Showing results by narrator "Mark Meadows" in All Categories

Most homicides are young male on young male, and that's bad enough. But as a father of two daughters, DCI Bill Slider can't help but take it harder when the victim is a young woman. Rhianne Morgan, just 18, waiting for her A-level results, lies dead in her comfortable middle-class home in a nice, respectable area. Neighbours remember rows with her stepfather. Schoolmates talk of a boyfriend humiliatingly dumped.

It took little more than a single generation for the centuries-old Roman Empire to fall. In those critical decades, while Christians and pagans, legions and barbarians, generals and politicians squabbled over dwindling scraps of power, two men—former comrades on the battlefield—rose to prominence on opposite sides of the great game of empire. Roman general Flavius Stilicho, the man behind the Roman throne, dedicated himself to restoring imperial glory, only to find himself struggling for his life against political foes.

Night & Day takes us from the dusty shelves of an uncanny library filled with fictional characters to a bunker deep beneath the earth where scientists seek revenge on old Nazis, from an English marsh haunted by a mother and her son to a country house where a grieving widower finds comfort in a most unlikely source. Concluding with the author's account of how an obscure horror film brought him closer to his lost father, and how nostalgia can help through our hardest times, this is a collection that will move, entertain, and keep you listening late into the night.

We might think we are through with the past, but the past isn't through with us. Tragedy permits us to come face to face with the things we don't want to know about ourselves, but which still make us who we are. It articulates the conflicts and contradictions that we need to address in order to better understand the world we live in. A work honed from a decade's teaching at the New School, where Critchley on Tragedy is one of the most popular courses, Tragedy, the Greeks and Us is a compelling examination of the history of tragedy.

Don’t miss the instant Sunday Times bestseller starring true crime podcast host Cristy Ward from the author of Nothing to See Here! Book 2 in the Cristy Ward series They raised her. Nurtured her. And lied about everything. They told Sadie she was adopted. They gave her a home and showered her...

When Varg Veum reads the newspaper headline 'YOUNG MAN MISSING', he realises he saw the youth just a few days earlier - en route to a demonstration against a commercial fish-farming facility in the tiny village of Solvik, north of Bergen. Varg heads to Solvik, initially out of curiosity, but when he chances upon a dead body in the sea, he's pulled into a dark and complex web of secrets, feuds and jealousies.

Roger Scruton looks at the central ideas of conservatism over the centuries. He examines conservative thinking on civil society, the rule of law and the role of the state on the one hand; and freedom (including freedom of expression and association), morality, equality, property and rights on the other. He traces the origins and development of the conservative ideology in the philosophies and thoughts of, among others, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Michael Oakeshott, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Robert Nozick.

A clergyman is murdered in his bed in the dead of night, triggering a chilling chain of events, each more bizarre and unnerving than the last – brutal killings, corpses vanishing, decomposed bodies digging their way out of graves. These shocking events seem unconnected but, at each scene, people report witnessing swarms of flies – hundreds, thousands, even millions of them.

Hammer of the Gods tells the extraordinary saga of Olaf Tryggvason – warlord, wanderer, king, and crusader – whose life rivals the most legendary figures of Viking lore. Born in exile and hunted from birth, Olaf survived slavery, betrayal, and shipwreck to become a fearsome warrior across the Viking world from the icy fjords of Norway to the courts of Kyiv, the slave markets of the Baltics, and the battlefields of England and Ireland. His rise would shake the foundations of Norse society, forge new kingdoms, and ignite a holy war against the old gods themselves.

Franco Fiorvante has toiled for years on the estate of Baron Zito. Determined to secure a prosperous future with dreams of owning his own lemon grove, Franco will do anything to prove his loyalty to the Baron. But when Baron Zito asks him to arrange the kidnapping of a little boy, Franco sets in motion the making of the world's first Mafia family. Gaetano Catalano is an idealistic young lawyer and a member of the Beati Paoli, a real-life secret society of aristocrats who investigate crime.

When former MI6 agent turned archaeologist Dr Ava Curzon is engaged by American intelligence to track down an African militia claiming to hold the Ark of the Covenant, she is plunged into a world where nothing is what it seems. Her breakneck descent into the shadowy realm of dark biblical magic hurls her across continents and into the opaque worlds of the Knights Templar, freemasons, occultists and extremist neo-Nazis, pushing her mentally and physically to the limits.

Henry was the first to reach the girl, found sleeping on the beach, with his friends Gil and Susan. When they learn what has happened to her, they are thrown into a mystery that nightmares are made of. The young girl has been forced to host a hideous malevolence that insinuates itself into the bodies and minds of thousands of unsuspecting people. The only hope of saving them is to become Night Warriors, an ancient Order with the power to infiltrate the dream world, and destroy the original source.

A troubling murder investigation may see Montalbano find his answers on a theatre's stage in The Sicilian Method, Andrea Camilleri's twenty-sixth novel in the Inspector Montalbano mystery series. 'Even the contents of his fridge are described with the wit and gusto that make this narrator the...

Ranging from the early Middle Ages to the present, this is one of the broadest and most up-to-date studies of French history available in English. Among its central themes are the relationships between state and society, the impact of war, competition for power, and the ways in which power has been used.

The Shape of Water is the first in Andrea Camilleri's wry, brilliantly compelling Sicilian crime series, featuring Inspector Montalbano. The goats of Vigàta once grazed on the trash-strewn site still known as the Pasture. Now local enterprise of a different sort flourishes: drug dealers and...

Only fools think war is simple. Or glorious. Some are warriors, some captains; others tend to the fallen or feed the living. But on the magic-drenched battlefield, information is the lifeblood of victory, and Aranthur is about to discover that carrying messages, scouting the enemy, keeping his nerve, and passing on orders is more dangerous, and more essential, then an inexperienced soldier could imagine...especially when everything starts to go wrong.

At Firenze, the reclusive artist Adrian Delafield's Florentine enclave in St John's Wood, the whispers of an impending tragedy are growing louder. The tension between the fanatical zealot of a housekeeper Miss Trimming and Delafield's sister Virgilia is just shy of fever pitch, when a cold morning at the house finds Trimming and Adrian sprawled at either end of the staircase – upstairs, an injury; downstairs, death.

Staying on in Northern Ireland as a civilian after years of working on undercover missions against terrorists, Rob eventually gains employment in Bristol, undertaking security work, but things don’t work out and Rob ends up living in a squat. After a job offer from an old colleague, Rob heads to London to work in close-protection security for some of Hollywood’s royalty and later becomes involved in the rescue of some very well-connected people from a dangerous religious cult. Rob’s life seems to be getting back on track. But Rob’s work soon becomes more covert.

Berlin, 1930. Sound film is conquering the big screen, leaving many by the wayside: producers, cinema owners - and silent film stars. Investigating the violent on-set death of actress Betty Winter, Inspector Gereon Rath encounters the dark side of glamour and an industry in turmoil. When his father requests that he help his friend, the mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, and his ex-girlfriend, Charly, makes a renewed attempt at rapprochement, things start to get out of hand.

Berlin, 1931. A power struggle is taking place in Berlin’s underworld. The American gangster Abraham Goldstein is in residence at the Hotel Excelsior. As a favour to the FBI, the police put him under surveillance, with Detective Gereon Rath on the job. As Rath grows bored and takes on a private case for his seedy pal Johann Marlow, he soon finds himself in the middle of a Berlin street war. Meanwhile Rath’s on-off girlfriend, Charly, lets a young woman she is interrogating escape, and soon her investigations cross Rath’s from the other side.