Showing results by narrator "David Thorpe" in All Categories

1950s Staffordshire. Within the clay tanks at the pottery company Shentall's, a body has been found. Amid cries of industrial espionage and sabotage of this leader of the pottery industry, there is a case of bitter murder to solve for Inspector Hedley Nicholson. Kelly's mystery won the CWA Gold Dagger Award in 1961 for its impeccable sense of place and detail, and for the emotional weight of its central crime. The novel is part of a shift from the cosiness of crime novels before to mysteries characterised by their psychological interest and affecting realism. An influential classic.

Causing chaos wherever they sail, the robotic Steampunk Pirates are roaming the high seas, hunting for gold! But the evil Iron Duke has other ideas. He's determined to capture the pirates in return for a handsome reward from the king. Can the mechanical marauders stay one wave ahead of their enemy?

The Steampunk Pirates are lured back to England by the promise of gold. But the appearance of their inventor, Mr. Richmond Swift, signals big trouble. He has a new army of robots, and it's not long before sparks begin to fly. Have the pirates finally met their match?

Michael Tate has not had an easy life. With his father in prison, and his mother dead, Michael was sent to Woodside Children’s Home. Now an adult, Michael wakes up in hospital from a coma suffering from amnesia and paralysis. Confused and terrified, he is charged with the fatal stabbing of his girlfriend, Becky. He also learns he attempted to end his own life. Detective Inspector John Carver is determined that Michael is sent to prison. With no way of defending himself, Michael is left in his hospital bed awaiting transfer to remand. But then strange things begin to happen....

A bold new dramatisation of Thomas Hardy’s classic, giving his story a 21st-century resonance. Tess Durbeyfield is driven by poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D'Urberville family. But meeting her cousin Alec proves to be her downfall. This classic criticism of social convention is given a new treatment in this full-cast adaptation which blows away the shepherd's pipe and heritage stereotype, foregrounding Hardy's social and sexual radicalism.

This audiobook stinks! Hold your nose while you find out absolutely everything you never knew about poo! Did you know that.... A week's worth of elephant poo weighs as much a 25 people? A lifetime of farts would fill 2,000 balloons? The world uses enough loo paper in an hour to wrap around the Earth 14 times? This irresistibly disgusting audiobook for children will teach you all you need to know about all kinds of animal dung and human waste - what it's for, how it's made, where it goes, and lots more!

December 1882. Attending the opening of the new Natural History Museum, reporter Alec Lonsdale and his colleague Hulda Friederichs are shocked to discover a body in the basement, hacked to death. Suspicion falls on three cannibals, brought from the Congo as museum exhibits, who have disappeared. But Alec discovers that three other men have been similarly murdered, and when he and Hulda discover a letter in the victim's home warning of a catastrophic event planned for Christmas Eve, they find themselves in a race against time.

Amateur thief Ted Lyte has chosen an isolated house by the coast for his first robbery. But Haven House is no ordinary country home. While hunting for silverware to steal, Ted stumbles upon a locked room containing seven dead bodies. Detective Inspector Kendall takes on the case with the help of passing yachtsman Thomas Hazeldean. The search for the house's absent owners takes Hazeldean across the Channel to Boulogne, where he finds more than one motive to stay and investigate.

Trish Noble, a nurse and devotee of her local church, walks into a Bath police station and confesses to killing her husband. She found him drunk again, saw red and hit him in the side of the head with a teapot. Detective Peter Diamond struggles to see the woman as a cold, callous killer, but when the post-mortem reveals stab wounds to Glenn Noble’s back as the cause of death, it becomes clear there’s more to this case than meets the eye.

A story from the collection Do Not Exceed the Stated Dose. Whilst John and Olga Hitchman are at the Theatre Royal enjoying their usual box, they become the victims of a professional thief who has his eye on their Fabergé egg as an Easter gift for his partner. Known only as 'Macavity', the name given to him by the press, this thief thinks he’s untouchable. But that was before he had detective Peter Diamond on his tail.

A story from the collection Do Not Exceed the Stated Dose. Some might think that Bertie, Prince of Wales’ first case was the suspicious death of jockey Fred Archer in 1886, but here the self-important amateur sleuth recalls how his talent for deduction started much earlier in his youth, when he solved a mystery surrounding an Oxford boat race.

A story from the collection Do Not Exceed the Stated Dose. When widower George Blackitt falls in love with Edith Plumley, there isn’t anything he wouldn’t do for her - including murder.... Edith keeps pedigree mice, and with just one more win, she’ll be a lifetime member of the National Fancy Mice Society. But suddenly there’s new competition in the village, in the form of George’s neighbours.

A story from the collection Do Not Exceed the Stated Dose. The narrator of this short story is unimpressed when all he is bequeathed by his uncle George upon his death, a notorious diamond robber, is his noisy, blue and yellow macaw parrot called Roger. But when Roger is stolen, it becomes clear the parrot is more valuable than the narrator thinks.

A story from the collection Do Not Exceed the Stated Dose. Albert and Rose have been married for 47 years. To everyone else they’re the perfect couple, but Albert has reached breaking point. He’s tired of the same routine every night, the same conversation and running around after his wife. But how to escape when his wife adores him? The only way is murder.

A story from the collection Do Not Exceed the Stated Dose. Professor Patrick Storm and Bishop Ben Tattersall receive a call out of the blue from their Cambridge university chum Cape Brown. He is honouring the pact they made 40 years previously - to reunite and climb Mount Snowdon - and he won’t take no for an answer. However, it becomes clear that there is an ulterior motive behind Cape’s reunion and events soon take a dark turn.

A story from the collection Do Not Exceed the Stated Dose. Bertie, Prince of Wales, must combine his detective skills with those of a firefighter when he tends to a fire in Villiers Street. With no apparent cause, Bertie soon finds himself on the tail of an arsonist.

A parent's worst fear is realised when seven-year-old Libby Hallforth goes missing at a funfair; no witnesses, no leads, and no trace. Months later, human remains are found, but they're too old to be Libby. It's the tip of a gruesome iceberg - bodies, buried in pairs, carefully laid to rest in a ritualistic manner. For DI Jake Porter and DS Nick Styles, the trail for Libby is cold, and everyone is a suspect.

The year is 1999, and Internet companies are springing up everywhere. Anything seems possible for those who think big. So when David Lane - a quiet, cautious banker - is invited by his old friend Guy Jordan to help start up ninetyminutes.com, he decides that for once he will do something daring, something dangerous. If only he'd realised quite how dangerous. Because Guy falls out with Tony Jordan, his father and their biggest investor, bringing the company close to collapse. Then Tony is murdered - and David's roller coaster ride into danger and disaster begins.

When the world's most famous chocolate factory disappears, it is up to the Spy Toys to find out the truth - and fast! If the chocolate runs out, there could be riots from children everywhere! The Spy Toys are sent undercover into a school where they need to disguise themselves as regular pupils. Could this be their toughest challenge yet? They'll need all their wits about them to defeat this baddie. And one thing is for sure: these kids don't play nice!

Against all odds, Aydin Torkal - aka Sleeper 13 - broke free from the terrorist group that took him as a child and raised him into a life of violence and hate. In the two years since, he's been tracking and killing all those responsible. But he's not done yet. Now living a secret life in London, he receives a surprise visit from Rachel Cox of MI6. She needs his help to infiltrate a sinister new terrorist cell who've taken root in the USA. Aydin is initially reluctant.