Showing results by narrator "Mel Hudson" in All Categories

Reykjavík Detective Gunnhildur Gísladóttir tries not to believe in ghosts. But when Helgi, one of her team, is certain he's seen a man who had been declared dead more than 15 years ago, she reluctantly gives him some unofficial leeway to look into it. Has the not-so-dead man returned from the grave to settle old scores, or has he just decided to take a last look around his old haunts?

Gunnhildur reluctantly allows herself to be taken off police duties to act as bodyguard to a man with a price on his head. Hidden away in a secure house outside Reykjavík, Gunna and the high-profile stranger, a guest of the interiors minister, are thrown together - too close for comfort. They soon find they are neither as safe nor as carefully hidden as Gunna and her boss had thought. 

It's Dissolution Summer, and as the United Kingdom prepares to break up into separate nations, the Counterculturals have gathered for a festival where everything's allowed. Among them is a talented little brat called Fiorinda, rock and roll princess by birth, searching for her father, the legendary Rufus O'Niall. Instead, she finds Ax Preston, the softly spoken guitarman with bizarre delusions about saving the country from the dark ages. Together with Sage Pender, techno-wizard king of the lads, they join the pop-icon team that's supposed to make the government look cool.

One crumbling grand manor house, a family in decline, five generations of women and an attic full of beautiful clothes with secrets and lies hidden in their folds.... Failed fashion designer Sylvie Dearlove is coming home to England - broke, ashamed and in disgrace - only to be told her parents are finally selling their once grand, now crumbling country house, Bledesford, the ancestral home of the Dearlove family for countless generations.  

Snowed in with a couple of psychopaths for the winter.... When two small-time crooks rob Reykjavik's premier drugs dealer, hoping for a quick escape to the sun, their plans start to unravel after their getaway driver fails to show. Tensions mount between the pair and the two women they have grabbed as hostages when they find themselves holed up upcountry in an isolated hotel that has been mothballed for the season.

Detective Gunnhildur sets to investigate two seemingly separate cases, but uncovers some disturbing links. Top class crime writing set in Icleand. Following her promotion and working now from Reykjavik, Gunnhildur is given responsibility for two cases - the first in tracking down an escaped convict who's keen to settle old scores, and the other, the murder of a TV fitness presenter in her city centre apartment.

A successful housebreaker who leaves no traces and no clues as he strips Reykjavík homes of their valuables has been a thorn in the police's side for months. But when one night the thief breaks into the wrong house, he finds himself caught in a trap as the stakes are raised far beyond anything he could have imagined.

When a shipowner is found dead, tied to a bed in one of Reykjavik's smartest hotels, sergeant Gunnhildur Gisladottir of the city police force sees no evidence of foul play but still suspects things are not as cut-and-dried as they seem. And as she investigates the shipowner's untimely - and embarrassing - demise, she stumbles across a discreet bondage society whose members are being systematically exploited and blackmailed.

The Quantum Bomb of 2015 changed everything. The fabric that kept the universe's different dimensions apart was torn and now, six years later, the people of earth exist in uneasy company with the inhabitants of, amongst others, the elfin, elemental, and demonic realms. Magic is real and can be even more dangerous than technology. Elves are exotic, erotic, dangerous, and really bored with the constant Lord of the Rings references.

In the tradition of gloriously absorbing, lush and moving women's fiction by authors such as Kate Morton, Lucinda Riley and Joanne Harris comes Precious Things. Normandy, France, 1891: a young woman painstakingly sews an intricate beaded collar to her wedding dress, the night before her marriage to someone she barely knows. Yet Aimee longs for so much more....

Your past will always be part of you, but does it have to define your future? Or can you rewrite your story? I want to explain it all to you. How this happened. How that summer - the summer I was 16 - made me the person I am today. I want to share my memories with you: the happy memories are like sunbursts, sparkling on the sea. But then, like a current dragging me under, there's that summer of 1997.

Lila Black returns in the fourth volume of high-octane, high-magic, high-tech adventures. Ever since the Quantum Bomb of 2015 things have been different; the dimensions have fused and suddenly our world is accessible to elves, demons, ghosts, and elementals-and their worlds are open to us. Things have been different for Special Agent Lila Black too: she's been tortured and magic-scarred by elves; rebuilt by humans into a half-robot, part-AI, nuclear-fueled walking arsenal; married to a demon; and is in love with a recently-deceased elf.

Ever since the Quantum Bomb of 2015 things have been different; the dimensions have fused and suddenly our world is accessible to elves, demons, ghosts and elementals and their worlds are open to us. Things have been different for Special Agent Lila Black too: Tortured and magic-scarred by elves, rebuilt by humans into a half-robot, part-AI, nuclear-fueled walking arsenal, and carrying the essence of a dead elfin necromancer in her chest, sometimes she has trouble figuring out who she is.

The gap between the worlds was so thin in places, you could almost step across without meaning to... Lila Black can still turn into a lethal war-winning machine with the merest thought but she doesn't work for the agency any more. Problem is, she has no idea what to do next. Teazle is a demon who may have become Death's Angel. Zal is a has-been elven musician without a band. They don't add up to much and when they get together major stuff goes down.

Book two of the Quantum Gravity series sees Lila Black drawn into the intoxicatingly dangerous demon realm. Capricious, in love with beauty, demons are best left to themselves. This is not easy when they can't resist tampering with humans.

Ax Preston, Sage Pender and Fiorinda, charismatic leaders of the Rock-n-Roll Reich, have beaten the cascade of disasters that followed the collapse of the former United Kingdom. Now they have to find some resolution to the impossible dynamics of their own relationship, while the world keeps falling apart. There are fearsome things going on in England's rural hinterland, and in Continental Europe the Green Nazis are planning a final solution to desperate environmental damage.