Showing results by narrator "Helen Lloyd" in All Categories

After their fateful stay at the Hearst Hotel, the Ghost Gang is back with more spooks and more subscribers. They’ve been invited to record onboard the RMS Queen Anne, a transatlantic luxury ocean liner with a colorful past of violent deaths of hundreds of passengers—souls that bought a one-way ticket to the afterlife (and never disembarked). When Chrissy, Chase, Kiki, and Emma board the ship, they have a funny feeling they’ve been sucked into a ghostly time warp—a theory that takes a frightening turn when Chrissy goes missing on the first night.

Detective Constable Connie Childs is dragged from her bed to the fire-wrecked property on Cross Farm Lane. Three bodies discovered, a family obliterated, and their deaths all seem to point to one conclusion - one mother, one murderer. But DC Childs realises it is the fourth body, the one they cannot find, that holds the key to the mystery. Her determination to unmask the murderer might cost her the thing she cares about most: her career.

When Nicola's husband, Dominic, retires they decide not to spend their days finding hobbies to fill the time until Countdown is on. Instead, they fulfil their life-long fantasy of buying a country house and filling it with their dearest friends. Reliving their youth and spending their children's inheritance. Joined by seven of their friends they club together to invest in a château in Normandy. Group dinners, fine wine, beautiful scenery - they're living the dream!

A wedding on picturesque Martha's Vineyard promises to be the affair of the season when Penny Arbuthnot asks her cousin, feisty 92-year-old poet Victoria Trumbull, if she can use her property for the reception. Victoria agrees - but she has no idea what's in store for the hapless couple. For one, Penny is seriously in debt and desperate to marry money. She thinks she's on the road to riches when she hooks Rocco Bufano, whose father is a multi-billionaire. But unbeknownst to Penny, Rocco's been disowned by dad.

Alice’s husband is missing. Has he left her for another woman, or has something more sinister happened? In a world that is becoming increasingly muddled, Alice is unsure whom she can trust. Even her daughter appears to be lying to her. How much heartache can one person endure?

Vee Smith is 22 when she starts work on Gosport's ferries, taking a job left vacant by the men gone off to war. She soon makes friends with the other women workers, and together they enjoy nights out dancing in Gosport. Vee even feels herself falling for Sam, the skipper of the ferry and her unhappily married boss. But Vee has a secret: her real name is Violetta Schmidt, and she is half German. If her true nationality is discovered, she and her mother could find themselves interned as enemy aliens.

Herbert George Wells was one of the most prolific and visionary British writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. H. G. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels, although he wrote across many genres, including nonfiction. His fiction embraces history, science fiction, horror, satire, fantasy, and social commentary. Wells was also a futurist, foreseeing air travel, tanks (as in “The Land Ironclads” - part of this anthology) space travel, nuclear weapons, and even satellite television.

Where is Wendy? Leading a labor strike against the Lost Boys, of course. In Jane Yolen's first full collection in more than 10 years, discover new and uncollected tales of beloved characters, literary legends, and much more. A Scottish academic unearths ancient evil in a fishing village. Edgar Allan Poe's young bride is beguiled by a most unusual bird. Dorothy, lifted from Kansas, returns as a gymnastic sophisticate. Emily Dickinson dwells in possibility and sails away in a starship made of light. Winner of the 2018 World Fantasy Award.

Olive Turner might have lived through eighty-four Christmases, but she'll never get bored of her favorite time of year. And this one's set to be extra-special. It's the Gin Shack's first Christmas—and there's a gin-themed weekend and a cocktail competition on the cards! But, beneath the dazzle of fairy lights and the delicious scent of mince-pies, Olive smells a rat. From trespassers in her beloved beach hut to a very unfunny joke played on her friends, it seems that someone is missing a dose of good cheer.

Jacob’s Room was written in 1922 and is Virginia Woolf’s third novel; the first in which she made a radical shift from the established style of prose narrative writing and began experimenting with the modernist "stream of consciousness style" now so firmly associated with her work and that so shook the literary establishment. Jacob’s Room is overwhelmingly centered around feelings of absence and emptiness and is a collection of memories and sensations that chart the life of Jacob Flanders, largely observed through the eyes of others.

