Showing results by narrator "Alex Lee" in All Categories

Rachel Prince once again joins the Coral Queen for the holiday of a lifetime with her octogenarian friend Lady Marjorie Snellthorpe and her parents. One day into the voyage and a nun who is part of an exclusive religious party collapses. It's not long before the death is seen as suspicious. The chief of security, Jack Waverley, is flummoxed by the case and asks Rachel to assist. All is not what it seems with this religious order and the woman's dying words are a cause for concern.

Each night, after dark, men flock to Bankside seeking girls of easy virtue, prostitutes known as the Winchester Geese. Joanie Toogood has worked the streets of Southwark since childhood, but her path is changed forever by an encounter with Francis Wareham, a spy for the King’s secretary, Thomas Cromwell. Meanwhile, across the river, at the glittering court of Henry VIII, Wareham also sets his cap at Evelyn and Isabella Bourne, members of the Queen’s household and the girls, along with Joanie, are drawn into intrigue and the shadow of the executioner’s blade.

As the early years of detective fiction gave way to two separate golden ages - of hard-boiled tales in America and intricately-plotted, so-called “cozy” murders in Britain - the legacy of Sherlock Holmes, with his fierce devotion to science and logic, gave way to street smarts on the one hand and social insight on the other, but even though these new sub-genres went their own ways, their detectives still required intelligence and clear-sightedness as characterized the earliest works of detective fiction: the trademarks of Sherlock Holmes, and of all the detectives featured here.

As Henry VIII’s second queen dies on the scaffold, the embittered King strikes out, and unprecedented change sweeps across the country. The bells of the great abbeys fall silent, the church and the very foundation of the realm begins to crack. Determined to preserve their way of life, novitiate nuns Margery and Grace join a pilgrimage thirty thousand strong to lead the king back to grace.

Maxim Jakubowski has edited all the great names in crime fiction, and stories from his anthologies have won the CWA Dagger six times. Now he has collected 19 Dagger Award-winning stories in one volume, making it the first retrospective deep dive into the CWA’s archive of Dagger Award winners. Edgy, twisted, and disturbing, Daggers Drawn is visceral and thrilling collection showcasing the very best modern crime fiction has to offer.

Rachel thinks she is living the dream. Taking a cruise around Australia and New Zealand as a guest lecturer and meeting up again with her best friend, cruise ship nurse, Sarah. The scene is set for the holiday of a lifetime! Rachel Prince is drawn to investigate when the leader of a bucket list tour party is discovered in the library on the first day of her antipodean cruise. Can this seemingly harmless group of elderly people have a killer among them?

Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born at Yasnaya Polyana, his ancestral estate located about 120 miles from Moscow. While he would live and travel in other places over the years, he always considered this family residence in the Russian heartland as his home. His lifelong quest for truth and meaning began while he was a university student. In Simply Tolstoy, Professor Donna Tussing Orwin traces the author’s profound journey of discovery and explains how he mined his tumultuous inner life to create his great works.

To keep her parents from losing their farm in Pennsylvania, Emma agrees to travel to England and accept her grandfather’s offer to arrange a marriage for her with the Earl of Devonport. She secretly hopes marriage to this stranger will lead to love. To honor his father, Devon agrees to marry Emma. Emma’s straightforward and unpretentious manner draws Devon’s reluctant admiration. Unfortunately, long-held fears are not easily overcome. When the unexpected happens, all hope seems lost. Emma must learn to trust God while surrendering her dreams and expectations into his care.

A penniless young widow with an indomitable spirit. A wealthy viscount with an unsavory reputation. London, 1815: After her husband's untimely death, Letty Burton comes up from the country with her domineering mother-in-law. Hiding a past she wishes to forget and facing an uncertain future, all she wants is to navigate London Society as a silent companion. A chance meeting with London's most eligible bachelor sets in motion a series of events that will bring her quiet life under the unfriendly scrutiny of the ton. With the net of scandal, debts, and rivals closing in, will she let her dark past dictate her life forever? Will she learn to trust again? And most importantly, will she allow herself to love? The Widow's Redeemer was a finalist in the 2012 RONE Awards (Reward of Novel Excellence) hosted by InD'Tale Magazine.

