Showing results by narrator "Esther Wane" in All Categories

Flowers, favors, and a cake with a body in it...what a way to start a wedding! Diana already regrets saying yes to her neighbor's ridiculous wedding flower demands, but when she discovers a body in the middle of the multi-tiered centerpiece...it's really taking the cake! The man in the cake has been murdered. Diana suspects that one of her neighbors may be the killer. And she already knows that some of them are keeping skeletons in their closets. Sometimes literally.

Sheer Mischief by best-selling author Jill Mansell is an unmissable romantic comedy about sisterly love and rivalry.... Not to be missed by listeners of Sophie Kinsella and Marian Keyes. It's not that Janey Sinclair isn't pleased to see her sister. It's just that being woken at seven by Maxine, complete with police escort, isn't quite how she'd planned to spend her Sunday. Even so, Janey, who's just rebuilding her life after her husband disappeared, is delighted that her sister's back in the Cornish town where they grew up.

Available for the first time: audio editions of Milly's brilliant short stories 'Here Come the Boys', 'The Wedding Dress', 'Ladies Who Launch' and 'The Barn on Half Moon Hill'. Milly Johnson is the sparkling and irrepressible author of six best-selling novels. She is also a columnist, greetings card copywriter, poet and after-dinner speaker. Her books are about the universal issues of friendship, family, betrayal, babies, rather nice food and a little bit of that magic in life that sometimes visits the unsuspecting.

Some of today's greatest storytellers reveal their choices of the ideal grown-up bedtime story: writers such as Margaret Drabble, Ken Follett, Tessa Hadley, Robert Macfarlane, Patrick Ness, Tony Robinson, and Warsan Shire. Fold away your laptop and shut down your mobile phone. Curl up and crash out with the ultimate bedside book, one you'll return to again and again. Full of laughter and tears, moonlight and magic, Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups joyfully provides the dream way to end the day - and begin the night....

Thirty-nine-year-old empty-nester, Megan Fallon is putting the fiance who left her well and truly out of her mind, and focusing on settling back into village life, and her new job. Meanwhile, her childhood friend, American, Jack Windsor, is renovating the old village school, and is looking for a four-legged friend to share his new home with. All is well in Bliss Bay until obituaries start appearing on the church noticeboard for villagers who are still very much alive, and the village is thrown into turmoil.

When Dr. Nathan Frost, a lecturer in German literature at Oxford University, is invited to a lavish party at the country house of a wealthy businessman, he knows there'll be a price to pay. After all, as an expert on the legend of Faust and Mephistopheles, he can recognize a deal with the devil easily enough. But even he's not expecting such a sinister end to the evening.

Aria Summers knows what she wants. A life on the road, with best friend Rosie and her beloved camper-van-cum-book-shop and definitely, definitely, no romance. But when Aria finds herself falling - after one too many glasses of wine, from a karaoke stage - into the arms of Jonathan, a part of her comes back to life for the first time in years. Since her beloved husband died, Aria has sworn off love, unless it’s the kind you can find in the pages of a book. One love of her life is quite enough.

First coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, a meme is any idea, behavior, or skill that can be transferred from one person to another by imitation. Susan Blackmore shows that once our distant ancestors acquired the crucial ability to imitate, a second kind of natural selection began, a survival of the fittest amongst competing ideas and behaviors. Ideas and behaviors that proved most adaptive-making tools, for example, or using language - survived and flourished, replicating themselves in as many minds as possible.

Rumors have long swirled about the strange kingdom of Eldon. The only thing more frozen than its mountains are the inhabitants themselves. But Princess Celine has never backed away from a challenge, so she eagerly accepts an invitation to visit. Yet the situation in Eldon is even worse than Celine feared. And if the kingdom is to have any hope of freedom or a future, she's going to have to call on new skills and new allies - including the crown prince, Oliver. But against an enemy stronger and colder than ice, all her fire may not be enough.

Exiled from her old life as the daughter of a vizier, Zaria still grieves the lost friends of her childhood. She’s grown accustomed to her new role as a servant, though—up until the day she stumbles on the fabled lost cave of treasures. The wealth inside is enough to transform anyone’s life, but Zaria isn’t the first to find it. A gang of cutthroat thieves got there first, and their behavior makes Zaria question everything she sees. With an unknown enchantment at work, and forty criminals desperate to protect their hoard, she doesn’t want anything to do with the gold.

