Showing results by narrator "Elizabeth Knowelden" in All Categories

Paris, 1940 German tanks rumble through the streets of Paris, forcing frightened citizens to flee. But not everyone has the luxury to leave. Camille Lacroix, a chambermaid at the world-famous Hôtel Ritz, must stay to support her family back home in Brittany. Desperate to earn money, Camille also acts as a lady’s maid for longtime guest Vivian Miller, a glamorous American widow—and a Nazi sympathizer. Despite her distrust of the woman, Camille turns to Vivian when her friend Rachel Berman needs help getting out of Paris. It’s then that Camille discovers that Vivian is not what she seems.

After discovering her mother’s secret life, Cara doesn’t have much faith in marriage. So when the love of her life, Simeon, proposes, she struggles to say "I do." She adores him, but why risk the perfect relationship by signing on a dotted line that could ruin everything? If her parents’ marriage taught her anything, it was that a gold ring doesn’t equal happiness, and she has no desire to follow in their dysfunctional footsteps.

Coworkers Ruby and Harry are in love - but they're married to other people. They decide to tell their spouses that their marriages are over and to start a new life together. Ruby has wanted to leave her controlling husband for a while, so she tells him she's leaving and waits at the hotel where she and Harry are to meet. But Harry never shows up.

July 1910. Lady Hardcastle and her tireless sidekick Flo have finally embarked on a long-overdue seaside break. But just as they’re wavering between ice creams and donkey rides, their fellow guests start to go missing - and the duo find themselves with a hysterical hotel manager and a case to solve. The first to disappear is Dr Goddard, a scientist doing something terribly top-secret for the government.

When Ella Longfield overhears two attractive young men flirting with teenage girls on a train, she thinks nothing of it - until she realises they are fresh out of prison and her maternal instinct is put on high alert. But just as she’s decided to call for help, something stops her. The next day, she wakes up to the news that one of the girls - beautiful, green-eyed Anna Ballard - has disappeared.

A happy marriage. A beautiful family. A lovely home. So what makes Emily Coleman get up one morning and walk right out of her life to start again as someone new? Now Emily has become Cat, working at a hip advertising agency in London and living on the edge with her inseparable new friend, Angel. Cat's buried any trace of her old self so well, no one knows how to find her. But she can't bury the past or her own memories.

For sorcerer Nate Garrett, the stakes have risen. If Asgard falls, he may lose much more than his home - he may lose the thing dearest to him. To stand a fighting chance against Avalon, he must be ready to go to war. But when his best friend and father are poisoned, Nate must race against the clock in a desperate quest to find a cure.

An idyllic wellness retreat has opened on an island off the English coast, promising rest and relaxation—but the island itself, known locally as Reaper’s Rock, has a dark past. Once the playground of a serial killer, it’s rumored to be cursed.

When Justin walks out on Alice on their honeymoon, with no explanation apart from a cryptic note, Alice is left alone and bewildered, her life in pieces. Then she meets Evelyn, a visitor to the gallery where she works. It's a seemingly chance encounter, but Alice gradually learns that Evelyn has motives, and a heartbreaking story, of her own. And that story has haunting parallels with Alice's life. As Alice delves into the mystery of why Justin left her, the questions are obvious. But the answers may lie in the most unlikely of places...

On the balcony of our gorgeous villa, I clink glasses with my handsome new husband, Owen Turner. As I gaze into his mysterious brown eyes, a shiver runs down my spine. I can barely believe it: true love, palm trees, turquoise sea, white sand. Everything should be perfect. Except last night, Owen and I had our first argument. My husband drank too much, and he said something that made me wonder if there's a darker side to the man I married.

As single mother Leah struggles to get her children ready one morning, the doorbell rings. Standing on the doorstep of their terraced house in Whitley Bay is a well-dressed stranger, Clio, who feels an emotional tie to the house that she can’t explain.

When Daisy Cooper’s new husband joins the RAF to fight the Battle of Britain, she’s terrified she’s going to lose him. So when her mother Ivy suggests she join the gardeners at Kew to keep busy, Daisy’s intrigued. After all, Ivy worked at Kew during the last great war and made friends along the way. Louisa Armitage, not ready to hang up her gardening gloves just yet, and Beth Sanderson, an aspiring doctor looking to make a difference, decide to enlist as well. When tragedy strikes, the women are forced to come together to support one other during their darkest hours.

London, 1754. Six years after leaving her illegitimate newborn at the Foundling Hospital, Bess Bright returns to reclaim the daughter she has never known. Dreading the worst, that she has died in care, she is astonished to discover someone pretending to be Bess has already claimed her. Her life is turned upside-down as she tries to find out who has taken her little girl - and why.

Spring, 1909, and Lady Hardcastle, amateur sleuth and all-round eccentric, is enjoying a well-deserved rest. But a week after a trip to the cattle market, Spencer Caradine, a local farmer, turns up dead in the pub, face-down in his beef and mushroom pie. Once again, it is up to Lady Hardcastle and her maid, Florence, to solve the case. Armed with wit and whimsy, not to mention Florence’s mean right hook, the pair set out to discover what really happened and why. Was it poison or just ill luck?

Beautiful, popular, and fortunate, Anna Karenina is an upright wife and mother. But her passionless marriage to a senior statesman leads her into the arms of Count Alexey Vronsky. The dashing cavalry officer stokes in her something exciting and defiant. In abandoning the rules of her noble station, she's aware of the risks: a degraded reputation and the hostile recriminations of St. Petersburg society. But there are even greater stakes as Anna follows desires both romantic and carnal, emancipating and destructive.

Haworth Parsonage, February 1846: It's been six months since the case of the vanished bride, and the Brontë sisters - Anne, Emily, and Charlotte - have received a steady dribble of inquiries made to Bell Brothers and Company solicitors, but nothing to really thrill them. Having found a publisher for their poems, they turn their attention toward writing a full-length novel, deciding to put their covert careers as detectors behind them.

When Rachelle was 15, she was good - apprenticed to her aunt and in training to protect her village from dark magic. But she was also reckless - straying from the forest path in search of a way to free her world from the threat of eternal darkness. After an illicit meeting goes dreadfully wrong, Rachelle is forced to make a terrible choice that binds her to the very evil she had hoped to defeat.

Alex Dale is lost. Destructive habits have cost her a marriage and a journalism career. All she has left is her routine: a morning run until her body aches, then a few hours of forgettable work before the past grabs hold and drags her down. Every day is treading water, every night is drowning. Until Alex discovers Amy Stevenson. Amy Stevenson, who was just another girl from a nearby town until the day she was found unconscious after a merciless assault. Amy Stevenson, who has been in a coma for fifteen years, forgotten by the world.

Beth Pickering is on the verge of finally capturing the rare deathwhistler bird when Professor Devon Lockley swoops in, stealing both her bird and her imagination like a villain. Albeit a handsome and charming villain, but that's beside the point. As someone highly educated in the ruthless discipline of ornithology, Beth knows trouble when she sees it, and she is determined to keep her distance from Devon.

November 1911. Lady Emily Hardcastle is celebrating her birthday by seeing a play at the Duke’s Theatre in Bristol with her maid and confidante, the inimitable Flo. Act One is a triumph. Then Act Two opens with a body on stage—a real one. One of the cast has been brutally murdered during the interval. When other matters get in the way of Inspector Sunderland overseeing the case himself, he asks the ever-resourceful Lady H to keep a watchful eye on the suspects—and his police colleagues.