One night in Montreal, an ageless man hires a young female translator to help settle mysterious debts with an array of desperate characters.

Rachel Jacobi-Prince and Lady Marjorie Snellthorpe are delighted to be invited to dine at the captain’s table. A pleasant dinner, shared with Marjorie's son and troublesome daughter-in-law, becomes less palatable when the guest of honour goes missing.

Endless years of a lonely, childless spinster’s life stretching ahead, Victoria Kavanagh finds an abandoned baby. She knows it’s the answer to her prayers. Or is it? Has she stolen him in a moment of madness? She’s come close to it before. Desperate to keep him, she creates a past of her own design and moves to Faredene, but is her new life far enough away from the past she’s trying to escape? What a framework on which to build - one of lies and deceit.

In their twilight years, two 80-something sisters, Esther and Minnie are coaxed from their easy chairs and their comfort zone of carpet slippers, crochet hooks, jigsaws, and rummage sales to fulfill the dying wish of a dear friend. They go on to undertake a road trip of sorts in Esther's beloved classic Trafalgar blue Morris Traveller, affectionately known as "Vivien". The trip, however, is no minor errand to return late library books. Theirs was to be an epic undertaking from Lodon's Whitechapel to Raipur, deep in the heart of the Indian Subcontinent.

What if everything we know about Jesus and Mary Magdalene are wrong? What if there's a story that goes deeper...a story that when revealed, could rock the Christian world? What will powerful factions do to get hold of this information? How will they use it? Near the Qumran Caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, archaeologists unearth scrolls supposedly written by the apostles Philip and Thomas. And they're telling a different story.

Beth and Gran begin to read Grace Robinson Nesbitt's journal of the time just before World War II. It turns out the Grace was secretly a code-breaker at the famous Bletchley Park! Dame Joan is just now finding out that her own mother was a hero. Due to the Official Secrets Act, Grace was never able to divulge that she was a "Bletchley Girl"! It's Christmas in 1938 and the present. In the present day, Beth's growing relationship with the local vicar is relayed between the journal entries.

When Eve Anderson meets Adamo de Leone on a ship bound for Europe, she has no idea of the dark secret that will endanger both their lives. She accompanies him to his home on Italy's Amalfi Coast to open an inn left to him by his grandfather. But then she learns he spent five years in prison for a crime he claims he didn't commit. Could the man she loves be responsible for embezzling eighty million dollars from the investment firm he once owned?

Jessica Lockhart is in need of a live-in carer over the Christmas period; Isla Barrow is the woman who takes the job. After a fraught journey to reach her along remote country lanes, Isla arrives to find the old woman in distress, and the house strangely unnerving. With the weather hostile, no phone line or mobile signal, and her charge growing increasingly frail, Isla realizes death is waiting. And something else besides: vengeance.

In the gaming hells of 18th-century London, orphan Caro Worth is leading a double life. By day, she plays a proper gentlewoman on the lookout for a wealthy husband. By night, she plays the infamous Angelica, her fictional half-sister with a talent for cards and an ability to finance the life her respectable self has built. An introduction to a rich Marquis brings marriage and security within Caro's grasp - until the arrival of the unpredictable and totally ineligible Mr. Tobias Felton.

After her parents die in a suspicious boating accident little Eliza is abandoned by her uncaring, unscrupulous guardians. If not for the love of the nuns in the convent she would surely have died. Little did she know that her coming of age would throw her back into peril when, after so many years, her scheming guardians reappear to kidnap and incarcerate her. What is the secret that Eliza holds that they are so keen to possess?

In Simply Eliot, Joseph Maddrey plumbs the emotional and intellectual life of the man whom critic Edmund Wilson called "one of our only authentic poets". He chronicles Eliot's attempts to create a coherent worldview, and explores how his religious conversion in 1927 led to a spiritual rebirth that allowed him to produce his ultimate poetic statement.