Showing results by narrator "Gordon Griffin" in All Categories

After battling for justice in his first recorded case, Sergeant Caleb Cluff makes a swift return to duty in this book. The story opens one wet and windy night, with the discovery of a young woman's corpse, in a passageway in the Yorkshire town of Gunnarshaw. The deceased is Jane Trundle, an attractive girl who worked as a shop assistant. She yearned for the good life, and Cluff finds more money in her handbag than she would have earned in wages.

London, Autumn 1916. When he slips out of a house in the early hours, Simon Wilder is too preoccupied to realise that he is being stalked. As he walks along the street, lights begin to dim as a warning that there's another Zeppelin attack. British aeroplanes attack the Zeppelin. Suddenly, it bursts into flame and lights up the whole sky. The crowds cheer as the great fireball drops slowly down and crashes in a field but the one person unable to watch is Simon Wilder.

While attending a lavish masked ball in Venice, retired Scotland Yard Detective Jasper has a shock when, at the midnight démasqué, he spots a woman whose accidental death he investigated in England three years ago. Even more stunned than Jasper is the woman's husband, Lord Bantham, who has since remarried, not to mention his new wife who sees her acquired position and wealth slip away. Then there are her old friends who all seem to have known more about the 'accident' than they ever let on. Then, the resurrected lady is found dead the next morning.

The plague has struck London once again but so has opportunity for theatre company Lord Westfield’s Men. Invited to perform at the wedding celebrations of Sophia Magdalena, the fair maid of Bohemia, the company’s bookholder Nicholas Bracewell and his acting troupe begin the long journey across Europe. Confident they will arrive safely and deliver Lord Westfield’s secret missive to an alchemist in the Imperial Court, Nicholas is unaware what danger travels with them.

The adventure begins in London on Tuesday, October 1st, 1872, when rich British gentleman Phileas Fogg gets in an argument with a group of friends. He enters a wager that sets him on a race to make it around the world in 80 days. Although the trip begins as planned with his valet Jean Passepartout, he is quickly mistaken as a bank robber by Scotland Yard detective Fix. Now being pursued on his journey, Fogg must quickly travel in order to win the wager, see the world, and avoid being apprehended for a crime he did not commit in the ultimate adventure story.

Although Professor Stephen Westaby was born with the necessary coordination and manual dexterity, it was a head trauma sustained during university that gifted him the qualities of an exceptional heart surgeon: qualities that are frequently associated with psychopathy. His 35-year career has been characterised by fearlessness and ruthless ambition, leaving empathy at the hospital door as thousands of patients put their lives in his hands.

Detective Inspector Frank Elder's first case was unsolved. A dead woman, lying on a bed, immaculately dressed. The murderer was never found: free to kill again. Eight years later, Elder's estranged wife contacts him in his Cornish hideaway. Her friend's sister Claire has mysteriously disappeared. Elder reluctantly agrees to help. Then Claire is found dead, arranged with meticulous detail on her bed, and it doesn't take long for Elder to make the connection.

In 1665, England is facing war with the Dutch, and the capital is awash with rumours of conspiracy and sedition. As an experienced investigator, Thomas Chaloner knows that there are very few grains of truth in the shifting sands of the rumour-mill, but the murder of Paul Ferine, a Groom of the Robes, in a brothel favoured by the elite of the Palace of White Hall makes him scent a whiff of genuine treason.

Alderman John Foster purchases a piece of land from the Magdalen Nunnery intending to build a chapel, dedicated to the Magi - the Three Kings of Cologne - and some almshouses. He little imagines the shocking discovery about to be made.

"I’ve always wanted to see something of the Empire outside Rome." AD 71. Germania Libera: dark, dripping forests inhabited by bloodthirsty barbarians and legendary wild beasts, a furious prophetess who terrorises Rome, and the ghostly spirits of slaughtered Roman legionaries. Enter Falco, an Imperial agent on a special mission: to find the absconding commander of a legion whose loyalty is suspect.

1817. Upon receiving a letter from an old family friend, Clemency van Emden returns from Holland to find her father dead. She refuses to believe the middle-aged man died of natural causes, and the suspicious circumstances of his life during the past few months compel her to ask Peter and Paul Skillen for help. Why would a successful engineer suddenly begin begging for alms on the streets? Had he refused to ask for help, or was he prevented from doing so?

The essential novels of Jules Verne include the classics such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Around the World in Eighty Days. Enjoy all three novels in this enthralling science-fiction collection.

In his Cornish hideaway, retired Detective Inspector Frank Elder's solitary life is disturbed by a call from his estranged wife, telling him his 17-year-old daughter, Katherine, is running wild, unbalanced by a rape he feels he should have prevented. Meanwhile, in London, the capture of a violent criminal goes badly wrong, and Detective Sergeant Maddy Birch is uneasy about the reasons why, an uneasiness that is compounded when she starts to believe she is being stalked.

For two couples honeymooning in Sorrento, the future is uncertain, but they are full of the promise of youth. The year is 1938 and the Munich crisis is just over - a relief for both Biff and Rosemary Banks and their new-found friends Konrad and Anna von Riegner. Biff is a pilot in the RAF and Konrad an Oberleutnant-zur-See in the German Kriegsmarine. Together they tour the Amalfi coast.

DS Wesley Peterson, newly arrived in the West Country town of Tradmouth, has his hands full when a child goes missing and a young woman is brutally murdered on a lonely cliff path. Then his old friend, archaeologist Neil Watson, unearths the skeletons of a strangled woman and a newborn baby in the cellar of an ancient merchant's house nearby. As the investigation continues, Wesley begins to suspect that these deaths, centuries apart, may be linked by age-old motives of jealousy, a sexual obsession and desperate longing.

Amy Snowden, in middle age, has long since settled into a lonely life in the Yorkshire town of Gunnarshaw, until - to her neighbours' surprise - she suddenly marries a much younger man. Months later Amy is found dead - apparently by her own hand - and her husband, Wright, has disappeared. Sergeant Caleb Cluff - silent, watchful, a man at home in the bleak moorland landscape of Gunnarshaw - must find the truth about the couple's unlikely marriage and solve the riddle of Amy's death.

What did he eat last? Whom did he eat, in fact? Lumbered with working alongside reptilian Chief Spy Anacrites, Falco has the perfect plan to make money - he will assist Vespasian in the Emperor's 'Great Census' of AD 73. His potential fee could finally allow him to join the middle ranks and be worthy of long-suffering Helena Justina. Unexpectedly confronted with the murder of a man-eating lion, Falco is distracted from his original task, uncovering a bitter rivalry between the gladiators' trainers.

A short story from British Library Crime Classic The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories. Car trouble and poor weather lead John Bradley to Lark Cottage, the home of Lucy Shaw and her young daughter, Julia. Her husband, serving a life sentence for murder, has escaped from Lanforth Prison, and she implores her unexpected visitor to stay the night. Listeners will love this rare short story from John Bingham and the unexpected twist.

A short story from British Library Crime Classic Deep Waters. When a man is found dead on his yacht on the Thimble River, an inlet off the Solent, series detective David Wintringham must draw on his nautical knowledge to track down the killer....

Gogol's great comic masterpiece paints an hilariously satirical picture of provincial life in 19th century Russia. Its publication in 1847 not only provided inspiration for succeeding generations of Russian writers, but fanned the already flickering flames of social discontent which were eventually to flare up and consume Russia in the revolution of 1917.