Showing results by narrator "Gordon Griffin" in All Categories

Soho during the blackouts of the Second World War. When a piercing scream rends the air and a bloodied knife is found, Detective Inspector MacCarthy is soon on the scene. He must move through the dark, seedy Soho underworld - peopled by Italian gangsters, cross-dressing German spies and glamorous Austrian aristocrats - as he attempts to unravel the connection between the mysterious Madame Rohner and the theft of secret antiaircraft defence plans.

Lord Thurlby can only ever recall previous visits of Lavinia Muir, his mother’s goddaughter, with a shudder. So it is with undisguised horror that he hears she is to come and stay again. Her arrival on the common stage, accompanied by the flirtatious Isobel Macclesfield, does nothing to allay his fears. When he learns that Lavinia has become entangled with the rakish Lord Riseholm, his reservations appear to be justified.

July 1829. When a female corpse dressed in male clothing is discovered lying in a haystack in the Worcestershire countryside, rumour and superstition abound. For the sighting of a man in white robes fleeing from the scene leads to suspicion that the Devil's Monk is responsible for the crime. According to local legend, this vengeful apparition appears at intervals to molest and kill.

Detective Inspector Michael Angel and his team of regulars are searching for a serial killer on the loose in the Yorkshire town of Bromersley. The available clues are as sparse as they are puzzling: A character in early Roman attire is observed at every murder and a laurel leaf is left on every corpse. DNA evidence links a woman of oriental origin to the murders but this profile doesn’t fit any of the suspects. The investigations become more mystifying as Inspector Angel races against the clock to find the killer.

On a damp autumn day, two girls playing truant from school find a body in a remote cottage not far from Hungerford. The dead woman, Gillian Lestrange, was a ghostwriter, engaged in writing the memoirs of a widely disliked retired spy, Lavinia (Vinnie) Latham. The mystery thickens when Superintendent Gregory Summers discovers that Gillian was a ghost in more ways than one – she has been presumed dead for the past fifteen years. Somebody paid the price for Gillian’s first death, and a heavy price it was.

In the summer of 1913, the world seems full of possibility for four very different young men. Young Jean-Baptiste dreams of the day he'll leave his Picardy home and row down-river to the sea. Earnest and hard-working Frank has come to London to take up an apprenticeship in Regent Street. His ambitions are self-improvement, a wife and, above all, a bicycle. Organ scholar Benedict is anxious yet enthralled by the sensations of his synaesthesia.

In the long, hot summer of 1969, two young men are involved in the accidental killing of their foreman on a Shropshire building site. Traumatized, they conceal his body and vow to never mention the horrific incident again. Four decades later, DI Frank Kavanagh and DC Jane Salt’s relationship is in trouble and she escapes to a friend’s home in that same Shropshire town. Here, whilst trying to avoid her own relationship problems, Salt gets herself embroiled in her friend’s love life and finds herself in serious danger.

There was a time when Simon Knapp wouldn't have dared go near Edgfield House. As a teenager, he'd only had the nerve to snoop around the grounds. But now, returning 50 years later, he marches straight up to the derelict 18th-century stately home and pushes open the front door. But curiosity killed the cat. When the police arrive, it is with a similar carefree spirit that they carry out a routine search of the house. And they, too, come across something they were not looking for.

For Dick and Tammy, life was a struggle. Although Dick’s family were wealthy, Dick wanted to prove to himself that he was capable of supporting his wife and two children himself. With both finances and marriage failing, Tammy turns to a family friend, Adam, for support when she realises that baby Richard is not responding as he should. After visiting the doctor, all three are devastated to learn that baby Richard is severely deaf. Will this be the final straw?

A note that is discovered hidden in a wall cavity of a London hotel leads Detective Inspector Harry Vicary and his team to a burial site containing the charred bones of two men. Their investigation into this startling find quickly leads them into a dark and brutal world, where men and women are used and abused by those who rule through fear and intimidation. But who were the dead men and how did they meet their fate?

Alderman John Foster purchases a piece of land from the Magdalen Nunnery intending to build a chapel, dedicated to the Magi - the Three Kings of Cologne - and some almshouses. He little imagines the shocking discovery about to be made.

“Matrimony. An Officer of the Honourable East India Company is greatly desirous of finding a soul-mate to share his life and fortune". Lonely spinster Phoebe Creswell responds to an advertisement in the Worcester Herald, but are the outwardly charming Major Christophe de Langlois and his companion, the Reverend Geraint Winward, really who and what they seem?

A raving, bedraggled girl is found sheltering in a barn near the Parish of Tardebigge in Worcestershire. Then the decomposing body of a small boy is unearthed by poachers in a nearby wood. Constable Thomas Potts is called upon to investigate both cases, which appear to be connected to a wagon-load of children known to have been abducted from the Poorhouse. Meanwhile Thomas’ engagement to buxom barmaid Amy Danks is threated by his widowed mother’s hatred of his sweetheart, and by the many duty calls upon his time.

Amy Snowden, in middle age, has long since settled into a lonely life in the Yorkshire town of Gunnarshaw, until - to her neighbours' surprise - she suddenly marries a much younger man. Months later Amy is found dead - apparently by her own hand - and her husband, Wright, has disappeared. Sergeant Caleb Cluff - silent, watchful, a man at home in the bleak moorland landscape of Gunnarshaw - must find the truth about the couple's unlikely marriage and solve the riddle of Amy's death.

Detective Inspector Michael Angel and his team are sent to investigate the murder of a young woman, and inquiries indicate that she had discovered the operation of a money tree swindle at Zenith Television. Angel begins his interviews and is faced with a cast of eccentric characters amongst whom are the peculiar Abercrombie, who tows a boxcar and scavenges for fuel to heat his cottage....

February, 1927: The remains of a man are found in the grounds of Maxtead Court, home of the wealthy Scroope family. Meanwhile, Margaret Rees-Talbot is preparing for her wedding to the Rev Symon Scroope - to the disapproval of some residents of Folbury, who think it's too soon after the death of her father, Osbert, found drowned in his bath a few months previously. Before he died, Osbert had been writing an account of his experiences as a soldier during the Second Boer War. But what really happened in South Africa back in 1902?

Das Haus Usher liegt an einem dunklen See, in dem dämonische Gestalten hausen sollen...

Surprises are guaranteed, as elephants appear in a London side street; a gang of geriatrics goes on a hearing aid heist and an underworld boss searches for a harp. Join the author in a brush with Adolf Hitler and take a walk on Beachy Head, the UK's favourite suicide spot.

When Matthew Hopkins left his hellhole council flat to seek out funding for his heroin addiction, he spotted a plastic bag on the landing outside. Pouncing on it hopefully, he found it contained only a number of bones. Human bones, but from a number of different people, all victims of the same killer. Both the bags and the bones open up more than enough avenues of investigation for Chief Inspector Hennessey and Sergeant Yellich.

Inspector Alvarez is in a good mood, for once. The sun is shining, he has enjoyed an uniterrupted morning nap at his desk, his irasciable boss - Superios Chief Salas - is on holiday, and the local Mallorquin government’s proposal to increase tax on alcohol has been soundly defeated. But optimism, he soon has cause to reflect, is the road to disaster. In short order, he provokes the ire of Salas’ secretary and then of Salas himself - whose holiday does not seem to exclude phoning Alvarez to complain about his work. In no time at all, Alxvarez is mired down by a seemingly impossible task....