Showing results by narrator "Ric Herbert" in All Categories

Frances honestly isn’t that excited about the SpeechMakers annual national conference and public-speaking competition. What she’s excited about is that this year's major prize. Frances has a few small problems, and 40,000 dollars would go a long way to sorting them out. Keith is Frances’ probably ex-mentor, it’s hard to tell since she’s not talking to him and he disapproves of the prize money. He thinks SpeechMakers should be about self-improvement, not self-enrichment. He wants to win the competition, though. He thinks it might help the situation with his wife, Linda.

It's winter in Melbourne, and Detective Emmett Corban is starting to regret his promotion to head of the Missing Persons Unit, as the routine reports pile up on his desk. So when Natale Gibson goes missing, he's convinced this is the big case he's been waiting for - the woman's husband and parents insist the devoted mother would never abandon her children, and her personal accounts remain untouched. But things aren't all they seem. The close-knit Italian family is keeping secrets - none bigger than the one Natale has been hiding.

On the evening of September 22, 1998, three teenage girls venture out for a night of mischief in the coastal town of Blairgowrie. But only two return. For over 20 years the disappearance of 15-year-old Cecilia May remains a baffling cold case - until human bones are discovered on an isolated beach.  Now it's up to Detective Emmett Corban and his team to dig up decades of trauma, and find the missing piece of an investigation that's as complex as it is tragic.

The calling card of the killer known as ‘The Jeweller' is as elegant as it is gruesome: a pair of ring fingers, separated from their owners, encircled by a band of wire, and delivered directly to Senior Detective Joe Capello. When the Jeweller taunts Joe and his team into meeting him in the diseased grounds of Barren Park, the consequences of that evening will have permanent repercussions for everyone involved. And for Joe, it gets personal.

To Become a Whale tells the story of 13-year-old Sam Keogh, whose mother has died. Sam has to learn how to live with his silent, hitherto absent father, who decides to make a man out of his son by taking him to work at Tangalooma, then the largest whaling station in the Southern Hemisphere. What follows is the story of a gentle boy trying to make sense of the terrible reality of whaling and the cruelty and alienation of his new world.

This web of characters struggle, both individually and collectively, through a time of unprecedented, escalating change. Beginning in 2016, Arne Bakke witnesses the historic devastation of that summer's bushfires across the ancient wilderness of Tasmania. Elsewhere, Londoner Evie Weatherall witnesses extreme climate events in her travels. They each see a dangerous future forming. When their paths collide in Melbourne, Australia, they and their group of close friends are set on course to witness and struggle together against the coming century, an age of great individual and planetary loss.

Kharkiv, Ukraine, 2019: Ongoing clashes between Ukrainian nationalists and pro-Russian activists make this city a deadly destination. However, Matt Latham—Australian foreign correspondent and reluctant spy for ASIS (Australia's secret service)—isn't too picky with the work he accepts, as long as the money is right. When offered a lucrative assignment to interview a reclusive Russian billionaire in Kharkiv, he jumps at the chance. But an explosion at the club where they were to meet leaves Matt hospitalized and his interpreter, Katya Fomina, dead.