For years, Abigail Linton devoted herself to caring for her parents and her siblings’ children. Now, eager to create a life of her own, Abby seizes upon a position as a governess on a neighboring estate. Unfortunately, her absentee employer is Maxwell Bryce, the Duke of Rothwell, the notorious rake who once broke her youthful heart. But since he hasn’t set foot on his estate for 15 years, Abby assumes she’ll never have to lay eyes on him ever again.

They were the unsung heroines of World War II: the women who clocked in daily to work in vast munitions factories, helping to make explosives, bullets, shells, bombs and war machines that would ensure victory. A factory accident could mean blindness, loss of limb or worse. Yet this hidden army of nearly two million women toiled on, regardless, through the hardest years of the war.

After the defeated Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte goes into exile on tiny St. Helena Island in the remote South Atlantic, he and his lover, Albine de Montholon, plot to escape and rescue his young son. Banding together African slaves, British sympathizers, a Jewish merchant, a Corsican rogue, and French followers, they confront British opposition as well as treachery within their own ranks with sometimes subtle, sometimes bold, but always desperate action. When Napoleon and Albine break faith with one another, ambition and Albine’s husband threaten their reconciliation.

Dan Ranscombe is clever and good-looking, but he resents the wealth and easy savoir faire of fellow guest Paul Latimer. Surely a shrewd girl like Meg Slater would see through that, wouldn't she? And what about Diana, Paul's beautiful sister; Charles Asher, the Jewish outsider; Madeleine, the children's nanny; and artist Henry Haddon? As these guests gather at a country house party, none has any inkling that the choices they make will have fateful consequences lasting through the war and beyond.

Helen Reid has received a devastating diagnosis—and as she contemplates the life she’s lived, she is haunted by a terrible mistake she made in her youth after her boyfriend Rob struck a cyclist with his car. Compelled to find some sort of redemption, she journeys back to her old hometown to track down her ex and finally bring the truth to light. But Rob isn’t quite so ready to face his past, and it soon becomes clear that he’s willing to do anything to avoid the consequences. Will Helen find redemption—or revenge?

February, 1586. When the queen’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, learns that Ursula is to visit her relatives in Devon, he asks her to find out what has happened to two of his local agents, who have been strangely silent recently. On arrival in the small Devon village of Zeal Aquatio, Ursula discovers that both spies in question have met with mysterious - and fatal - accidents. Or is there more to it than that? What did the two spies find out that got them killed?

Honor - Adam Stanford, Earl of Ashworth, has always done the right thing. Desire - Lady Catherine Bourgeault, lonely and rejected, longs to experience passion, to love just once in her life. Treachery - The Baron Bourgeault: to what extremes will an obsessive, unstable man go to achieve his own dark ends? Seduction - In the face of a love that will not be denied, Adam and Catherine risk everything to be together.

Nazi-occupied Holland, 1944. As soldiers patrol the streets, nursing student Ilse is only just surviving the terrible famine and increasingly violent German occupation. Though exhausted by her demanding work at a hospital far from home, she can’t help but notice Levi, a young man with dark eyes watching the world silently from the abandoned house next door. London, present day. When Anna’s father dies, he leaves her a ticket to Amsterdam, a bent silver sixpence on a delicate silver chain, and a note begging her to complete the journey he was never able to.

February 2022 marked 80 years since the Fall of Singapore and Olga is now ready to tell the story of her years as a child prisoner of war. It's a story of great fear and deprivation; of a childhood utterly lost to conflict. It's also a story of class prejudice and unkindness that didn't end when Olga was freed from the camp and returned to England as a refugee.

An arch-schemer, gossip, and insatiably curious social climber, Miss Elizabeth Mapp is a 40-something spinster living in the picturesque English seaside town of Tilling. Miss Mapp and her nemesis, Godiva Plaistow vie for sartorial and social status much to the amusement of the gentlemen of Tilling - particularly Major Flint and his friend Captain Puffin.