Showing results by narrator "Tony Britton" in All Categories

This audiobook is about the rise and fall of Michael Henchard. While out-of-work he gets drunk at a fair and impulsively sells his wife and baby for five guineas to a sailor. Eighteen years later he is reunited with his wife and daughter, who discover that he has gained wealth and respect and is now the most prominent man in Casterbridge. Though he attempts to make amends he is no less impulsive and once again loses everything due to bad luck and his violent, selfish and vengeful nature.

Kidnapping is Andrew Douglas's business: they take them, he finds them. But it isn't so simple when Alessia Cenci, golden-girl jockey, disappears, followed by the young child of a derby winner and the senior steward of the Jockey Club. From Italy to England to Washington, D.C., Andrew's caseload is suddenly, violently overflowing. And he must fight triply hard to keep his own name off the growing list of victims.

A superbly crafted collection of thirteen tightly plotted tales that treats listeners to murder, mystery, and mayhem in the world of horseracing. With his remarkable blend of unrelenting suspense, finely tuned narrative, and lean, stylish prose, New York Times bestselling author Dick Francis proves that he is as much a master of the short story as he is of the novel in this thrilling collection.

Travel writer John Kendall travels to England to interview a racehorse trainer. Soon enough, however, Kendall realizes that completing the book will be tricky at best. Because the racehorse trainer he’s tasked with interviewing has something to hide—a secret that could threaten Kendall’s life.

Dick Francis, the bestselling master of mystery and suspense, takes you into the thrilling world of horse racing. In the middle of the night, two masked men break into Neil Griffon’s home and abduct him. He quickly discovers that unless he agrees to their unreasonable demands, they will destroy his father’s precious horse and racing stable, and ultimately Neil himself. Returned to his father’s stables, he must find a way to bring down these criminals, because having to choose between his integrity and his life is no choice at all.

Henry Grey doesn't particularly care for having been born the heir to an earldom. He is a reserved young man whose greatest problem is his mother's matchmaking plots and whose greatest joy is to ride as an amateur steeplechase jockey. But on a sudden impulse, he throws in his respectable desk job to join a firm that transports racehorses all over the world. Yardman Transport proves to be Henry's passport to many things, not the least the girl he loves, and a tidy little racket that brings him face to face with death.

Australian horse breeder Daniel Roke had resisted the exorbitant sum of money offered by a suave Englishman to investigate a scandal involving drugged racehorses. But after another investigator dies mysteriously, Roke agrees to fill his shoes, and learns that men who would give drugs to horses are capable of doing much worse to human beings …

J. B. Priestley was one of Britain's most significant writers. His output was prodigious: in his lifetime, he penned 26 novels, 39 plays and hundreds of essays. He enjoyed great success on stage, notably with Dangerous Corner, Time and the Conways and An Inspector Calls, which experimented with narrative structure and unorthodox theories of time. Included here are some of his most esteemed works, adapted for radio and brought together in one statement collection.

For a generous commission, ex-prizewinning jockey Jonah Dereham reluctantly agrees to bid on a young steeplechaser on behalf of a wealthy American woman. But his life is thrust into danger immediately following the auction, when he receives a blow to the head by two thugs demanding ownership of the horse.

On the death of his son, Sir Harry Hotspur had determined to give his property to his daughter Emily. She is beautiful and as strong-willed and high-principled as her father. Then she falls in love with the black-sheep of the family.

The last place veteran horseman Randall Drew wanted to go was Moscow. But when his royal highness the prince asks a favor, one doesn’t refuse. The Royal Family is worried about the prince’s brother in law, who aims to make the Olympics. Unfortunately a jealous Russian rider has sworn to kill him if he sets one hoof in Moscow. So Randall leaves his thoroughbred horses and loving girlfriend to investigate. But what he finds is more than jealousy. It’s a terrifying track of sabotage and murder. And now that he knows, the killer is after him.

Tim Ekaterin's merchant bank, like all banks, only invests in sure things. Now he's about to involve it in ₤5 million of prime horseflesh, a stallion called Sandcastle. Top breeders reckon it's the safest bet in racing. But racing doesn't just attract the money men of the city. It's riddled with all kinds of dubious dealmakers. People who don't think twice about breaking bones. People to whom no bet is safe until it's paid in blood, Ekaterin's blood.

hampion jockey Robert Sherman has disappeared right before his wife was about to give birth. And right before he was sure to win the National. A coincidence? British investigator David Cleveland doesn’t think so. He’s convinced someone made Sherman disappear, but with every answer David gets, the body count rises. And if he isn’t careful, the next body might just be his own.

James Tyrone was the troubleshooting gracing correspondent of the Sunday Blaze, a newspaper dedicated to exposing scandals in the noisiest (and most profitable) way. Ty was accustomed to hot water, but from the day a Fleet Street colleague died after giving him some serious advice, he found himself wading deep into more danger than he expected. What he thought to be the fairly routine uncovering of a minor racing fraud turned into a major hunt involving ruthless international crime.

When reporter Bert Chekov falls to his death, his colleague James Tyrone is suspicious. Chekov’s column had recently recommended some ‘can’t-lose’ horses, who then wound up out of the running on race day. Tyrone thinks he can prove it was murder, but he may not live to tell the tale. Because as the dead man has already made clear, there’s no such thing as a sure thing...

When globe-hopping British First Secretary Peter Darwin returns to his childhood home for a visit, he is sorry. Waiting for him were long-hidden memories, a string of racehorse deaths and homicide. As Darwin begins to realize that the key to all of it involves his own past, he wishes he'd never come back, because he just might never leave again—alive.

To the Jockey Club, the racing world would be a better place without Julius Apollo Filmer. An expert in corruption with a devastating line in witness intimidation, and proving to be a slippery character to put behind bars. Baffled, they call in undercover security agent Tor Kelsey to keep an unflinching eye on Filmer and his associates. A mission that takes him from the finest of English racecourses to the wild Canadian interior, on a luxury transcontinental train journey to end them all.

Despair, suicide, and obsessive hatred, mixed well with humor, love, and horses, brew up into the story of a battle between one man's nerve and another man's cunning. Robert Finn, steeplechase jockey, finds himself the focus of a malicious campaign, which is also afflicting his friends. He sets out to discover its source and remove it.

When a sick friend asks Edward Lincoln to investigate the comprehensive failure of a string of racehorses, he agrees to help out. But it is impossible for him to go about the task quietly and unnoticed because he is now a world-class star of action films, in which he always plays the hero. And the apparently easy survey of the string of racehorses blows him through a smokescreen into circumstances, where, to survive, he has to make himself become the man everyone else already thinks he is.

The house was stripped bare of all its treasures. Gone was the furniture, the family silver, the paintings and the antique china. And if that was a shock for Charles Todd, painter of horses, how much more harrowing was the trauma for his cousin Donald, whose house it was and whose young wife lay on the sitting room floor, bloody and dead... A coincidental meeting with a middle-aged widow sends Charles off to Australia, on the trail of a gang with a fruitful business in forging works of art.