Showing results by narrator "Sean Barrett" in All Categories

August 1958. DI Stratton has just been posted to Notting Hill. Stratton's new manor is rife with racial tension. The end of the war saw a flood of Caribbean migrants. Now, a decade later, working-class Teddy Boys are showing mounting hostility towards their black neighbours. Notorious landlord Danny Perlmann, a Polish refugee, is taking full advantage and is making a fortune off the high rents he charges. Caught in the middle of this war over rents and turf is Irene, a young runaway on the verge of going on the game.

In a huge old schoolhouse by the sea, full of precious paintings, Thomas Porteous is dying. His much younger wife, Di, holds him and mourns. She knows that soon, despite her being his sole inheritor, Thomas' relatives will descend on the collection that was the passion of both of their lives. And descend they do. The two needy daughters, who were poisoned against their father by their defecting mother, are now poisoning themselves. The family regard Thomas' wealth as theirs by right, with the exception of young Patrick, who adored his grandfather and is torn between his parents and Di, the interloper.

October, 1975. When Dr Lance Elliot receives a call from his elderly father to say he has been arrested for arson, he can hardly believe it. Especially when he discovers that the intended victim was his father’s neighbour, Oliver Lightoller, with whom his father has a long-running feud. But things quickly take a dark turn when Lance stumbles across Lightoller’s body, which has been pinned by an old sword to an office chair in the dead man’s South London antiques shop.

One of the wildest and most beautiful regions in Italy, known for its rugged coastline and mountains, Calabria is also home to the deadly ‘Ndrangheta'. An organised Mafia crime operation more feared in Italy than the Cosa Nostra or the Camorra, it is shrouded in mystery.Chief Superintendent Michele Ferrara of Italy’s elite Anti-Mafia Investigation Department is tasked with investigating the deaths of several Calabria citizens – some in New York, some in the small, isolated villages that dot the Calabrian countryside.

Nineteen stories of the supernatural: The Brazilian Cat by Arthur Conan Doyle Read by Paul Panting, Eveline’s Visitant by Mary E. Braddon Read by Hayward Morse, The Leopard Man’s Story by Jack London Read by Garrick Hagon, The Eyes of the Panther by Ambrose Bierce Read by Garrick Hagon, The Voice in the Night by William Hope Hodgson Read by Sean Barrett, Oshidori by Lafcadio Hearn Read by Liza Ross, Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson Read by Paul Panting.

May, 1942. A group of soldiers uncover a tomb in Libya. Buried in the ancient dust they find a macabre crown of thorns and the devastatingly powerful Spear of Destiny. They've discovered the last resting place of Christ. Sixty years on, Gerald Usherwood and his old army pal Max Chippendale reunite with friends and family. Dark shadows visit them in the night and make them pay for the secrets they stole.

At three p.m. on a Saturday afternoon in 1911, Oskar Johansson is caught in a blast in an industrial accident. The local newspaper reports him dead, but they are mistaken. Because Oskar Johansson is a born survivor. Though crippled, Oskar finds the strength to go on living and working. The Rock Blaster charts his long professional life - his hopes and dreams, sorrows and joys. His relationship with the woman whose love saved him, with the labour movement that gave him a cause to believe in, and with his children, who do not share his ideals.

Alastair Cunningham wakes up in hospital with almost total amnesia. But he knows that something terrible happened in his past, something that haunts him still. A young family friend, Clemence, is called in to help rekindle his memory. Retreating with Alastair to his remote cottage, Clemence finds a peculiar manuscript hidden away from prying eyes. Reading the prologue, she discovers a murder by someone very much like a young Alastair. The victim? Clemence's grandmother, Sophie.

Hodgson’s finest short story is set at sea, where one dark, starless night a schooner is hailed by a voice from a nearby rowing boat. The passenger refuses to bring his craft alongside and insists that the crew put away their lantern. He has approached them to beg for food for his fiancée, who he has left behind upon an island, but dares not come any closer. The crew float a box of food to him, and with heartfelt thanks he rows away. But three hours later he returns....

