Showing results by narrator "Stephen Thorne" in All Categories

1889, Paris. When Charles Zidler's extravagant pleasure palace, the Moulin Rouge, opens in bohemian Montmartre, he commissions local artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to create a series of posters to promote it. The striking lithographs Henri produces will make his name—and launch the careers of the performers he portrayed. This sparkling collection of plays introduces us to eight of those legendary artistes, whose lives were as vivid as Lautrec's paint.

The man who brutally murdered Uncle Harry is dead. In an effort to recover from the confrontation and collect himself, Jack takes refuge on Torcello, a small island in the Venetian lagoon, to return to his writing career. Even more urgently, he wants to win back Kerry, the beautiful lawyer who rejected him after the bloody episode with Harry's assassin.

Daegan and Casidhe are tested at every turn by angry immortals when they appear uninvited in a place with no exits. An expected change of events devastates Daegan’s hope of gaining the second grimoire volume and shatters Casidhe’s trust. Faced with becoming a monster, Adrianna gambles with the ancient Witchlock power capable of cataclysmic results and becomes collateral damage. Possessed by an Imortik, Reese runs to keep Quinn safe and finds a way to save others even though she can’t save herself.

Paul Sturgis is a retired bank manager who lives alone in a dark little flat. He walks alone and dines alone, seeking out and taking pleasure in small exchanges with strangers: the cheerful Australian girl who cuts his hair, the lady at the dry cleaners. His only relative - and only acquaintance - is a widowed cousin by marriage, herself a virtual stranger, to whom he pays ritualistic visits on a Sunday afternoon.

In this friends-to-lovers romance, Justin is an elite black ops warrior on a unique shifter team. He turns into a monster grizzly and rushes into danger without hesitation. But he's having second thoughts on playing bodyguard for a Russian bear shifter princess. How'd he get stuck guarding a prima donna who will look down her nose at him like the snobs in the bear clan where he grew up? But Elianna turns out to be nothing like he expected. She's strong, pretty, and feels special, like she could be the one.

A few years it became possible, for this first time, for a foreigner to travel Siberia almost at will. This is the account of Thubron's 15, 000-mile journey through this astonishing country - one twelfth of the land surface of the whole earth.

When a young nun dies of a fever in the town of Beverley in the summer of 1365, she is buried quickly for fear of the plague. But one year later a woman appears, talking of relic-trading and miracles. She claims to be the dead nun resurrected. Murder follows swiftly in her wake, and the worried Archbishop of York asks Owen Archer to investigate.

Daegan is given an unconscionable task to execute before he’ll be told how to find the last grimoire volume. Casidhe jumps at learning the truth of her bloodline, only to discover a deadly surprise. While running solo, Reese angers the Imortik master who sends two possessed Beladors to drag her to him. Human military lock on Evalle and her Belador team racing to stop preternatural threats. With one last hope of surviving, Cathbad goes all-in and encounters a battle he never planned for. The Imortik master escalates his plans sooner than anyone expected.

While leading an extraction team deep inside North Korea, Tanner watches his escape route disintegrate minutes after encountering a suspicious female who claims she knows another way out of the dangerous country…if she can exit with his team.

Fascinating, frightening or just plain frustrating? These eight gripping stories show detective work as it really is - and sometimes truth can be stranger than fiction. Hear about the ghostly dream that helped to solve a baffling murder mystery, some clever detectives' tricks that led to the conviction of the 'Laurel and Hardy' jewel thieves, and the crafty blackmailer who nearly got away with the perfect crime.

Drawing on fascinating examples from diverse social contexts, Don't Take It Personally introduces a general framework to better understand the deeper connection between seemingly disparate phenomena, from racial profiling and hate crimes to "secret Santa" gifting.

Thirty-five years after the publication of Ronald Blythe's classic portrait of an English village, Akenfield, Craig Taylor returned to the Suffolk village on which the book was based. He sought out locals who appeared in the original book to learn how their lives had changed, met newcomers, and interviewed Ronald Blythe himself.

What makes people want to solve a mystery? Listen to these seven stories and you might decide there are some things that can never be explained. Find out how one woman checked into a Parisian hotel - and then disappeared; why Flight 19 never returned, with no sign of wreckage or survivors; and if the ghosts of Borley rectory can ever rest in peace. With gripping accounts and dramatic fact files, uncover some mysterious events from real life and decide what you think really happened.

In Black Reconstruction W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, "The slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery." His words echo across the decades as the civil rights revolution, marked by the passage of landmark civil rights laws in the '60s, has seen those gains steadily and systematically whittled away.

In this gripping series, Helena Kennedy, celebrated human rights lawyer, broadcaster and civil liberties expert and playwright Rib Davis bring to life eight groundbreaking twentieth century trials. With the help of a full cast, they reveal how the British legal system has been influenced by powerful human stories that redefined the law to better reflect our modern society.

It is the year of our Lord 1363. And in the cathedral city of York people are dying in mysterious circumstances. But there seems to be a common thread - the herbal remedies dispensed by Nicholas Wilton, Master Apothecary. The first victim is an anonymous pilgrim. But when a highborn nobleman dies after taking the same potion the authorities decide to act. Dispatched to York, in disguise, to unravel the mystery, Owen Archer, former Captain of Archers, apprentices himself to the Apothecary.

The second volume featuring eight classic stories about Elmer, our favourite colourful patchwork elephant! A modern classic, Elmer the colourful patchwork elephant has been a nursery favourite since his creation in 1989 and has sold over four million copies around the world. Elmer is not your normal grey elephant - his colourful exuberance cannot be contained for long! With his trademark cheeky humour, Elmer shows us that it's OK to be different.

Julius Hutch has planned to spend his retirement years 'pottering' and worrying about his bills, but wakes one morning to discover a foreign merchant bank has put four million pounds into his account—and won't take it back. So Julius, a humble man, sets out to spend the money helping other people, and wooing Pauline, the local bank teller. Up against an enormous banking corporation and an unsavoury property developer, Julius soon discovers that rather than being crushed by these financial giants as he would have been in the past, he is rendered rather more delightfully impervious.

After years of struggle, Emma Conway is living the dream - a happy second marriage and a great career. She is the driving force behind Acordinol, a hugely successful painkiller that has pharmaceutical giant Percival & Baxter riding high. But her dream becomes a nightmare when a Wall Street raider threatens her company with a hostile takeover. Worse, the raider is no ordinary cutthroat; it's her ex-husband Josh Katz, father of their sixteen-year-old son .P&B goes for a "poison pill" defense.

The year is 1367, and the people of York are suffering. Not only has the harvest failed, but the plague has returned. In the midst of this, scandal threatens St Leonard's Hospital, which is struggling to stay solvent and has suffered thefts. The deaths of several of its aged residents seems timely, for their care has long exceeded the sums they bequeathed. Rumours start to fly that their deaths were no accident.