Showing results by narrator "Gordon Griffin" in All Categories

Your brother seemed to know what he was doing.' Rome, AD 72. Falco returns home from a six-month mission to the German legions. But trouble is in store for him: his apartment has been wrecked by squatters and an ex-legionary friend of his colourfully heroic brother Festus is demanding money, allegedly owed him as the result of one of Festus's wild schemes. Worse still, the only client Falco can get is his mother - who wants him to clear the family name.

"The first concern of an author is to do down his colleagues." In the long, hot Roman summer of AD 74, Falco, private informer and spare-time poet, gives a reading for his family and friends. Things get out of hand, as usual. The event is taken over by Aurelius Chrysippus, a wealthy Greek banker and patron to a group of struggling writers, who offers to publish Falco's work.

In the heroic days of rail travel, you could dine on kippers and champagne aboard the Brighton Belle, smoke a postprandial cigar as the Golden Arrow approached Paris or be shaved by the Flying Scotsman's onboard barber. Everyone from schoolboys to socialites knew of these glamorous trains. Andrew Martin recreates famous train journeys by travelling aboard their nearest modern-day equivalents, describing the disappearance of the extravagance and luxury.

Keith Floyd started out in a hotel kitchen in Bristol. He made and lost fortunes, was married four times, and dealt with a level of fame that bemused him. Now, in this revealing memoir, he reflects upon his colourful career. As irrepressible, funny and charming as the man himself, this is a must-read for anyone who loves life, food, women... and a quick slurp.

When the decapitated body of a monk is found outside Vienna's most splendid baroque church, a young psychoanalyst, Dr Liebermann, must enter a world of secret lore and mysticism if he is to find the key to the mystery....

While our understanding of the Holocaust is well developed, we know little about everyday life in Nazi Germany. In this vivid and important study, Roger Moorhouse portrays the German experience of the Second World War from the viewpoint of the capital's streets and homes, raising issues of consent and dissent, morality and authority, and charting the violent humbling of a once proud metropolis.

Superspy of Restoration London, Thomas Chaloner foils an uprising in his eighth outing. Five years after Charles II's triumphant return to London, there is growing mistrust of his extravagant court and of corruption among his officials - and when a cart laden with gunpowder explodes outside the General Letter Office, it is immediately clear that such an act is more than an expression of outrage at the inefficiency of the postal service.

Thomas Chaloner, spy for the King's intelligence service, has just returned from thwarting a planned revolt in Dublin, but soon realises that England's capital is no haven of peace. He is ordered to investigate the shooting of a beggar during a royal procession. He soon learns the man is no vagrant, but someone with links to the powerful company of Barber-Surgeons. His master, the earl of Clarendon, is locked in a deadly feud with the earl of Bristol, and an innocent man is about to be hanged in Newgate.

Luke Livingstone is a respected solicitor, a father and grandfather, a pillar of the community. Yet Luke is struggling with an unbearable secret, and it's threatening to destroy him. All his life, Luke has hidden the truth about himself and his identity. It's a truth so fundamental that it will shatter his family and leave him outcast. But to continue living, he must become the person - the woman - he knows himself to be, whatever the cost.

It's 1985, and as Jack returns for another year as head teacher at Ragley village school, some changes are in store. It's the year of Halley's Comet, Band Aid, Trivial Pursuit, Dynasty shoulder pads, Roland Rat and Microsoft Windows. And at Ragley-on-the-Forest, Heathcliffe Earnshaw decides to enter the village scarecrow competition, Ruby the caretaker finds romance and retirement looms for Vera the secretary.

East Anglia, 1861. Alone in a first-class carriage, the Swarbricks are robbed at gunpoint. But when the universally admired Swarbrick fights back, the train robber takes more than money and jewellery, killing the man working to unify East Anglia's tangle of railway networks. Inspector Colbeck is brought in from London, but as Swarbrick's glowing reputation begins to crumble, the line of investigation isn't clear.

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.

In A Yorkshire Vet Through the Seasons, Julian Norton, the star of Channel 5’s A Yorkshire Vet, recounts more inspirational tales from his life, the animals he has treated and the people he has met, as well as taking us through the seasons, showing the challenges that occur at the most unlikely times. Whether he's tending to a domestic pet at his practice in Thirsk or called out to an injured swan in the middle of a cold Yorkshire night, the animals always come first.

Rogue Herries tells the story of the larger-than-life Francis Herries, who uproots his family from Yorkshire and brings them to live in Borrowdale, where their life is as dramatic as the landscape surrounding them.

Proud, violent, and impetuous, he despises his first wife, sells his mistress at a county fair, and forms a great love for the teenage gypsy Mirabell Starr. Alongside this turbulent story, runs that of his son David, with enemies of his own, and that of his gentle daughter, Deborah.

A short story from British Library Crime Classic The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories. In this festive short story featuring Francis Durbridge’s favourite debonair amateur detective, Paul Temple journeys to Switzerland to identify an elusive criminal.

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.

Halloween 1861. A special train with two carriages steams across the Lake District at night on its way to a place notorious for its record of supernatural incidents. Lighting inside the carriages is poor, and without warning, the lamp goes out in the last compartment of the second carriage, plunging it into darkness. When the special reaches the end of its journey, the passengers pour out on to the station platform. There are almost 60 of them in all, laughing and jostling.

The Widow's Promise is a powerful new saga from Jennie Felton and part of her Families of Fairley Terrace series. She'd do anything to keep her children safe.... Carina Talbot's life is shattered when her beloved husband, Robert, is found dead in mysterious circumstances. Suddenly she must take on sole responsibility for their two young children and find a way to continue running the farm which was Robert's pride and joy.

Serpent's Point in South Devon is the focus of local legends. The large house on the headland is shrouded in an ancient tale of evil, and when a woman is found strangled on the coastal path nearby, DI Wesley Peterson is called in to investigate. The woman had been house-sitting at Serpent's Point, and Wesley is surprised to discover that she was conducting an investigation of her own into unsolved missing persons cases. Could these enquires have led to her murder?

As the new school year begins, Jack Sheffield prepares for an even more eventful year than usual. A new teacher is appointed, and before long tongues start to wag. Meanwhile, five-year-old Madona Fazackerly makes her mark in an unexpected way, life changes dramatically for Ruby the caretaker, and, in the village Coffee Shop, Dorothy Humpleby plans a dirty weekend. It’s 1983 - the era of the new CD player, Microsoft Word, the McDonalds McNugget, Cabbage Patch dolls, the threat of a miners’ strike and a final farewell to the halfpenny piece. Jack has to manage a year of triumph and tragedy….