Showing results by narrator "Davina Porter" in All Categories

Ten people gather together for an elegant London dinner party. By the end of the party, only nine are alive. Sometime after dinner, General Thaddeus Carlyon is brutally murdered in the hallway. Who had the strength - and motive - to murder the distinguished military hero? Nurse Latterly and Inspector Monk find the answers in a nightmarish legacy of evil.

Drawing upon her background in ancient history and her experiences on archaeological digs, author C.S. Harris crafts authentic, compelling novels that appear regularly on best-seller lists and have won numerous awards. In 1812, surgeon Paul Gibson discovers a stiletto wound in the base of a corpse’s skull and immediately contacts Sebastian St. Cyr. And when another body turns up with the same injury, the lives of St. Cyr’s family are threatened if he doesn’t back off. Now, the pressure’s on to find the culprit before anyone else gets killed.

It's 1811, and the threat of revolution haunts the upper classes of King George III's England. Then a beautiful young woman is found savagely murdered on the altar steps of an ancient church near Westminster Abbey. A dueling pistol found at the scene and the damning testimony of a witness both point to one man - Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, a brilliant young nobleman shattered by his experience in the Napoleonic Wars.

After enjoying London's sophisticated society and the attentions of wealthy suitors, Lilly returns home to help her ailing dad. Determined to resurrect his apothecary business, Lilly labors tirelessly - praying her family's secrets and her rivals' schemes won't cloud her future.

From the start, St. Cyr's mission is sensitive: finding out who killed the bishop of London, a leading candidate for archbishop of Canterbury, in the crypt of the same country church where the mummified body of another murder victim was discovered only hours earlier. It becomes downright dangerous once the charismatic viscount unearths the surprising connection between the men as well as the many powerful enemies with motives for their murder - including his own father.

Victoria Trumbull is a feisty 92-year-old who refuses to let her age stop her from having fun, or investigating crime. When Victoria's knowledge of her native Martha's Vineyard helped to solve a murder in Deadly Nightshade, she earned her own baseball cap emblazoned with "West Tisbury Police Deputy". Now the authorities will turn to her again to help uncover another scandal on the idyllic island.

His name, they tell him, is William Monk, and he is a London police detective. But the accident that felled him has left him with only half a life; his memory and his entire past have vanished. As he tries to hide the truth, Monk returns to work and is assigned to investigate the brutal murder of a Crimean War hero and man about town. Which makes Monk’s efforts doubly difficult, since he’s forgotten his professional skills along with everything else.

In this revealing compendium, acclaimed writer Diana Gabaldon shares her invaluable lessons for creating an immersive reading experience, from evoking a mood to using the power of emotions to communicate physical intimacy. You'll learn the difference between gratuitous sex and genuine encounters that move the story forward and how to handle less-than-savory acts that nevertheless serve a narrative purpose. Gabaldon also notes that sex can be conveyed instead of described.

Rupert, the young Earl of Westerholme, returns home from the war - and Anna, a housemaid, falls hopelessly in love with him. But they can never be together - Rupert is engaged to the snobbish and awful Muriel. And anyway, Anna is only a servant. Or so everybody thinks.

It's June 1814, and the royal families of Austria, Russia, and the German states have gathered in London at the Prince Regent's invitation to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of monarchical control throughout Europe. But the festive atmosphere is marred one warm summer evening by the brutal murder of a disgraced British nobleman long thought dead.

Tess Durbeyfield has become one of the most famous female protagonists in 19th-century British literature. Betrayed by the two men in her life - Alec D’Urberville, her seducer/rapist and father of her fated child; and Angel, her intellectual and pious husband - Tess takes justice, and her own destiny, into her delicate hands. In telling her desperate and passionate story, Hardy brings Tess to life with an extraordinary vividness that makes her live in the heart of the reader long after the novel is concluded.

Little did Maggie Duncan know how great the sacrifice she would be making. Forty-seven years have passed since she was separated from her beloved Scotland and her beloved husband, Ian. More than time and oceans seem to have conspired to keep them apart, but Maggie continues to trust in the Lord and never gives up hope. Through forgiveness and acceptance, she comes to believe that all things happen according to God's will and in His time.

So what would Al Gore choose if he had a book club? Gore named Stendhal's The Red and the Black, a 19th century classic chock full of adultery, betrayal, and moral vacuity, as his favorite book on a recent broadcast of Oprah. It's a bit shocking of a choice, given his wife and running mate's position on clean, wholesome literature. Listen and decide for yourself the merit of this presidential pick.

When her wealthy Scottish employer dies of an overdose of heart medication, Nurse Latterly is charged with murder and locked up in Newgate Prison. To save his friend from the gallows, Inspector Monk works feverishly to identify a cold-blooded killer in the victim's greatly admired - and coolly silent - family.

Prize-winning historian and biographer, Carolly Erickson has created an eminently readable biography that recognizes the humanity of Great Catherine—Empress of Russia—with her majesty and immense capability. Dispelling some of the myths surrounding her voracious sexual appetite, the biographer portrays Catherine as a lonely woman far ahead of her time—achieving greatness in an era when women were executed on a husband’s whim.

In a London hospital, Prudence Barrymore, a talented nurse who had once been one of Florence Nightingale’s angels of mercy in the Crimean War, meets sudden death by strangulation. Private inquiry agent William Monk is engaged to investigate this horrific crime—which intuition tells him was no random stroke of violence by a madman.

Michael Phillips and Judith Pella author inspirational novels set in 19th-century Scotland. Stranger at Stonewycke is the first book in the Stonewycke Legacy series, which continues the story of the Ramsey family begun with the Stonewycke Trilogy. The great Stonewycke fortune is being stretched to its limits as the family tries to bolster the town's economy. With Allison representing a new susceptibility to change and corruption, the family is once again at the crossroads of destiny.

The vicious decapitation of Stanley Preston, a wealthy, socially ambitious plantation owner, at Bloody Bridge draws Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, into a macabre and increasingly perilous investigation. The discovery near the body of an aged lead coffin strap bearing the inscription King Charles, 1648 suggests a link between this killing and the beheading of the deposed seventeenth-century Stuart monarch.