Showing results by narrator "Gordon Griffin" in All Categories

Having just returned from a clandestine excursion to Spain and Portugal on behalf of the queen, Thomas Chaloner finds London dank and grey under leaden skies. He finds many things changed, including the government slapping a tax on printed newspapers. Handwritten news reports escape the duty, and the rivalry between the producers of the two conduits of news is the talk of the coffee houses with the battle to be first with any sort of intelligence escalating into violent rivalry. And it seems that a number of citizens who have eaten cucumbers have come to untimely deaths.

The plague has struck London once again but so has opportunity for theatre company Lord Westfield’s Men. Invited to perform at the wedding celebrations of Sophia Magdalena, the fair maid of Bohemia, the company’s bookholder Nicholas Bracewell and his acting troupe begin the long journey across Europe. Confident they will arrive safely and deliver Lord Westfield’s secret missive to an alchemist in the Imperial Court, Nicholas is unaware what danger travels with them.

Gerald Brown is a handsome and brilliant young engineer - wrongfully accused of stealing diamonds from his South African firm. Why has he been framed? Elizabeth Burleigh is a beautiful and talented West End actress – compelled to deny herself what marriage could bring her. What is the secret that impairs her love? Gerald and Elizabeth are half-brother and sister. They are reunited in London and together they face the mysteries that have made them both so unhappy.

When Mike Wakefield's business partner absconded with all the firm's money, Mike and his wife Stephanie feared bankruptcy. Detective Inspector Sloan is at first tasked with solving what appears to be a cut-and-dry case of embezzlement, but that is before unsettling events - tyres slashed, bricks through windows - make it clear that someone is gunning for the printing firm. Mike Wakefield is determined to finish a job that had been in hand for a while in time for a launch party at the grand surroundings of Ornum House. All is going according to plan until one of Mike's employees is found dead.

A teenage girl is strangled and left for dead on a lonely country lane in Devon. The police are baffled when she describes her attacker as having the head of a dog, but when the body of a woman is found mutilated and wrapped in a sheet, DI Wesley Peterson suspects the killer may be performing an ancient ritual linked to the jackal-headed Egyptian god, Anubis. Meanwhile, archaeologist Neil Watson has been called to Varley Castle to catalogue the collection of an Edwardian amateur Egyptologist.

Superspy of Restoration London, Thomas Chaloner foils an uprising in his eighth outing. Five years after Charles II's triumphant return to London, there is growing mistrust of his extravagant court and of corruption among his officials - and when a cart laden with gunpowder explodes outside the General Letter Office, it is immediately clear that such an act is more than an expression of outrage at the inefficiency of the postal service.

January 1916. Britain is on the brink of enforcing conscription. Eligible young men who have not yet signed up to fight are despised as ‘conchies’ and ‘shirkers’, subjected to hatred and verbal abuse. Cyril Ablatt, leader of Shoreditch’s group of conscientious objectors, makes a rousing speech at a meeting of the No-Conscription Fellowship, refusing to be ‘an instrument of slaughter in a khaki uniform’.

When the phone rings in the middle of the night, Dr Arthur Jackson leaves the warmth of his bed without hesitation. Tending to his peculiar flock of patients - including the blind cobbler with a surprising taste for hard liquor, the accident-prone butcher, and the young woman with an unusual phobia - is his first priority, whether their illness is critical or they simply need a comforting hand to hold. The whole community turns to the young doctor for advice...and not all of it medical.

A short story from British Library Crime Classic The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories. In this festive short story featuring Francis Durbridge’s favourite debonair amateur detective, Paul Temple journeys to Switzerland to identify an elusive criminal.

Soho - illicit, glamorous, sordid, louche, poverty-stricken, squalid, exhilarating. One of Britain's best loved historians, Dan Cruickshank, grants us an intimacy with centuries of rich and varied history as he guides us around the Soho of the last 500 years. We learn of its original aspirations towards respectability, how it became London's bohemian quarter and why it was once home to its criminal underworld. The bars, clubs and theatres and their frequenters are described with detail that evokes the heart of the district.

