Showing results by narrator "Gordon Griffin" in All Categories

Ex-Met officer John Cannon is entangled in trouble from the moment he vaults a stile on an early morning run and becomes ensnarled in a discarded fishing-line. The macabre discovery at the far end of this lines leads John into a search for a missing au pair, conflict with the local newspaper and international crime. He follows the trail of a ruthless Portuguese businessman who owns a local Health Spa, where much is concealed and a team of security guards with dogs patrol the grounds.

British organised crime has changed beyond all recognition over the last five years. Youth violence, the drug trade and rising levels of gun crime are rarely out of the news. Beginning on the troubled streets of the inner cities, Gang Land takes its readers on a journey up through the underworld hierarchy until it finally reaches the very highest levels, occupied by shadowy ‘Mr Big’ characters.

When the body of a middle-aged woman is found frozen beside a canal towpath, it looks like a simple case of death by misadventure. But marks on her neck and a carefully-hidden piece of paper point towards foul play. George Hennessey and Somerled Yellich assemble their team, and quickly begin their investigation into this unusual murder. But as the case progresses they discover that the victim, who was originally from Canada, may not have been all she seemed.

When a skeleton is discovered in a deep grave at the edge of an area of woodland, the police discover that it is one of their own officers who disappeared whilst on duty some 30 years earlier. DS Harry Vicary and DI Archibald Dez have little evidence to go on, but as the investigation unfolds they meet ex-police men and women who left the force at the time of the DC’s disappearance, and did so in fear of their own safety, and who, even after all this time, are reluctant to talk.

Surprises are guaranteed, as elephants appear in a London side street; a gang of geriatrics goes on a hearing aid heist and an underworld boss searches for a harp. Join the author in a brush with Adolf Hitler and take a walk on Beachy Head, the UK's favourite suicide spot.

A tip-off leads police to dismantle a pile of rubble in the village of Pendwick, in search of a hidden body. As expected, a corpse is found and is identified as being that of a local businessman who has been missing for 10 years.

Hennessey and Yellich - along with an ever-expanding team -head up the ensuing murder investigation. And then two further bodies are discovered - along with a particularly nasty brand of political extremism involving just a few too many respected local businessmen.

When two badly burned bodies are discovered, the York police begin to wonder if there is a link. Are they crimes of passion or revenge? The result of a family feud? Hennessey and Yellich thoroughly investigate the private and business lives of the deceased, but find little to go on. Then Hennessey's gut feeling as to the identity of the killer, based on years of experience and intuition, is shaken when another burned body is discovered...and another.

It is a shock to the staff at the Barleybridge Animal Hospital when Dan, one of the farm vets, is seriously injured in a car accident. It is even more of a shock when Scott Spencer, back from Australia, steps in to cover for him. Scott slips seamlessly into the Practice routine, not guessing what secrets are about to be revealed: secrets that will turn his life upside down and amend his callous attitude towards women.

Between 1881, when Churchill was just six, and 1921, the year of his mother's death, Winston Churchill and Jennie Jerome were prolific and energetic correspondents. Their exchange of letters has never before been published as a volume of correspondence, and many of these intimate letters - between two highly gifted writers - are being published here for the first time. A significant addition to the Churchill canon, Darling Winston traces Churchill's emotional, intellectual and political development as confided to his main mentor.

On a dark November evening, Sir Wilfred Saxonby is travelling alone in the five o'clock train from Cannon Street, in a locked compartment. The train slows and stops inside a tunnel, and by the time it emerges again minutes later, Sir Wilfred has been shot dead, his heart pierced by a single bullet. Suicide seems to be the verdict, even though no motive can be found, but Inspector Arnold of Scotland Yard thinks again when he learns that a mysterious red light in the tunnel caused the train to slow down.

Lilith Benley and her mother, rumoured to be witches, were convicted of the brutal murder of two teenage girls 18 years ago. Shortly after Lilith is released from prison, a young woman is found dead at a farm close to Lilith's old home in South Devon, and DI Wesley Peterson is called in to investigate. As Wesley tries to establish whether Lilith Benley could have killed again, archaeologist Neil Watson discovers a gruesome wax doll at a house that once belonged to a woman hanged for witchcraft in the 17th century.

Returned to an England she barely knows and a postwar world she doesn't understand, Marian searches for something on which to ground her life. Family and friends surround her, and a RAF officer attempts to bring her the normality of love and affection, but she is haunted by the guilt of knowing that her contribution to the war helped to develop the atom bomb. Where, in the complexities of peacetime, does her loyalty lie?

When Darren Hatman reports his daughter, Leanne, missing, DI Wesley Peterson isn't too concerned. However, Darren's claim that a photographer has been stalking her soon changes Wesley's opinion. Leanne works at Eyecliffe Castle, now converted into a luxury hotel. When Darren is found murdered on the grounds, the police fear that Leanne has met a similar fate.

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.

When Dr James Dalcott is shot dead in his cottage it looks very much like an execution. And as DI Wesley Peterson begins piecing together the victim's life, he finds that the well-liked country doctor has been harbouring strange and dramatic family secrets. Meanwhile, archaeologist Neil Watson has discovered a number of skeletons in nearby Tailors Court that bear marks of dissection and might be linked to tales of body snatching by a rogue physician in the 16th century. But when Neil finds the bones of a child buried with a 1930s coin, the investigation takes a sinister turn.

When a woman is burned to death in Grandal Field in Devon, it seems like a case of mistaken identity. Until DI Wesley Peterson learns of a legend involving a French woman who burned to death there in the 13th century. And when he discovers that records of a previous excavation on the site have vanished, and that two archaeologists involved in that dig died in tragic circumstances, Wesley starts to investigate the possibility of a link between the legend and recent events.

The decaying body of a woman is discovered in a suburban house in South Devon, following an anonymous tip off to the police. DI Wesley Peterson has problems establishing the woman's identity and, as he begins to investigate her death, another disturbing case arises. Two teenagers are found shot dead at the foot of a cliff. The teenage victims had taken part in an online game called Blood Hunt and it seems they may have been persuaded to play a sinister real-life game, which ended in their murder.

Robert Sackville-West brings together the extraordinary, moving accounts of those who dedicated their lives to the search for the missing. These stories reveal the remarkable lengths to which people will go to give meaning to their loss: Rudyard Kipling's quest for his son's grave, E. M. Forster’s conversations with traumatised soldiers in hospital in Alexandria, desperate attempts to communicate with the spirits of the dead, the campaign to establish the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior and the exhumation and reburial in military cemeteries of hundreds of thousands of bodies.

Lord Thurlby can only ever recall previous visits of Lavinia Muir, his mother’s goddaughter, with a shudder. So it is with undisguised horror that he hears she is to come and stay again. Her arrival on the common stage, accompanied by the flirtatious Isobel Macclesfield, does nothing to allay his fears. When he learns that Lavinia has become entangled with the rakish Lord Riseholm, his reservations appear to be justified.

A body is found in the woods.... Based on the true story of the shocking murder of Mrs Caroline Luard, which took place in Kent in August 1908. Caroline Luard is shot dead in broad daylight in the grounds of a large country estate. With few clues available, her husband soon becomes the suspect... but is he guilty? Bringing to life the people involved in this terrible crime, in A Dreadful Murder best-selling author Minette Walters uses modern detective skills to attempt to solve a 100-year-old crime.