Event organizer Megan Fallon is gearing up for a concert in honor of the oldest tree in the county: the ancient village oak on Bliss Bay's village green. What she's not gearing up for, though, is stumbling over the dead body of Bliss Bay's most unpopular villager, under the oak tree's sprawling boughs. With a murder investigation underway, a mystery that has everyone looking like a suspect, and a cat that needs a new home, there's also the small matter of the theft of forty-eight garden gnomes to get to the bottom of.

Since giving up their city jobs in London and moving to rural France over ten years ago, Janine and husband Mark have renovated their dream home and built a new life for themselves, adjusting to the delights and the peculiarities of life in a small French village. Including much-loved village characters such as Mr. and Mrs. Pepperpot, Jean-Claude, Claudette, and the infamous Bread Man, Toujours La France also introduces listeners to some new faces and funny stories, as Janine and Mark continue their lives in this special part of northern France. There is never a quiet moment.

There exists a secret and highly illegal trade in mythological creatures and their artifacts. Certain individuals pay fortunes for a sliver of a satyr's hoof, a gryphon's claw, a basilisk's scale, or an angel's wing. Embroiled in the hidden world of the Relics, creatures known as the Kin, Angela Gough is now on the run in the United States. Forty years ago the town of Longford was the site of a deadly disease outbreak that wiped out the entire population. Now the town is revealed again. The Kin have an interest in the ruins.

Living in London's poorest slum, Mercy Wilkins has little hope of a better life. When she's offered an opportunity to join a bride ship sailing to British Columbia, she agrees. After witnessing so much painful heartache and loss in the slums, the bride ship is her only prospect to escape a bleak future, not only for herself but, she hopes, someday for her sister. Wealthy and titled Joseph Colville leaves home and takes to the sea - as ship's surgeon - in order to escape the pain of losing his family. When Mercy becomes his assistant, the two must fight against a forbidden love.

Rachel Stone’s world was destroyed by a stalker, Alan Griffin. After he went to prison, she rebuilt her life. But someone is stalking her again. Her phone, her emails and her social media are hacked. Rachel believes it’s Griffin, out of prison and looking for revenge. She needs to find him and make him leave her alone. But as Rachel is drawn into a hunt, she realises that something even more horrific is happening - something that will make her confront the childhood that has lingered like a ghost and will force her to face the truth about her new life.

Thirty-nine-year-old Megan Fallon is in a pickle. Not only is she suffering from empty-nest syndrome, but she's lost the job she loved, and her fiance's run off with her hairdresser. A complete life change is what's called for, so when the opportunity to make a new start presents itself following news of a family celebration, Megan is lured back to her childhood home. However, what starts off as a leisurely break soon takes a chilling turn when members of the community start getting bumped off at an alarming rate.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Private Joseph Caan, a young Jewish soldier stationed in Germany, seeks the truth about lost family members; in the 1960s a father focuses on his daughter’s wedding even as the Cuban Missile Crisis brings the world to the brink of disaster; in 2001, while planes fly into the Twin Towers, a maid working for US Embassy staff in London wonders if her birth on the day of the Kennedy assassination shaped her life.

Anne Bassett served four of Henry VIII's queens, yet the king himself once pledged to serve her. Had fate not decreed otherwise, she might have been his wife - and queen of England. But now, far from court and heavy with her husband's child, Anne prays in the Hungerford chapel and awaits the ghostly figure she knows will come. This is her story, one that entwines with the fate of another Lady Hungerford from not so many years before.

Unemployed mill worker Zoe Hart jumps at the opportunity to emigrate to British Columbia in 1863 to find a better life and be reunited with her brother, who fled from home after being accused of a crime. Pastor to miners in the mountains, Abe Merivale discovers an abandoned baby during a routine visit to Victoria and joins efforts with Zoe, one of the newly arrived bride-ship women, to care for the infant. While there, he's devastated by the news from his fiancee in England that she's marrying another man.

Abraxas learned long ago that a life without his soul is not one worth living. Heart shattered with the loss of his mate, he does the only thing he can think of and packs up his children and he leaves the Kingdom of Umbra. The journey across the sea is arduous and long, but soon he finds himself on a very familiar shore: Dracomaquia. But the island may not be as uninhabited as he originally thought...