but his hopes of a quick and easy case are dashed – for while the man was found in a car full of fumes, it appears the cause of death was not carbon-monoxide poisoning….

With a penchant for wine and women, Tyler is not the kind of man to let the law stand in his way. Rich, arrogant and spoiled, when his love of wine and cognac leads to the death of a young couple walking along a country lane, he'll do anything to avoid the consequences - including driving his car to his property in Mallorca so the English police can't examine it.

The Mallorcan police receive an anonymous call to say that a body has been found at the foot of a steep wall of rock. Hoping it is an accident, Alvarez makes cursory enquiries only to find that the medical evidence reveals this could be a murder. Alvarez uncovers several possible motives seeming to draw in just about every English person on the Island – but he refuses to countenance that Mary, the dead man’s niece, to whom he becoming uncomfortably close, could be guilty.

During the long hot summer of 1976, a brilliant young Cambridge mathematician arrives in a remote village in the Lake District and takes on a job as a farm labourer. Painfully awkward and shy, Spencer Little is viewed with suspicion by the community and his only real friendship is with scruffy, clever 10-year-old Alice. When he saves Alice from a wild-fire, the locals at last begin to accept him, but as he is drawn deeper into their lives, he also becomes aware of their secrets - and of the difficulty of keeping his own.

An editor receives a manuscript purporting to be the lost diary of history's greatest lover, Don Juan. An orphan left on the steps of a convent, Don Juan grew up within the church but his ambitions towards the priesthood fell to the wayside when he was seduced by a young nun. Evicted from the convent, he was taken under the wing of the libertine Don Pedro, the Marquis of Mota, who coached him in skills both courtly and amorous and then employed him as a spy at court.