Showing results by narrator "Steven Pacey"

Inquisitor Glokta, a crippled and bitter relic of the last war, former fencing champion turned torturer, is trapped in a twisted and broken body - not that he allows it to distract him from his daily routine of torturing smugglers.Nobleman, dashing officer and would-be fencing champion Captain Jezal dan Luthar is living a life of ease by cheating his friends at cards. Vain and shallow, the biggest blot on his horizon is having to get out of bed in the morning to train with obsessive and boring old men.

The end is coming. Logen Ninefingers might only have one more fight in him but it’s going to be a big one. Battle rages across the North, the King of the Northmen still stands firm and there’s only one man who can stop him. His oldest friend and his oldest enemy. It’s time for the Bloody-Nine to come home. With too many masters and too little time, Superior Glokta is fighting a different kind of war. A secret struggle in which no-one is safe and no-one can be trusted.

Bitter and merciless war is coming to the frozen north. It's bloody and dangerous and the Union army, split by politics and hamstrung by incompetence, is unprepared for the slaughter that's coming. Lacking experience, training, and in some cases even weapons, the army is scarcely equipped to repel Bethod's scouts, let alone his elite forces. In the heat-ravaged south, the Gurkish are massing to assault the city of Dagoska, defended by Inquisitor Glokta.

When a paragraph in an evening newspaper reveals a decades-old tragedy, most readers barely give it a glance. But for three strangers, it's impossible to ignore. For one woman it's a reminder of the worst thing that ever happened to her. For another it's the dangerous possibility that her darkest secret is about to be discovered. And for a third, a journalist, it's the first clue in a hunt to uncover the truth. The Child's story will be told.

They say Black Dow's killed more men than winter, and clawed his way to the throne of the North up a hill of skulls. The King of the Union, ever a jealous neighbour, is not about to stand smiling by while he claws his way any higher. The orders have been given and the armies are toiling through the northern mud. Thousands of men are converging on a forgotten ring of stones, on a worthless hill, in an unimportant valley, and they've brought a lot of sharpened metal with them.

Shy South comes home to her farm to find a blackened shell; her brother and sister have been stolen and she's going to have to return to her bad old ways if she's ever going to see them again. She sets off in grim pursuit with only her cowardly old step-father Lamb for company. But it turns out he's hiding a bloody past of his own. None bloodier.

Springtime in Styria. And that means war. There have been nineteen years of blood. The ruthless Grand Duke Orso is locked in a vicious struggle with the squabbling League of Eight, and between them they have bled the land white. While armies march, heads roll and cities burn, behind the scenes bankers, priests and older, darker powers play a deadly game to choose who will be king.

The Union army may be full of bastards, but there's only one who thinks he can save the day singlehanded when the Gurkish come calling: the incomparable Colonel Sand dan Glokta. Curnden Craw and his dozen are out to recover a mysterious item from beyond the Crinna. Only one small problem: no one seems to know what the item is. Shevedieh, the self-styled best thief in Styria, lurches from disaster to catastrophe alongside her best friend and greatest enemy, Javre, Lioness of Hoskopp.

A woman vanishes in the fog up on "the Hill", an area locally known for its tranquillity and peace. The police are not alarmed; people usually disappear for their own reasons. But when a young girl, an old man, and even a dog disappear, no one can deny that something untoward is happening in this quiet cathedral town.

When the 5,000-year-old djinni Bartimaeus is summoned by Nathaniel, a young magician's apprentice, he expects to have to do nothing more taxing than a little levitation or a few simple illusions. But Nathaniel is a precocious talent and has something rather more dangerous in mind...

The death of a journalist from a single bullet to the heart makes for a dramatic story - but the twist in the tale is that this time, it's the man who fired the gun who's asking all the questions... The assassin, Michael Weston, knows he has carried out his assignment successfully. One mistake was enough, a long time ago, when a young girl had accidentally received the fatal bullet. Her father hired a PI named Hoffer to track him down. Every time Weston completed a job, Hoffer was not far behind.

Following on from the child abduction in her previous novel The Pure in Heart, Susan Hill explores the crazy grief of a widowed husband, a derangement that turns to obsession and threats, violence and terror.

As "Scarecrow" Schofield watches his mission turn into a bloodbath, he realises he has been tricked - and that now he's become the prey rather than the predator. For a shadowy consortium has included his name on a list of 15 targets to be eliminated without fail by 12 noon that same day. Now, every high-powered bounty hunter on the planet is on his trail, while he must simultaneously track down the perpetrators of a conspiracy about to reduce many of the major cities of the world to ashes.

Kimmie’s home is on the streets of Copenhagen. To live she must steal. She has learned to avoid the police and never to stay in one place for long. But now others are trying to find her. And they won’t rest until she has stopped moving - for good. Detective Carl of Department Q, the cold cases division, has received a file concerning the brutal murder of a brother and sister 20 years earlier. A group of boarding school students were the suspects at the time - until one of their numbers confessed and was convicted.

In Paris, in Washington, and in Greece in a fabulous villa, an innocent American becomes a bewildered, horror-stricken pawn in a game of vengeance and betrayal. She is Catherine Douglas, a woman caught in a web of four lives intertwined by passion as her handsome husband pursues an incredibly beautiful film star...and as Constantin Demeris, a legendary Greek tycoon, tightens the strands that control them all.

How can one writer hurt another where it really counts? The answer: attack his reputation. This is the problem facing novelist Richard Tull, contemplating the success of his friend and rival Gwyn Barry. Revenger's tragedy, comedy of errors, contemporary satire - The Information skewers high life and low in Martin Amis's brilliant return to the territory of Money and London Fields.

The kidnapping of a young man on a country road in Oxfordshire is but the first brutal step in a ruthless plan to force the President of the United States out of office. If it succeeds, he will be psychologically and emotionally destroyed. Only one man can stop it - Quinn, the world's foremost Negotiator, who must bargain for the life of an innocent man, unaware that ransom was never the kidnapper's real objective...

The murderee is Nicola Six, a 'black hole' of sex and self-loathing who is intend on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts; or the rich, honourable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch. And as Nicola leads her suitors towards the precipice, London - and, indeed, the whole world - seems to shamble after them in a corrosively funny novel of complexity and morality.

Charlie Boxer messed up his family life. First the army, then the police, then high-stakes kidnap and recovery, his ex-wife and daughter learnt to live without him as his work took him places no man can come back from unscarred. Trying to rebuild a relationship with Amy, his teenage daughter, hasn't been easy. But Charlie only realises just how wrong things have gone when he finds her empty room and a note: You will never find me.

A hazy aerial photograph and a sinister curse are the only clues Dr Ben Kazin has before he stumbles on the archaeological discovery of a lifetime. Beneath the red cliffs of Botswanaland a magnificent unknown civilization has remained buried for millennia. But the magic of uncovering a lost culture is harshly interrupted by the violence of terrorists, love, intrigue, and the breathtaking secrets of centuries.