1893. Wigan is in the grip of a harsh winter and a devastating national miners' strike. Arthur Morris, a wealthy colliery owner whose determination to cut the miners' pay is one of the main causes of the strike, is found brutally murdered in an alleyway. A sinister letter prompted the victim to leave his dinner guests and hurry out into the freezing night to Scholes, a rough working-class district where he is universally hated.

This audiobook chronicles the triumphs and failures of his surgical life. Having spent his childhood in the backstreets of a northern steel town, he went on to become one of the world's foremost heart surgeons. His drive for perfection in his profession took him to the world-renowned Harefield Hospital, the foremost heart surgery centre in Birmingham, Alabama and the newly-created Cardiothoracic Centre in Oxford. Then in 2019 in Wuhan he was the first Western doctor to learn about Covid-19 before the virus was identified.

At the height of World War II the people of Leningrad endured a bitter 900-day siege. Prit Buttar tells the story of how the siege was finally broken. The Red Army had suffered multiple setbacks in the preceding two years but achieved a partial success by breaking the blockage in early 1943. However, this was followed by further failed attempts to lift the siege completely. This compelling history uses original Russian source material to vividly describe the deprivations visited upon those trapped. But it also details the tactical successes and strategic failures of both sides.

Jayne is quiet. She keeps to herself and has no grand expectations for her days. But after a chance encounter with her elderly neighbour, Meredith, Jayne is forced to reevaluate her determination to keep the world at a distance. Meredith's dust-covered home is chaotic and neglected. And slowly, Jayne starts to grasp that Meredith herself is quite lost. She can't seem to remember anything: what she last ate, when she last went out or saw her daughter, or even Jayne's name, despite what are becoming frequent visits. But most alarmingly, Meredith can't remember where her husband is.

February 1918. Detective Inspector Harvey Marmion and Detective Sergeant Joe Keedy are pulled from their beds to attend a sinister siege involving three burglars where one policeman has already been shot dead. Attempts at talking the men in the house into surrender are met with stony silence so the police proceed to batter down the door and Keedy bravely leads the way. A gunshot is heard. Keedy is hit. As Keedy is rushed to hospital, Marmion is on the trail of the men who fled the scene and startling revelations emerge.

Ada Hobbes has cleaned for Dr Tindall for many years and begins the morning like any other day. But the house is not empty after all. The blood-covered George Tindall is sprawled across the floor. Detective Inspector Harvey Marmion and Sergeant Joe Keedy arrive to a horrific scene. Someone enjoyed killing Tindall, without a doubt. Their investigation takes them out of London and on the trail of three different women as it emerges that Dr Tindall was not the respectable local GP after all, but a bigamist whose third wife had some very interesting connections in the crime fraternity.

1916. As thousands of Brits are fighting on the Front Line, a new breed of women emerges to hold the Home Front together. Fiercely independent and fiery-spirited, the munitionettes, or ‘canaries’, are easily recognisable with their chemically-stained yellow faces. Among the raucous group of women is Florrie Duncan, who plans to celebrate her birthday in style at the Golden Goose pub. But the celebrations are cut short when all but one are killed in a brutal explosion.

Pentonville Prison. Wally Hibbert is serving a long sentence for arson. But after befriending and tricking one of the officers, Hibbert makes an audacious escape. Inspector Marmion, the detective who arrested Hibbert, is warned to watch his back, but it seems that Hibbert has another target in his murderous sights. However, the investigation is mired in confusion, and the identities of killer and victim become increasingly ambiguous.

In April 1917, as Tsar Nicholas II's abdication sent shockwaves across war-torn Europe, the future leader of the Bolshevik revolution, Vladimir Lenin, was far away, exiled in Zurich. To lead the revolt, Lenin needed to return to Petrograd immediately. But to get there, he would have to cross Germany, which meant accepting help from the deadliest of Russia's adversaries and betraying his homeland.

Sex, Spies and Scandal is the story of John Vassall, a civil servant who was unmasked as a Soviet spy in 1962. Having been photographed in compromising positions while working at the British embassy in Moscow in 1954, Vassall was blackmailed into handing over secrets from the British Admiralty to his Soviet handlers, both in Moscow and in London, for more than seven years.