Showing results by narrator "Peter Noble" in All Categories

It should be a routine job. Joe Hunter and his associates are hired to provide security for an elite event in Miami. Wear a tux, stay professional, job done. But things go wrong. Hunter is drawn into what appears to be a domestic altercation. When he crosses the mysterious Mikhail, however, he soon finds something altogether more sinister.... Before long this chance encounter has serious repercussions for Hunter and his friends. Good people are being killed. On the run, in the line of fire, the clock is ticking.

After victory in World War II, Britain was a relieved but also a profoundly traumatized country. Simon Winder, born into this nation of uncertain identity, fell in love (as many before and since) with the man created as the antidote, a quintessentially British figure of great cultural significance: James Bond. Written with passion, wit and a great deal of personal insight and affection, this book is his wildly amusing attempt to get to grips with Bond’s legacy and the difficult decades in which it really mattered.

This book investigates the thesis that despite America lacking a world-leading welfare state, America and its cultural desire for individual immortality may give Americans more psychological benefits than Europeans get in their welfare states.

It's 1919. The Derbyshire village of Wenfield is still coming to terms with the loss of so many of its sons when the brutal murder of a young girl shatters its hard-won tranquility. Myrtle Bligh is found stabbed, her mouth slit to accommodate a dead dove. During the war Myrtle volunteered as a nurse, working at the nearby big house, Tarnhey Court. When two more women are found murdered, Inspector Albert Lincoln is sent up from London.

From the author of Leviathan, or, The Whale, comes a composite portrait of the subtle, beautiful, inspired and demented ways in which we have come to terms with our watery planet. In the third of his watery books, the author goes in pursuit of human and animal stories of the sea. Of people enchanted or driven to despair by the water, accompanied by whales and birds and seals - familiar spirits swimming and flying with the author on his meandering odyssey from suburbia into the unknown.

Funny, moving and sharply observed, these stories are confirmation of Boyd's status as one of English fiction's finest writers. Here are 24 gripping tales told in bold, distinct voices from Brazil to Africa and from Nice to Hollywood. This eclectic collection by the acclaimed author of Restless and Brazzaville Beach is a must for any lover of the short story.

A young woman is brutally murdered on an island near Stockholm. Suspicion falls first on a family of Iraqi refugees. But then the victim's story begins to unfold. Lena Sundman was rude, dysfunctional, and young. Everything Dan Byrne disliked. Hiding out on the island after the sudden death of his wife, Dan finds himself drawn to the troubled girl, starting from the moment he rescues her from a gathering snowstorm.

Chris Burwell charts one man's career in aviation from joining the RAF in 1969 aged eighteen, to having responsibility for training pilots for the world's major airlines nearly fifty years later. After training at RAF Cranwell and RAF Valley and a tour as a flying instructor on Jet Provosts, he joined the Harrier Force, flying on front-line squadrons in the United Kingdom and Germany during the Cold War and as an instructor on the Harrier Conversion Unit.

An assassin’s bullet. A deadly conspiracy. But who is calling the shots? When an attempted assassination sparks a chain reaction of explosive events across London, Britain’s elite security forces seem powerless to stop the chaos threatening to overwhelm the government. As the dark and deadly conspiracy unfolds, three strangers find their fates entwined: Joe Dempsey, a deadly military intelligence officer; Sarah Truman, a CNN reporter determined to get her headline; and Michael Devlin, a Belfast-born criminal barrister with a secret past.

A global thriller presenting an apocalyptic vision of a world on the brink of despair and destruction. What would you do if the world was brought to a standstill? If you heard deafening static followed by the words 'my children. Do not be afraid'? Would you turn to God? Subscribe to the conspiracy theories? Or put your faith in science and a rational explanation? The lives of all 26 people in this account are affected by the message. Most because they heard it. Some because they didn't.

Armadillo and Hare are the best of friends. They live together in a little house in the Big Forest. It's normally very quiet in the Big Forest. Hare likes music and excitement. Armadillo like it when it's quiet. Today there's a lot of bashing and crashing going on! Someone is playing the drums. Very loudly. It's Bear! What will our friends make of their new arrival? Return to the Big Forest for even more fun, friendship - and cheese!

A man obsessed with the cleansing power of fire is destroying everything that reminds him of his youth. He calls himself the Fire Man. That same Easter, a teenager is threatened by his girlfriend's tradition-bound family. Karsten's attempts to protect himself put him and his sister, Synne, at even greater risk. Then he disappears altogether. Eight years later Synne is determined to find out what happened that night. But her investigation will ignite smouldering and dangerous memories.

Roald Dahl was one of the world's greatest storytellers. He conceived his vocation as one as intrepid as that of any explorer and, in his writing for children, he was able to tap into a child's viewpoint throughout his life. He crafted tales that were exotic in scenario, frequently invested with a moral, and filled with vibrant characters that endure in public imagination to the present day.

The experience of being in nature alone is here set within the context of a series of walks that Neil Ansell takes into the most remote parts of Britain, the rough bounds in the Scottish Highlands. He illustrates the impact of being alone as part of nature rather than outside it. As a counterpoint, Neil Ansell also writes of the changes in the landscape and how his hearing loss affects his relationship with nature as the calls of the birds he knows so well become silent to him.

In 1865 a broken Admiral Robert FitzRoy locked himself in his dressing room and cut his throat. His grand meteorological project had failed. Yet only a decade later, FitzRoy’s storm-warning system and ‘forecasts’ would return, the model for what we use today. In an age when a storm at sea was evidence of God’s great wrath, 19th-century meteorologists had to fight against convention and religious dogma.

This fresh new account of the liberation, packed with revelation, tells the story of those heady days of suspense, danger, exhilaration – and vengeance – through the eyes of a range of participants, reflecting all sides of the conflict: Americans, French and Germans; resisters and collaborators. Among them are famous names like Ernest Hemingway, J.D. Salinger and Pablo Picasso, but also some fascinating unknowns including a medic turned Resistance gunwoman, an androgynous Hungarian sculptor and a French bluestocking who quietly set about saving the nation’s art treasures from the Nazi looters.

Berlin, 1938: Newly appointed military attaché Noel Macrae and his extrovert wife, Primrose, arrive at the British embassy. Prime Minister Chamberlain is intent on placating Nazi Germany, but Macrae is less so. Gathering vital intelligence, Macrae is drawn to Kitty Schmidt's Salon - a Nazi bordello - and its enigmatic Jewish hostess, Sara Sternschein, who is a treasure trove of knowledge about the Nazi hierarchy in a city of lies, spies and secrets. Does she hold the key to thwarting Hitler?

Lorenzo and Lucia, both from peasant families, are planning their wedding. However, after meeting the villainous Don Rodrigo, the couple are forced to flee their village. Their dangerous journey in exile takes them through one of the most dramatic eras in Italian history, filled with war, famine, and plague. Will they ever be able to find happiness together?

Amber Whittington-Jones is dying. In her last days she begins to write down her story in an attempt to make sense of her life, to explain to herself, and the one person who still might understand, why she made her choices. But for all her insight, Amber cannot foresee the events that are about to unfold, events that will once again bring her family to its knees and force the past out into the light.

In February 1944, the French Resistance in the Amiens area was in turmoil. Its strength had been decimated by German aggression and the work of a number of traitors in their midst, and hundreds of its members languished in the city's formidable jail, awaiting an almost certain death at the hands of their captors. When two Allied intelligence officers were incarcerated alongside them it became clear that immediate action was imperative.