Showing results by narrator "Colleen Prendergast"

Imagine that you live on a picturesque communal garden square, an oasis in urban London where your children run free, in and out of other people's houses. You've known your neighbors for years and you trust them. Implicitly. You think your children are safe. But are they really? On a midsummer night, as a festive neighborhood party is taking place, preteen Pip discovers her 13-year-old sister Grace lying unconscious and bloody in a hidden corner of a lush rose garden. What really happened to her?

Poppy tears, opium, heroin, fentanyl: humankind has been in thrall to the ‘Milk of Paradise’ for millennia. The latex of papaver somniferum is a bringer of sleep, of pleasurable lethargy, of relief from pain - and hugely addictive. A commodity without rival, it is renewable, easy to extract, transport and refine, and subject to an insatiable global demand. No other substance in the world is as simple to produce or as profitable. It is the basis of a gargantuan industry built upon a shady underworld, but ultimately it is a farm-gate material that lives many lives ....

The disregard of a dying woman's bequest, a girl's attempt to help an impoverished clerk, and the marriage of an idealist and a materialist intersect at an estate called Howards End. There, the lives of three families become entangled. As chance brings them together, societal conventions come into question as does the ownership of Howards End. Through the fate of the estate - as well as the lives of the families who are affiliated with it - Forster creates a brilliant parallel to the fate of English society itself.

For Ianthe, war is all too familiar. A former soldier in the Astra Militarum, she now serves Inquisitor Covenant as an agent of the Throne. Her first mission sees her investigating a cult called the Children of Eternity. Falling foul of the local Enforcers, Ianthe soon learns that war in the shadows is seldom straightforward and that the local, angry law-keepers are the least of her troubles.

The brand-new novel from the Sunday Times best-selling author of The Perfectly Imperfect Woman - a gorgeous listen full of love, life and laughter. Sophie Mayhew looks like she has the perfect life. Wife of rising political star John F Mayhew, a man who is one step away from the top job in the government, her glamour matches his looks, power, breeding and money. But John has made some stupid mistakes along the way, some of which are threatening to emerge. 

Alice Rose is a foundling, discovered on the Yorkshire moors above Haworth as a baby. Adopted but then later rejected again by a horrid stepmother, Alice struggles to find a place where she belongs. Only baking - the scent of cinnamon and citrus and the feel of butter and flour between her fingers - brings a comforting sense of home. So it seems natural that when she finally decides to return to Haworth, Alice turns to baking again, taking over a run-down little teashop and working to set up an afternoon tea emporium.

A killer is on the loose, attacking people in places they feel most safe: their workplaces, their homes. It’s up to DS Grace Allendale to stop the murders and prove herself to her new team. All clues lead to local crime family the Steeles, but that’s where things get complicated. Because the Steeles aren’t just any family, they’re Grace’s family. Two brothers and two sisters, connected by the violent father only Grace and her mother escaped. To catch the killer, Grace will have to choose between her team and her blood. But whom do you trust when both sides are out to get you?

After their success in their last investigation, DCI David Stone has been promoted and moved to the Murder Investigation Team, taking DS Frankie Oliver with him. But there's a catch: the case they are given is the latest in a series of undetected murders. It's a baptism of fire for MIT's newest recruits. In the incident room, the murder wall makes grim reading: three women have been killed within the past year and nothing links the crimes: no day of the week, geographical area, similarity between victims and, most importantly, no forensic evidence. 

Eleven months after discovering a brutal double murder in a sleepy Northumbrian town, Detective Chief Inspector Kate Daniels is still haunted by her failure to solve the case. Then the brutal killing of a man on Newcastle’s Quayside gives Daniels another chance to get it right, and her first case as Senior Investigating Officer. When Daniels recognises the corpse but fails to disclose the fact, her personal life swerves dangerously into her professional life. But much worse, she is now being watched. As Daniels steps closer to finding a killer, a killer is only a breath away from claiming his next victim.... 

Lou Winter is a lonely woman who no longer realises she's being taken advantage of - whether by her mother or unfaithful husband Phil. Then one day she spots a magazine article on clearing clutter. What begins as an earnest spring-clean soon spirals out of control. The more Lou lets go of, the more light can get to those painful places at the centre of her heart.

The gripping first novel in the exciting new Stone and Oliver series by award-winning author Mari Hannah. Alex should never have agreed to the spur-of-the-moment holiday with her sister. Seven days felt like a year without Daniel, her 10-year-old son. This was the first time they had been apart since he was born, and her husband had convinced her it was a good idea. It was a bad idea. Daniel has gone missing.

Eve Glace - co-owner of the theme park Winterworld - is having a baby, and her due date is a perfectly timed 25th December. And she’s decided that she and her husband, Jacques, should renew their wedding vows with all the pomp and Christmas ceremony that was missing from the first time round. But things keep going wrong in Winterworld - is it because the the usually competent site manager, Effin Williams, has lost his focus, or is there something more sinister going on? 

Darkness lives within.... Cash strapped, working for agencies and living in shared accommodation, Stephanie Booth feels she can fall no further. So when she takes a new room at the right price, she believes her luck has finally turned. But 82 Edgware Road is not what it appears to be.

As an agent of the Throne, former soldier Ianthe serves Inquisitor Covenant and faces some of the most dangerous and insidious threats the galaxy has to offer. On the hunt for the rogue psyker Silas Norn, Ianthe and her associates run afoul of the Imperial authorities and are imprisoned. Norn too is captured and incarcerated, but with the ability to manipulate the minds of his victims he is far from easy quarry. To stop him, Ianthe must not only find him; she must overcome the buried ghosts of her hidden past.

When the naked, battered body of an unidentified teenager is found dumped in an alleyway, postmortem finds evidence of a harrowing series of events. Another teenage death with the same MO pushes DI Hannah Robbins and her team on the Nottingham City division Major Crimes Unit to their limits - and across county borders.

At her husband's funeral, Carla Pride discovers that Martin never divorced his first wife. And his other wife is determined to take everything from Carla. When Will Linton's business goes bust he thinks that he will rise to the top again. But his wife Nicole isn't going to stick around with “a loser”. Molly Jones is being bullied into going into a retirement home. Then the love of her life returns – he says he is dying and wants to spend the time he has left with her.

Young Sara Crewe grew up in a well-to-do household, but she suddenly finds herself impoverished when her father, Captain Crewe, dies penniless in India. Sara is forced to abandon her life of privilege for a life of bare existence at Miss Minchin's boarding school. To survive those hard times, she imagines herself to be a princess as she awaits her rescue from a mysterious benefactor.

Thirty-two-year-old Catherine Hope has a great memory. But she can't remember everything. She can't remember her ninth year, or when her insomnia started. And she can't remember why everyone stopped calling her Catherine-Maria. With a promiscuous past, and licking her wounds after a breakup, Catherine wonders why she resists anything approaching real love. But when she loses her home to the devastating deluge of 2007 and volunteers at Flood Crisis, a devastating memory emerges.

When Lewis Harley has a health scare in his early 40s, he takes it as a wake-up call. So he and his wife, Charlotte, leave behind life in the fast lane, and Lewis opens the antiques shop he has dreamed of. Bonnie Brookland was brought up in the antiques trade and now works for the man who bought out her father's business, but she isn't happy there. So when she walks into Lew's shop, she knows this is the place for her.

Gaby Mortimer is the woman who has it all. But everything changes when she finds a body near her home. She's shaken and haunted by the image of the lifeless young woman and frightened that the killer, still at large, could strike again. Before long the police have a lead. The evidence points to a very clear suspect, one Gaby never saw coming.