Showing results by narrator "Gordon Griffin" in All Categories

Little Marcus Fallbrook was kidnapped in 1976 and, when he never returned home, his grieving family assumed the worst. Now, 30 years later, teenager Leah Wakefield has disappeared and DI Wesley Peterson has reason to suspect that the same kidnapper is responsible. As Wesley delves into the case, his friend, archaeologist Neil Watson, discovers a mystery of his own when he exhumes the dead from a local churchyard. A coffin is found containing one corpse too many and Neil believes it may be linked to a strange religious sect.

A year on from the mysterious disappearance of Jenny Bercival, DI Wesley Peterson is called in when the body of a strangled woman is found. The discovery mars the festivities of the Palkin Festival, held each year to celebrate the life of John Palkin, a 14th-century mayor of Tradmouth who made his fortune from trade and piracy. Could there be a link between the two women?

A man is found dead in an escape tunnel in an Italian prisoner of war camp. Did he die in an accidental collapse - or was this murder? Captain Henry 'Cuckoo' Goyles, master tunneller and amateur detective, takes up the case. This classic locked room mystery with a closed circle of suspects is woven together with a thrilling story of escape from the camp, as the Second World War nears its endgame and the British prisoners prepare to flee into the Italian countryside.

The discovery of a human skeleton and a red rucksack amongst the roots of a fallen tree jolts memories for DI Wesley Peterson: a hitchhiker who went missing in 2008 and was never found. Meanwhile, in the small Devon village of Petherham, a famous TV psychic is the main attraction at a supernatural weekend. But when the psychic dies in suspicious circumstances Wesley discovers a connection between the dead man and the vanished hitchhiker. But was he responsible for her murder? Or has a shady organisation called The Burial Circle been revived in the present day?

When the body of Pauline Brent is found hanging from a yew tree in a local graveyard, DS Wesley Peterson immediately suspects foul play. Then history provides him with a clue. Wesley's archaeologist friend, Neil Watson, has excavated a corpse at his nearby dig - a young woman who, local legend has it, had been publicly hanged from the very same tree before being buried on unhallowed ground five centuries ago. Wesley is now forced to consider the possibility that the killer knows the tree's dark history.

When DI Wesley Peterson is summoned to investigate a killing, he assumes that it is a routine case. But soon dark secrets start to emerge from the victim's past.... Meanwhile, archaeologist Neil Watson is pulled from the historic Paradise Court to a ruined village from World War One.

In A Yorkshire Vet Through the Seasons, Julian Norton, the star of Channel 5’s A Yorkshire Vet, recounts more inspirational tales from his life, the animals he has treated and the people he has met, as well as taking us through the seasons, showing the challenges that occur at the most unlikely times. Whether he's tending to a domestic pet at his practice in Thirsk or called out to an injured swan in the middle of a cold Yorkshire night, the animals always come first.

Since resigning from the papacy in 2013, the first pope in more than 700 years to do so, Pope Benedict has lived quietly in a convent in the Vatican gardens in Rome. He has devoted himself to a life of prayer and study and has vowed to remain silent, until now. So much controversy still surrounds Pope Benedict’s time in office - in this book, written with best-selling German author Peter Seewald, he addresses the issues of his papacy and reveals how, at his late age, governing and reforming the Church was beyond him.

Thomas Chaloner is relieved to be summoned back to London. His master, the Earl of Clarendon, has sent him to Tangier to investigate a case of corruption. Chaloner will be glad to be home, to be reunited with his new wife, but the trivial reason for his recall exasperates him - the theft of material from the construction site of Clarendon's embarrassingly sumptuous new house just north of Piccadilly.

An excavation at the lost gardens of Earlsacre Hall is called to a halt when a skeleton is discovered under a 300-year-old stone plinth, a corpse that seems to have been buried alive. But DS Wesley has a more recent murder case to solve. A man has been found stabbed to death in a caravan at a popular holiday park, and the only clue to his identity is a newspaper cutting about the restoration of Earlsacre. Does local solicitor Brian Willerby have the answer?

