Showing results by narrator "Charlotte Davey" in All Categories

An all-American diner appears overnight in a remote British field. It's brightly lit, warm and inviting but it has no power, no water, no connection to the real world. It's like a memory made flesh - a nostalgic flight of fancy. More and more objects materialise: toys, fairground rides, pets and other treasured mementos of the past. And the deaths quickly follow. Something is bringing these memories to life, then stifling innocent people with their own joy. This is a weapon like no other. But nobody knows who created it, or why.

Over a hundred years ago, the citizens of F - did something rather bad. And local school teacher Catherine Evans has made writing the definitive account of what happened when Ilsbeth Clark drowned in the well her life's work. The town's people may not want their past raked up, but Catherine is determined to shine a light upon that shameful event. For Ilsbeth was an innocent, after all. She was shunned and ostracised by rumour-mongers and ill-wishers and someone has to speak up for her. And who better than Catherine, who has herself felt the sting and hurt of such whisperings?

On her last day as a Detective, Midge McGowan is given the retirement present from hell: a ticket to take part in a haunted house tour. She’ll have to spend a weekend ghost-hunting in an isolated mansion, with a group of misfits, including a know-it-all paranormal investigator and a has-been pop star. It isn’t long before the tour starts to spiral out of control. Midge and the guests see an unsettling figure walking the grounds late at night. Then the unthinkable happens – someone is murdered in a room that’s been locked from the inside.

Lucy Carmichael is jilted at the altar. But no matter. Her loving and kind family never liked her explorer fiancé anyway. Instead of moping or falling into her supportive family’s arms, however, Lucy abandons their suburban home. Heading for the country, she takes up a teaching position in the industrial town of Ravonsbridge. There, she finds solace in her work, in her new (rather gossipy) colleagues – and rediscovers her sensible young self. But if Lucy has, despite everything, kept her head – where lies her heart?

Yorkshire teacher Ellen Fenwick has never been abroad. But when her mother dies, this young woman finds herself taking a position as governess to an English girl in Florence in the summer of 1933. Little does Ellen realise how this girl, Juliet, and her family will claim her. For as the summer passes, Ellen falls so in love with Italy and her new home that she cannot bear to leave – even when her own hopes of love are cruelly thwarted.

‘Down among the women. What a place to be!’ So says Wanda, a former radical who left her husband and raised her daughter Scarlet to be as liberated as she. But twenty-year-old Scarlet, with an abortion already behind her, is about to discover real liberation – as a single mother in Fifties’ London. Yet Scarlet’s not alone. Meet her friends: Sylvia, the born victim; respectable Jocelyn, willingly trapped in a dull, bourgeois marriage; Audrey, bristling to break free of her conventional life; and Helen, beautiful, vibrant – and very doomed.

Quiet, gentle, young Faustina Crayle is dismissed from her teaching position at Brereton School for Girls after just a few weeks. She is given no explanation, but it’s clear certain staff and pupils fear her. Her friend and fellow teacher Gisela contacts psychologist and sleuth Dr Basil Willing who offers to investigate these outlandish claims. But this only confirms two damning facts – first, that this happened at a previous school and, second, people believe there are two sides to enigmatic Faustina.