Showing results by narrator "Christine Mackie"

The year is 1792 and it's winter in Berkeley Square. As the city sleeps, the night-watchman keeps a cautious eye over the streets and another eye in the back doors of the great and the good. Then one fateful night he comes across the body of Pierre Renard, the eponymous silversmith, lying dead, his throat cut and his valuables missing.

When Tessa’s best friend organises a surprise TV makeover, Tessa is horrified. It’s the last thing she needs – her business is on the brink of collapse, her marriage is under strain and her daughter is more interested in beauty pageants than student politics. What’s more, the ‘Greenham Common angle’ the TV producers have devised reopens some personal history Tessa has tried to hide away. Then Tessa’s least favourite member of the Greenham gang makes contact ...

Broadstairs, Kent, 1851. Once a sleepy fishing village, now a select sea-bathing resort, this is a place where people come to take the air and where they come to hide.... Delphine and her cousin, Julia, have come to the seaside with a secret, one they have been running from for years. The clean air and quiet outlook of Broadstairs appeal to them, and they think this is a place they can hide from the darkness for just a little longer.

When Kate Vavasour wakes in hospital, she can remember nothing about the family gathered around her bed or of her life before the accident. The doctors diagnose post-traumatic amnesia and say the memories should start returning. Which they do...but these memories are not her own. They belong to Isabel Vavasour, who lived and died at Askerby Hall over 400 years earlier....

London, 1934. Doreen Bates is working in the same office as E, an older married man. They strike up a passionate affair and Doreen records it all in her diary - secret midnight walks, countryside escapades and stolen moments of intimacy. But Doreen longs for a child with E. Despite all the taboos at the time and against the wishes of E, Doreen gets pregnant and is amazed when twins are born during the war. However, Doreen faces an uncertain future - will E ever leave his wife and join his new family?

Jane believes in keeping her promises, but a deathbed vow sets her on a path of deceit and joy that takes her from the secrets of Holmwood House in York to London’s Mincing Lane. Getting what you want comes at a price. For the child that she longed for and promised to love and keep safe turns out to be a dark spirit indeed. Over four centuries later, Roz Acclam remembers nothing of the fire that killed her family - or of the brother who set it.

York, 1577: Hawise Aske smiles at a stranger in the market and sets in train a story of obsession and sibling jealousy, of love and hate and warped desire. Drowned as a witch, Hawise pays a high price for that smile. Four and a half centuries later, Grace Trewe is trying to outrun her memories of the Boxing Day tsunami. Her stay in York is meant to be brief, but she discovers that time can twist and turn in ways she never imagined. Drawn inexorably into Hawise’s life, Grace finds that this time she cannot move on.