The office of Poet Laureate goes back many centuries - informally to the time of Geoffrey Chaucer in 1389 and followed thereafter by a number of ‘volunteer laureates’. It was formally assigned to Ben Jonson in 1617 and, as a Royal office by letters patent in 1670, to John Dryden. It is a rich, rewarding history that bursts with the words, themes and visions of many great poets that has bound poetry and poets to a nation's soul.

Described by the author as simply 'a work of love', Mirror to Damascus provides an enthralling and fascinating history of Damascus from the Amorites of the Bible to the revolution of 1966, as well as being a charming and witty personal record of a city well-loved. In explaining how modern Damascus is rooted in immemorial layers of culture and tradition, Colin Thubron explores the historical, artistic, social and religious inheritance of the Damascenes in an amusing and perceptive manner.

July, 1858. Forensic scientist Adolphus Hatton and his trusty assistant Albert Roumande have a morgue full of cholera victims to attend to, and an eager apprentice to teach. When a leading politician of the Irish Unionist movement is murdered, the flamboyant Inspector Grey calls on Hatton and Roumande to help solve the case. But Inspector Grey proves difficult to deal with.

Arthur C Clarke is the world's foremost writer of science fiction and accessible science; his predictions have been coming true since he invented the idea of communications satellites in the 1940s. In Holiday on the Moon, teen Daphne Martin travels to the moon to visit her astronomer father.

At Police Scotland HQ, Grace Macallan has pitched up in Counter Corruption. But the demons of her past are never far behind. Meanwhile, Edinburgh's gangland is in turmoil, with territory battles causing serious havoc. Into the war steps DI Janet Hadden. An ambitious risk-taker, she knows how to throw opponents off balance. When she's thwarted, Hadden seeks help from a notorious underworld fixer - only for Grace to start an investigation that threatens to uncover all Hadden's secrets.

There is a killer loose on the streets of London, one that evades security cameras, is not held by locks, and savagely mutilates his victims. When the murderer switches from unknown prostitutes to Julie Longmuir, a beautiful actress at the height of her success, no woman feels safe. As the press begin to draw uncomfortable comparisons with Jack the Ripper, Jane Sullivan, heading up the police investigation, grudgingly has to agree.

A strikingly beautiful young woman is found dead in her Florence apartment. She lays on her bed, naked, a black rose between her legs. And the murders do not stop there: shortly afterwards, a woman is burned to death in a church, and a man is shot on the Ponte Vecchio. Chief Superintendent Michele Ferrara is all too familiar with the dark side of Florence.

Secrets of the Symbol builds upon the expertise and wisdom of Nobel prize-winning scientists, historians, technologists, and conspiracy theorists to help readers fully understand the mysteries behind The Lost Symbol.

The sight is a particularly horrible shock for George Palmer-Jones, ornithologist and amateur detective, as he was an old friend of the victim Eleanor Masefield. George and his wife, Molly, are staying at Eleanor’s family run hotel, and whilst George believed Eleanor was a beautiful and charming widow, Molly has other ideas. Is Molly a little jealous? Or was Eleanor more a black widow–a ruthless manipulator of all those caught in her far-reaching web? Can Molly prove it in time to prevent another death?

A routine weekend visit by the Gillibry Bird Observatory Trust is made memorable by the owner’s announcement that he is going to sell the island. A sale would mean the end of the Observatory, which for some of the birders made life worth living. A fire in Charlie Todd’s cottage added to their distress. And when, next morning, after a fierce storm, they found Charlie dead in a bird hide, their pleasant September weekend assumed a dangerous new face.

1944. Paul Brandt, a German soldier, returns wounded and ashamed from the chaos of the Eastern front to find his village home existing in the dark shadow of an SS rest hut - a luxurious retreat for those who manage the concentration camps, run with the help of a small group of female prisoners. When Brandt glimpses one of these prisoners, he realises that he must find a way to access the hut. For inside is the woman to whom his fate has been tied since their arrest five years before, and now he must do all he can to protect her.