Showing results by narrator "David Thorpe" in All Categories

The year is 1999, and Internet companies are springing up everywhere. Anything seems possible for those who think big. So when David Lane - a quiet, cautious banker - is invited by his old friend Guy Jordan to help start up ninetyminutes.com, he decides that for once he will do something daring, something dangerous. If only he'd realised quite how dangerous. Because Guy falls out with Tony Jordan, his father and their biggest investor, bringing the company close to collapse. Then Tony is murdered - and David's roller coaster ride into danger and disaster begins.

A cure for Alzheimer’s would be worth billions. And well worth killing for. Simon Ayot is an Englishman working for Revere Partners, one of Boston’s top venture-capital firms. The firm’s star investment, worth millions of dollars for each of its partners, is BioOne, which is working on a cure for the disease. Frank, one of Simon’s bosses and his father-in-law, is found murdered at his summer house in the marshes, and Simon is in the frame. To stay alive, and to save his marriage, Simon must figure out who killed Frank. And who will be the next to die.

150 AD. Alaric, once lord of the Ravensworn is no longer feared nor revered. It has been six long years since his great defeat. He now lives life in the shadows. All hopes of glory and eternal rest in the Heroes Hall are gone. Alaric is alone. An outlaw to his land. When a band of horsemen appear on the horizon, eager to recruit the man they still believe to be a lord of war. And so Alaric is pulled back to a life he thought had forsaken him. For in the far north of Germania lies a tribe in desperate need of aid.

Meet Lord James Harrington and his wife, Beth. They adore hosting seasonal events in the village of Cavendish, running their country hotel, keeping the local folklore alive and listening to the latest murder mystery on the wireless. But mysteries don’t always remain on the airwaves. James and Beth are looking forward to hosting a New Year's Eve ball, but first, they are accommodating the actors of a travelling Old West show and displaying American Indian artefacts as part of that tour.

London, 1889: After Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat became a Victorian best seller, rowing on the Thames was the great craze of 1889. When an elementary school teacher in training takes a midnight swim in the Thames and witnesses a body being dumped, Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackerey are called to investigate. They uncover strange parallels with the enormously popular Victorian novel, but nobody will take them seriously. Following their instincts, they stick doggedly to the trail, which leads upstream to Oxford.

A sadistic practical joker is haunting the popular music halls of London, interfering with the actors and interrupting their acts by orchestrating humiliating disasters that take place in view of the audience. A trapeze artist misses her timing when the trapeze ropes are shortened. Mustard has been applied to a sword swallower's blade. A singer's costume has been rigged. The girl in a magician's box is trapped. Then the mischief escalates to murder. Or was murder intended all along?

The eighth book in the Sergeant Cribb series by Peter Lovesey. London, 1888. Though Miriam Cromer has confessed to the murder of her husband's assistant, she is still confident of her acquittal. However, the jury sentence her to hang. Miriam then says her husband was the killer, but he has an alibi. Can Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray discover what really happened at Park Lodge on that fateful day in March before it's too late?

144 AD. Alaric Hengistson, leader of the Ravensworn, revels in his many fear-fuelled names whispered in the hearth flames. Cunning in battle, a ruthless war lord. He sleeps sound in the knowledge that he has been chosen by the Gods for a higher purpose – to rise up against the tyranny of an Empire. For years he has thwarted Rome’s attempts to gain control over the land that has long resisted them. His land. Germania. However the rules are changing, and new deals are struck between the conquering Roman legions and the feuding Germanic tribes. Deals that could prove Alaric’s downfall.

Harriet and Matthew Rowsley, the housekeeper and estate manager of Thorncroft House in Shropshire, have to cut short their successful trip to Oxford when they receive a telegraph: a decapitated and mutilated body has been found on the estate. While trying to help the strangely slow police investigation, the couple face an unsettling threat to their livelihood: after years of searching, a legitimate heir of Thorncroft estate has been found!

Who can Flavius Belisarius call an enemy? The Goths he must fight to take Italy back for the Byzantium. Or is it the intrigues of the Empress Theodora, who fears his ambitions. There is his own wife, betraying him in more than one way and Justinian, the unreliable emperor he helped to the throne. Sixth-century Byzantium, a hotbed of intrigue; Italy and Persia where he must combat some of his fellow generals.

