Showing results by narrator "Gordon Griffin" in All Categories

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….

A poignant imagining of Thomas Hardy’s relationship with his last muse. A celebrated author, in the winter of his life, awaits a visit from a beautiful young actress – the leading lady in a staging of his most famous tragedy. But his wife is troubled. An anxious and sickly woman, she watches the growing intimacy between her husband and the young woman, and becomes tormented by the idea that they will betray her.

An Englishwoman living in France falls through a balcony railing. Or was she pushed? An Englishman whose rented car showed a Spanish registration visited her in France on the day she died. Days later, an Englishman living in Spain dies from a heroin overdose - although he wasn’t an addict.

“Matrimony. An Officer of the Honourable East India Company is greatly desirous of finding a soul-mate to share his life and fortune". Lonely spinster Phoebe Creswell responds to an advertisement in the Worcester Herald, but are the outwardly charming Major Christophe de Langlois and his companion, the Reverend Geraint Winward, really who and what they seem?

For merchant bankers, success means secrecy; passwords and code names ensure conversations stay private. However, they reckoned without London cabbies Terry, Len, and 'Einstein', who know the rewards of keeping their ears pricked and their noses in The FT. Making money fast is their object, as Len's daughter Poppy is losing her struggle with Cystic Fibrosis. While scheming to give Poppy a chance of survival, they become embroiled in a murder and the politics of their target bank, Skidder Barton.

John visits his ageing mother, Mary, in her nursing home by the sea, and mourns the slow fading of her mind. Hoping to shore up her receding memory, he prompts her with songs, photographs, and questions from their shared past, taking her back to the 1940s, when she was a young woman and he a child in a small Cumbrian town. But as he rekindles her memories, it is her own mother she longs for - and John finds himself delving further back, into the secrets and silences of Mary's fractured childhood, and the unsung sorrows of her thwarted yet spirited mother, Grace.

When the phone rings in the middle of the night, Dr Arthur Jackson leaves the warmth of his bed without hesitation. Tending to his peculiar flock of patients - including the blind cobbler with a surprising taste for hard liquor, the accident-prone butcher, and the young woman with an unusual phobia - is his first priority, whether their illness is critical or they simply need a comforting hand to hold. The whole community turns to the young doctor for advice...and not all of it medical.

"I had not lived in the former pit village of Lynemouth since 1961 but the winding road north from Newcastle will always be the same nostalgic highway, each twist charged with vivid memories and powerful emotions...." So begins a story full of wonderful humour, emotional candour, and hardy tales of tough times - a quietly epic family saga set amid the pit villages of the Northeast. It stretches from the 1920s, before Sid's parents had even met, to the final closing of the mine and his mother's death, in 1999.

Inspector Alvarez is in a good mood, for once. The sun is shining, he has enjoyed an uniterrupted morning nap at his desk, his irasciable boss - Superios Chief Salas - is on holiday, and the local Mallorquin government’s proposal to increase tax on alcohol has been soundly defeated. But optimism, he soon has cause to reflect, is the road to disaster. In short order, he provokes the ire of Salas’ secretary and then of Salas himself - whose holiday does not seem to exclude phoning Alvarez to complain about his work. In no time at all, Alxvarez is mired down by a seemingly impossible task....

By the Booker-shortlisted author of Astonishing Splashes of Colour; a wittily observed slice of modern life as it plumbs the gulf between nostalgia and reality. Who is the Roundabout Man? He doesn't look like a tramp, yet he lives on a roundabout in a caravan and survives on the leftovers from a motorway service station. He calls himself Quinn, the name of a boy in a world-famous series of children's books. When Quinn's reclusive existence is invaded, he has to face his past, and the uncomfortable truth of who he really is.

In the long, hot summer of 1969, two young men are involved in the accidental killing of their foreman on a Shropshire building site. Traumatized, they conceal his body and vow to never mention the horrific incident again. Four decades later, DI Frank Kavanagh and DC Jane Salt’s relationship is in trouble and she escapes to a friend’s home in that same Shropshire town. Here, whilst trying to avoid her own relationship problems, Salt gets herself embroiled in her friend’s love life and finds herself in serious danger.

Spring, 1947. Having survived the horrors of the camps, Felix Breit, one of pre-war Europe’s foremost sculptors, arrives in London, hoping to rebuild his life and career. The opportunity arises when two English architects invite him to join a community they are hoping to create at the Dower House, a Georgian country house. He is under the spell of Angela Wirth, a fellow concentration camp survivor. Will they ever dare admit their love?

Five years after Duncan Percival is left in a vegetative state following a vicious attack, he finally dies. The case has now become a murder investigation, and DCI Hennessey and DS Yellich are brought in to renew the evidence and re-interview the suspects. As they delve deeper, bodies start turning up, and the detectives are drawn into York’s criminal underworld where grasses are punished and the gruesome Chelsea Smile is the favoured method of retribution…

A raving, bedraggled girl is found sheltering in a barn near the Parish of Tardebigge in Worcestershire. Then the decomposing body of a small boy is unearthed by poachers in a nearby wood. Constable Thomas Potts is called upon to investigate both cases, which appear to be connected to a wagon-load of children known to have been abducted from the Poorhouse. Meanwhile Thomas’ engagement to buxom barmaid Amy Danks is threated by his widowed mother’s hatred of his sweetheart, and by the many duty calls upon his time.

When five corpses in various states of decomposition are found chained to the walls of an overgrown kitchen garden, George Hennessey and Somerled Yellich, assisted by Carmen Pharaoh, Thomas Ventnor and Reginald Webster, quickly begin their investigation into these shocking murders. The recently deceased owner of the large country house had been housebound for the last 25 years and would have had no idea of the appalling crimes that were taking place just yards away.

On a damp autumn day, two girls playing truant from school find a body in a remote cottage not far from Hungerford. The dead woman, Gillian Lestrange, was a ghostwriter, engaged in writing the memoirs of a widely disliked retired spy, Lavinia (Vinnie) Latham. The mystery thickens when Superintendent Gregory Summers discovers that Gillian was a ghost in more ways than one – she has been presumed dead for the past fifteen years. Somebody paid the price for Gillian’s first death, and a heavy price it was.

For Dick and Tammy, life was a struggle. Although Dick’s family were wealthy, Dick wanted to prove to himself that he was capable of supporting his wife and two children himself. With both finances and marriage failing, Tammy turns to a family friend, Adam, for support when she realises that baby Richard is not responding as he should. After visiting the doctor, all three are devastated to learn that baby Richard is severely deaf. Will this be the final straw?

It is 1827, and in the town of Redditch life is harsh for the poor. When a young serving woman is found drowned in the canal, her widowed mother believes her daughter has been murdered and appeals to the Parish Constable, Thomas Potts, for help. Physically weak and bookish by nature, Tom Potts is to many people an object of derision. But concealed behind his timid façade is intelligence, experience and a fierce passion for justice.

Following the split from her husband, Helen Pascoe decides to take her children away from London to live in a lovely old house near Falmouth. The family are beginning to feel happy and settled, when the local community is stunned by a murder. A young man has been found stabbed at the crossroads of two narrow lanes - a place where legend says a gibbet once stood. It is DCI Channon's territory, and he soon finds that the victim is connected to the Pascoe family, as well as to other residents of the once humble fishing village.

When David Sterne went up to London to seek his fortune, Adolf Hitler was rampant and the shadow of impending conflict lay forebodingly over Europe. He was still struggling to make a living when war broke out and he was swept into it. Six years of his life were to be spent in the King's uniform. And so began his dramatic climb to success - with a little help from Frederica Lathwell. Then, of course, there was Angela Street...