Showing results by narrator "Tim Bruce" in All Categories

Winston Churchill possessed an iron will and a subtle conscience. His staunch patriotism, tenacity, appetite for a fight, and, above all, towering rhetoric inspired the British people to mount a gallant defense of their island nation. Having set a new bar for national heroism, he earned a place in the pantheon of the world’s greatest leaders. Churchill, a fearless soldier, was a veteran of countless battles and a rider in one of Britain’s last cavalry charges. He was also a gifted writer, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, whose war reporting made his name.

Poland suffered terribly under the Nazis. By the end of the war, six million had been killed. On 1 August 1944 Andrew Borowiec, a 15-year-old volunteer in the Resistance, lobbed a grenade from a Warsaw apartment block onto some German soldiers below – he felt he had come of age. Over that summer Andrew faced danger at every moment. Wounded the day after his 16th birthday, he was captured as he lay in a makeshift cellar hospital. Here he learned a lesson: there were decent Germans as well as bad.

A security van sets off for Durham prison, a disgraced Special Branch officer in the back. It never arrives. En route it is hijacked by armed men, the prisoner sprung. Suspended from duty on suspicion of aiding and abetting the audacious escape of his former boss, Detective Sergeant Matthew Ryan is locked out of the manhunt. Desperate to preserve his career and prove his innocence, he backs off.

A twisty story of murder, guilt and unintended consequences, perfect for fans of Kerry Wilkinson and Mel Sherratt. Two hundred and fifty thousand people go missing in the UK every year. Ninety-one percent of those reported to police are found within 48 hours. Ninety-nine percent of cases are solved within a year. And one percent stay gone. Troubled teenager Emma Thorley vanished without a trace 11 years ago. But now a body has been found....

When Abby Henshaw is brutally attacked by two strangers who dump her at the side of a remote road, her first thought is for the safety of her baby, Beth. But what follows is a mother’s worst nightmare: Beth is gone and Abby’s world collapses around her. As the world-weary DI Michael Gardner investigates, he discovers lives built on secrets and betrayal. Gardner finds himself struggling to stay emotionally removed from the case, and from Abby herself.

Detective Leone Scamarcio, the son of a former leading mafioso, has turned his back on the family business and joined the Rome police force. He may be one of the last honest men in Italy. But when Scamarcio is handed a file of extremely compromising photographs of a high-profile Italian politician and told to "deal with it", he knows he’s in for trouble. When a young man is found stabbed to death in Rome, and a young American girl disappears on a beach in Elba, Scamarcio’s job gets a whole lot more complicated. Worst of all, every lead seems to implicate the prime minister.

July 1983, Essex. A boy playing hide-and-seek sees a fox tugging at something up on a railway embankment. He approaches it cautiously. Seconds later, a blast is heard, and rooks ascend from the poplars surrounding the farmhouse at which the boy is spending his summer holiday with cousins. DI Nick Lowry is called upon to investigate two deaths at Fox Farm, the home of eminent historian Christopher Cliff. The body in the farmhouse kitchen is Cliff himself, having seemingly taking his own life with an antique shotgun. The fox-disturbed body on the property boundary is as yet unidentified.

The war, with its horrifying, endless slaughter on the Western Front, is the backdrop to this story of the conflicting demands of duty, loyalty and love. Dolly Weston, her husband reported missing, falls in love with a wounded army officer. To complicate things further, a deserter emerges, and unhealed wounds from a bitter past are re-opened. And then there is 10- year- old Joshua, drawn into the world of three people whom he comes to admire and love, but who are destined to be driven cruelly apart.

Spring, 1967. The trail of tragedy and destruction that followed the previous winter's flood seems to have died down; Florence is beginning to recover. But Inspector Bordelli does not feel the same sense of relief - he has not had a moment's peace since his investigation of a young boy's murder went disastrously wrong. Unsettled and embittered, Bordelli resigns from the force and leaves the city. He could not continue to work as a policeman while the perpetrators of such a terrible crime were still at large.

A frozen Arctic expanse, a captain who appears to be hardly of sound mind and a strange wailing from across the ice fields make for an eerie and desolate voyage. John M’Allister-Ray, a student of medicine aboard the Polestar, records the events in his diary whilst scarcely believing what he is witnessing.

What would you do to protect your family? Tell a lie? Break the law? Or solve the problem...for good? The body in Lauren James' back garden belongs to her ex-boyfriend, Ritchie. DI Gardner thinks it's an open-and-shut case. But he reckoned without the interference of Lauren's father, local businessman and aspiring politician Walter James. And he couldn't know about the secrets that everyone involved wants to hide.

Gordon Kingdom struggles with the fate of his seriously ill wife while patiently observing and methodically recording the lives of those around him: his neighbours. He has files on them all, including Don Donald (best friend and petty thief), Annie Carnaffan (lives next door, throws footballs over the fence), and Benny (the boy who paints with his eyes closed). Then there’s Angelica, the new girl (42) on the street, with her multicoloured toenails and her filthy temper.

It's glorious spring in Darkbridge and time for the first match of the cricket season. A single father shuns the friendly overtures of the neighbours. What sinister secret is he trying to hide?

A family which rules the world. A group of women no one would suspect. A diabetic girl on the run. DI Mike Yorke never mixes work and play - but his latest case on Holy Island has come a little too close to home. Aunt May is in a coma. Street kid Smiler is seeing doom at every turn. Childhood friend Dave is obsessively praying. The Drugs factory has been broken up, the enslaved children rescued and the monastery restored to the monks.

Rowan knows he is strange. But dangerous? He didn't scare his sister. In his right mind, he wouldn't hurt a fly. But there's a place he can go where they say they can fix his mind…. As the second World War begins, Rowan is diagnosed as schizophrenic and sent away to a hospital where the latest treatments are available. But the treatments are experimental still-and nobody predicts the effect they will have on Rowan.

On his first trip to London,Ivo Moncrieff steps off the train and stumbles into a nightmare.As he is waiting on the tubes platform,a stranger thrusts a mysterious object into his hand.Moments later, the carriage next to Ivo's is overcome with panic and at the next station the passengers find the stranger's dismembered body.Ivo guesses that the perpetrators want the object,and if they find he has it,he will be their next target.

It's 1220, and the City of London is a dirty and dangerous place, very different to the peaceful monastery of Saint Wilfred's in Saint Agnes Next-the-Sea.But when the new abbot returns from Westminster Abbey,it seems that he brings back something wicked,plunging Saint Wilfred's into deceit and violence. Once again,it falls to trainee monk Tom Fletcher to find the true culprit in a matter of life and death.

Freydis has been left for dead following a raid on her father's Viking stronghold. Her brother has been taken prisoner. Now Freydis's father is bent on revenge, and takes her on his quest, giving her Enno, an African warrior slave, to protect her. As the hunt for her brother becomes more desperate, Freydis and Enno draw closer together.

It's November 1983 in Essex, and there are reasons to be cheerful. 'Uptown Girl' is sitting pretty at the top of the charts, Risky Business is raking it in at the box office and there are now four channels on the telly. However, social tensions are beginning to bubble beneath the surface: Mrs Thatcher has embarked on her second controversial term, and the situation in Northern Ireland is ever-escalating. Yet in the garrison town of Colchester, it's another deadly standoff that is hogging the headlines.