Vienna, 1903. In St Florian's military school, a young cadet is found dead - his body lacerated with razor wounds. Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt calls on his friend Doctor Max Liebermann to help with the investigation. In the closed society of the school, power is everything. Suspicion falls on an elite group of cadets, with a penchant for sadism and dangerous games.

In the winter of 1939 in the cold snow of no-man's-land, two loners met and began an extraordinary journey together, one that would bind them for the rest of their lives. One was an orphaned puppy, abandoned by his owners as they fled the approaching Nazi forces. The other, a lost soul of a different sort - a Czech airman, flying for the French Air Force but soon to be bound for the RAF and the country that he would call home.

"Already it looked as if the police were up against a carefully planned and cleverly executed murder, and, what was more, a murder without a corpse!” Two brothers, John and William Rother, live together at Chalklands Farm in the beautiful Sussex Downs. Their peaceful rural life is shattered when John Rother disappears and his abandoned car is found. Has he been kidnapped? Or is his disappearance more sinister - connected, perhaps, to his growing rather too friendly with his brother's wife?

December 1860. Headed for the morning shift at the Swindon Locomotive Works is an army of men pouring out of terraced houses built by the GWR, a miniature town and planned community that aims to provide for its employees from cradle to grave. Unfortunately, boilersmith Frank Rodman is headed for the grave sooner than he'd expected, or he will be once his missing head is found. Colbeck, the Railway Detective, finds his investigation into Rodman's murder mired in contradictions.

Thomas Chaloner, spy for the King's intelligence service, has just returned from thwarting a planned revolt in Dublin, but soon realises that England's capital is no haven of peace. He is ordered to investigate the shooting of a beggar during a royal procession. He soon learns the man is no vagrant, but someone with links to the powerful company of Barber-Surgeons. His master, the earl of Clarendon, is locked in a deadly feud with the earl of Bristol, and an innocent man is about to be hanged in Newgate.

With the tourist season well and truly over in South Devon, Detective Inspector Wesley Peterson is looking forward to a quieter month in the CID. But when a man is shot dead on Bonfire Night, he finds he has a disturbing and complex murder case on his hands. The body of Patrick North was found in woodland connected to Nesbaraton Hall, a grand estate dating back to the eighteenth century. North worked for the Smithson family who now own the estate.

Without a permanent home, a wife or a job, and with no clear sense of where his life was going, Anthony Seldon set out on a 35-day pilgrimage from the French-Swiss border to the English Channel. The route of his 1,000-kilometer journey was inspired by a young British soldier of the First World War, Alexander Douglas Gillespie, who dreamed of creating a 'Via Sacra' that the men, women and children of Europe could walk to honor the fallen.

From his childhood love of animals, through his training and first steps in the profession and the pressures and challenges faced by vets, dealing with unexpected exotic pets - and handling excitable humans too - Julian Norton has seen all sides of the veterinary world and writes about it all with humour and affection. Just as happy calving a cow, treating a dehydrated chameleon or tending to the overgrown teeth of a rabbit, his passion for his work shines through in every chapter.

Returned to an England she barely knows and a postwar world she doesn't understand, Marian searches for something on which to ground her life. Family and friends surround her, and a RAF officer attempts to bring her the normality of love and affection, but she is haunted by the guilt of knowing that her contribution to the war helped to develop the atom bomb. Where, in the complexities of peacetime, does her loyalty lie?

By January 1666, the plague has almost disappeared from London, leaving its surviving population diminished and in poverty. The resentment against those who had fled to the country turns to outrage as the court and its followers return, their licentiousness undiminished. The death of a well-connected physician, the mysterious sinking of a man-of-war in the Thames and the disappearance of a popular courtier are causing concern to Thomas Chaloner's employer.