A Greek gangster arrives in Stockholm only to be murdered in a macabre fashion at Skansen zoo, his body consumed by animals. As the Intercrime Unit - a team dedicated to solving international violent crime - investigate what brought him to Sweden, eight Eastern European women vanish from a refugee centre outside the city while an elderly professor, the tattooed numbers on his arm hinting at his terrible past, is executed at the Jewish cemetery.

DI Liam McLusky, freshly transferred from Southampton and just recovered from having been injured in the line of duty, has no time to settle in before he is pushed in at the deep end in a new and unfamiliar city. Everyday objects, transformed into explosive devises by a man trying to revenge himself on the world for reasons unknown, are being left across Bristol, maiming or killing those who pick them up.

London, 1879. Crowds have gathered at Islington's chilly Agricultural Hall to place their bets on who will become the next world champion in a six-day, 500-mile speed-walking race, the wobble. When one of the highly favored contenders dies under suspicious circumstances, Sergeant Cribb also has a race on his hands - to pursue a ruthless murderer.

As the country bakes under the relentless summer sun, a young doctor is found brutally murdered at his home in a picturesque Cambridgeshire village. Is his death connected to his private life - or his professional one? Dr Joshua Ainsworth worked at an all-female detention centre, one still recovering from a major scandal a few years before. Was he the whistle-blower - or an instigator? As Detective Sergeant Ferreira and Detective Inspector Zigic begin to painstakingly reconstruct Dr Ainsworth’s last days, they uncover yet more secrets and more suspects.

Margaret Woodruff is slowly dying in a care home. When her son is presented with the chance of exceptional care in her final months, he finds the offer hard to resist. Winifred is assigned to Margaret’s care. She’s a Helper: a new kind of carer that’s capable, committed and completely tireless - because she’s a synthetic human being. Under Winifred’s care Margaret’s health improves beyond everyone’s expectations, and Winifred begins to learn from Margaret what it means to be alive. But how will Winifred use what she learns from Margaret - and what does she truly want from her?

It’s a busy time of the year for Lord James Harrington and his wife, Beth - there’s the Michaelmas Fair in the village to enjoy. But matters take a sinister turn when the body of the founder of the Jolly Madrigals singing group is discovered after the Fair. James’ friend DCI George Lane is in charge of the investigation, but as further murders occur, he grows increasingly baffled. James and George are convinced that a single killer is responsible for these deaths.

Amateur thief Ted Lyte has chosen an isolated house by the coast for his first robbery. But Haven House is no ordinary country home. While hunting for silverware to steal, Ted stumbles upon a locked room containing seven dead bodies. Detective Inspector Kendall takes on the case with the help of passing yachtsman Thomas Hazeldean. The search for the house's absent owners takes Hazeldean across the Channel to Boulogne, where he finds more than one motive to stay and investigate.

Mr. Richard Dodsley, owner of a fine second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road, has been found murdered in the cold hours of the morning. Shot in his own office, few clues remain besides three cigarette ends, two spent matches and a few books on the shelves which have been rearranged. In an investigation spanning the second-hand bookshops of London and the Houses of Parliament - since an MP's new crime novel Death at the Desk appears to have some bearing on the case - John Ferguson's series sleuth MacNab is at hand to assist Scotland Yard in an atmospheric fair-play bibliomystery.

Maurice, a small-town librarian, dies one Monday morning in a fiery car crash. Finding himself in a very unexpected afterlife, he befriends Kit, who knows more than he should about Heaven - and about Maurice's life on Earth. Meanwhile, Maurice's daughter Andy struggles to come to terms with the death of her ineffectual father. Tasked with preparing his eulogy, she starts writing letters to him, trying to make sense of her family's history.

Brighton, 1882: Albert Moscrop spends his holiday peering at beachgoers through a telescope, piecing together disarmingly trivial observations into a compelling drama for his own amusement. A keen student of human nature, Moscrop concentrates his interest on one particular family - the Protheros, especially the beautiful Zena Prothero, whose husband appears to take her for granted. Moscrop gradually moves into the circle of the Prothero family, only to become involved in a sensational murder.