Showing results by narrator "Ben Onwukwe" in All Categories

Recognising Black British experience within the Black Lives Matter movement, 19 prominent Black figures explain why Black lives should be celebrated when too often they are undervalued. Drawing from personal experience, they stress how Black British people have unique perspectives and experiences that enrich British society and the world; how Black lives are far more interesting and important than the forces that try to limit it.

Deep within the archives of time-and-motion pioneer Lillian Gilbreth lies a secret. Famous for producing solid light-tracks that captured the path of workers' movements, Gilbreth helped birth the era of mass observation and big data. Did she also, as her broken correspondence with a young Soviet physicist suggests, discover in her final days a 'perfect' movement, one that would 'change everything'?

St Pauls, Bristol, 1980. Joseph Tremaine Ellington, now 57 years old, has long abandoned his former career as an enquiry agent for the safety of teaching. But his old life draws him back. One of the very few lights from Ellington’s dark and violent past has flickered out. His fiancée, Ruth Castle, is dead - leaving him again heartbroken and alone to bring up his 15-year-old niece, Chloe. Ellington’s days are long and lonely, his nights tormented by old ghosts.

Mining diamonds is a lucrative business, but it soon proves itself deadly. Shortly after Kubu joins the CID, the richest diamond mine in the world is robbed of 100,000 carats of diamonds in transit. The robbery is well-executed and brutal. Police immediately suspect an inside job, but there is no evidence of who it could be. When the robbers are killed execution-style in South Africa and the diamonds are still missing, the game changes, and suspicion focuses on a witch doctor and his son.

It is ordinary homes, not grand public buildings or the mansions of the rich that have all the best stories. The rises and falls, the shifts in the fortunes of neighbourhoods and whole cities are here, tracing the often surprising journey one single house can take from elegant dwelling in a fashionable district to a tenement for society’s rejects. Packed with remarkable human stories, it is a phenomenal insight into living history, a history we can see every day on the streets where we live.

Was it suicide… or murder? When teenager Nick Buckingham tumbles from the fifth floor of an apartment block, Detective Sergeant Solomon Gray answers the call with a sick feeling in his stomach. The victim was just a kid, sixteen years old. And the exact age the detective's son, Tom, would've been, had he not gone missing at a funfair ten years ago. Each case involving children haunts Gray with the reminder that his son may still be out there - or worse, dead.

The British government has embarked on an ambitious and legally-binding climate change target: reduce the country's greenhouse gas emissions to Net Zero by 2050. The Net Zero policy was subject to almost no parliamentary or public scrutiny, and is universally approved by our political class. But what will its consequences be?

Set along the Great Barrier Reef, ‘The Black Bell Buoy’ recalls the story of two members of the Marine Board who were sent to secure a giant buoy near a dangerous piece of coral. Only one man makes it home though as rumours of a hideous octopus abound.

Alex Locke is a reformed ex-con forced into London's criminal underworld for one more job. He agrees to steal a priceless artefact - a human heart carved from the blackest obsidian - but when the burglary goes horribly wrong, Alex is plunged into the nightmarish world of the Wolves of London, unearthly assassins who will stop at nothing to reclaim the heart. As he races to unlock the secrets of the mysterious object, Alex must learn to wield its dark power - or be destroyed by it.

Alex and Morven have a pretty perfect marriage. Still madly in love after ten years, they have no secrets from each other and their life in London with daughter Poppy is...happy. Until one day it changes. Morven disappears, her car found abandoned. The police come around to Alex's house to tell him things about his wife he never knew: her real name, her past life, the secrets she kept from him. And Alex realises he's been loving a lie.

The world has changed beyond all recognition. Six years ago an unknown and dangerous virus left humanity blind. The world is doomed to an eternity in total darkness. People have adjusted as best they can, adjusting their senses to the new reality; phones have echolocation instead of large screens, cars are self-driven and radio killed the TV. But when a dead body is found in the city, the clues indicate that the killer must be a person who can see… In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. And he has only started his killing spree.

Caring and loving family man Jarmo Kivi lives a slow life in the suburbs where he works for a funeral home and actively takes part in his kids' lives and their activities. But Kivi has a secret; a hidden life of crime. Beneath his disguise as a loving father he is also a brutal, calculating and ice cold assassin – one who only a few know about.

Staying Power is a panoramic history of black Britons. Stretching back to the Roman conquest, encompassing the court of Henry VIII, and following a host of characters from Mary Seacole to the abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, Peter Fryer paints a picture of two thousand years of Black presence in Britain. First published in the 80s, amidst race riots and police brutality, Fryer's history performed a deeply political act; revealing how Africans, Asians and their descendants had long been erased from British history.

In 1980s London, Black political leaders who can straddle the racial divide are a rarity. So when a rising Black politician, Aston Edwards, is murdered, the effects quickly ripple through London’s Afro-Caribbean community. Then a young Black boy is arrested for his murder, surrounded by rumours of an affair with Aston’s wife. Sammy Dean, journalist turned investigator, is determined to find the truth. When a Black activist’s death is written off as a suicide, Sam begins to think the two cases are linked. With tensions running high, can Sam find the truth before the city erupts?

In the 1980s, London is a melting pot of cultures, but race and class create sharp divisions. Black British journalist Sam Dean looks for stories, not missing persons. When and old friend asks for help tracking down a White Conservative MP’s daughter, he feels he can’t say no. Virginia’s disappearance is tangled with the fate of Roy, a young mixed-race boy who reminds Sam of his own son, and Sam becomes determined to find the truth.

Sent from London to New York to bring a dying friend’s message to his daughter, Mary, Sam Dean arrives in Queens, steeped in a mesh of Caribbean and Hispanic culture, looking forward to reconnecting with family and old friends. But his relaxing holiday turns dark when Mary disappears, and Sammy is caught up in a world of murder, sex and corrupt politics that threatens to turn his world upside down.

When a TV producer offers journalist Sam Dean the job of tracking down a suspect in the brutal murder of a young woman and her child, he's reluctant to get involved. But when a colleague is stabbed to death on set, it’s clear something bigger is going on. And when threatening anonymous notes start arriving, Sam is forced to dig for the truth.

The real nightmare begins when the missing person returns. PC Gareth Bell is about to arrest a cocaine dealer on Brighton Marina, when he makes a shocking discovery that turns his world upside down: the dealer is his long-lost brother, Jake, someone he thought had died years ago. But their reunion is short lived. For Jake is on the run from a cold-blooded killer, whose network reaches all the way into the police force itself. Now that his brother’s life is on the line, Bell has only two choices. Family, or duty?

A short story from the British Library Crime Classic collection Murder by the Book. A devotee of Sherlock Holmes and prominent Sherlockian scholar, S.C. Roberts wrote several works about Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective. In this story, Holmes and Watson are tasked with discovering who is stealing large quantities of books from the circulation library of a London club. With no clear suspect or motive, Holmes must rely on clues that are hidden in plain sight.

A man is writing a book about prison life, using the first-hand stories of previously incarcerated women. Angered by his treatment of her, one of the women burns the manuscript—but she is later discovered murdered in the nearby woods. Detective Inspector Roberts is tasked with uncovering whether there is more to this case than meets the eye.