Showing results by narrator "Gareth Armstrong" in All Categories

Welsh surgeon Daffyd Woodruff's life is blown apart by the arrival of unexpected news. In the remote town of Moose Creek where he lived and worked fifteen years before, he's told he fathered twins. Dafydd knows it cannot be true - but DNA tests don't lie. From nowhere the past has a stranglehold on Daffyd, threatening to unravel everything he's built up - his marriage, his career.

The discovery of Bradley Pines body off a busy road signals the end of his bid to win a local election. But why would the killer risk dumping the body so publicly? With the election looming, and Charlie Woodends old enemy Marlowe replacing Pine as candidate, Woodend is required to produce a result.

Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced American woman for whom Edward VIII abdicated in 1936, ended her life as the prisoner of her lawyer who would not allow anyone - friend, foe or journalist - to visit her in her Paris flat. Rose Tremain takes this true story and transforms it into an imaginative and ironic fiction. Her thesis is that Wallis, gaga and bed-ridden, has forgotten the king who gave up an empire for love of her. The other stories in this magnificent collection range over a variety of themes, equally original and unexpected.

August, 1098. After countless battles and sieges, the surviving soldiers of the First Crusade are at last within reach of their ultimate goal: Jerusalem. But rivalries fester, and new enemies are amassing against them in the Holy Land. Demetrios Askiates, the Emperor's spy, has had enough of the Crusade's violence and hypocrisy. But when a routine diplomatic mission leads to a deadly ambush, he realises he has been snared in the vast power struggles which underlie the Crusade.

Adapted from the Arthur Conan Doyle story "Silver Blaze".... Horseracing is the sport of kings, perhaps because racehorses are very expensive animals. But when they win races, they can make a lot of money too - money for the owners, for the trainers, and for the people who put bets on them to win.Silver Blaze is a young horse, but already the winner of many races. One night he disappears from his stables, and someone kills his trainer.

Terry Walton has kept an allotment for over 50 years - man and boy - in the Rhondda valley in South Wales. He started when he was 4, helping on his dad's plot on the side of the mountain, when he was sent to cut bracken and collect sheep manure by the bucketful to feed the rows of vegetables. By the time he was 11 he had his own plot - the youngest ever to do so - and while still in his teens established an allotment empire to grow the vegetables and flowers he sold to local customers.

Today, 12 golden tablets sit in museums around the world, each created by unknown hands and buried in ancient times, and each providing the dead with the route to the afterlife. Archaeologist Lily Barnes, working on a dig in southern Italy, has just found another. But this tablet names the location to the mouth of hell itself. And then Lily vanishes. Has she walked out on her job, her marriage, and her life - or has something more sinister happened? Her husband, Jonah, is desperate to find her. But no one can help him: not the police, and not the secretive foundation that sponsored her dig.

Dark Echo is an unlucky boat. Despite this knowledge, Martin Stannard falls under her spell and prepares to sail her across the Atlantic with his father. But his lover, Suzanne, is uneasy and begins exploring the yacht's past. What she finds is terrifying. Dark Echo isn't just unlucky, it's evil. It was built for Harry Spalding, a soldier and sorcerer who committed suicide yet still casts his malevolent spell nearly a century after his death.

Paris, 2037. Alexandre Lamarque of the French external security service is hunting for eco-terrorists. Experience has taught him there is no one he can trust. Experience has taught him there is no one he can trust—not his secretive lover Mariam, not even his old mentor, Professor Fayard, the man at the center of the web. He is ready to give up. But he can’t. In search of the truth, Alex must follow the trail through an ominous spiral of events.

Having been made High Commissioner in Nairobi, Ed Barnes is keeping his head down and staying out of trouble. But when his daughter, Sophie, is kidnapped following a security crisis for which he is blamed, his attempts at normality fall apart once again. He finds himself at the heart of a complex negotiation with a dangerous Somali terrorist group, in an effort to avert a regional security crisis and free his daughter.

He may have prevented the world from falling into ruin, but Alex knows his work is not done yet. There’s still a controlling intelligence out there, pulling together the strands of a new and even more destructive conspiracy. Battling with personal tragedy on one hand, and the intrusion of new-found celebrity on the other, Alex must re-emerge from self-imposed exile to reunite with Mariam–the woman he loves–and Amaury–his truest friend–to face the fight of their lives.

Sydney Kentridge carved out a reputation as South Africa's most prominent anti-apartheid advocate—his story is entwined with the country's emergence from racial injustice and oppression. He is the only lawyer to have acted for three winners of the Nobel Peace Prize—Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Chief Albert Lutuli. Already world-famous for his landmark cases, he then became England's premier advocate.