Showing results by narrator "Jeff` Harding" in All Categories

Take his hand and follow him into the darkness....John Connolly, bestselling author of five brilliantly scary mystery novels, now turns his pen to the short story to give us a dozen chilling tales of the supernatural. In this macabre collection, echoing masters of the genre from M R James to Stephen King, Connolly delves into our darkest fears - lost lovers, missing children, subterranean creatures and predatory demons.

Ethan Gage, an expatriate American in post-revolutionary France, wins an ancient medallion in a card game. That same night, Ethan is framed for a prostitute’s murder and barely escapes France with his life. Faced with either prison or death, Gage is offered a third choice: to accompany Napoleon Bonaparte, as France sails to conquer Egypt. Once Gage arrives, he realises that the medallion may solve one of the greatest riddles of history – who built the Great Pyramids, and why.

The USA has been ravaged by civil war. It's been 30 years since the first wind-borne viruses ended the war between North and South. While the South has been devastated by disease, the North has emerged victorious but terrified of reprisals. Both territories remain at the mercy of the vicious Northern dictator, Renard. Two survivors, Dyce and Vida, journeyed deep into the Southern terrains in search of a cure for Renard's chemical warfare. Now they find themselves scouring the Northern territories on a new and far deadlier pursuit.

Most of them were asleep in their beds when the ground gave way.... When Ryder Creed responds to a devastating mudslide in North Carolina, he knows the difference between finding survivors and the dead is time. Heedless of the dangers, Creed and his best search-and-rescue dog, Bolo, are frantically wading through the chaos of twisted tree limbs, crumbled cement, and unrecognizable debris when a second slide catches up with Ryder.

As Hitler was attempting to conquer the western world, his armies were methodically pillaging the finest art in Europe, from Michelangelos to Vermeers, all stolen for the Führer. The Monuments Men had a mandate from President Roosevelt to find these artworks, but no vehicles, typewriters, or authority. In a race against time to save the world’s greatest cultural treasures from destruction at the hands of Nazi fanatics, each man constructed his own treasure map....

What is it like to broadcast the fateful words "Mayday, Mayday, Mayday," then jump into the unknown? The members of one of the world's most unusual brotherhoods provide the answers in this incredible book. Formed during the Second World War to celebrate the survival of pilots who had been forced to bail out over water, the Goldfish Club has taken on new members ever since. They share one pivotal moment, but their experiences beyond this couldn't be more different.

Moscow, 1985. The Soviet Union and its communist regime are in the last stages of decline, but remain opaque to the rest of the world - and still very dangerous. In this ever-shifting landscape, a senior KGB officer - code name GAMBIT - has approached the CIA Moscow station chief with top secret military weapons intelligence and asked to be exfiltrated. GAMBIT demands that his handler be a former CIA officer, Alex Garin, a former KGB officer who defected to the American side.

Sharon Ransom is the most beautiful woman in the room; she’s also the most troubled. So when former lover psychologist Alex Delaware bumps into her at a lavish LA cocktail party, though still attracted to her, fear of reviving unhappy memories prevents him from offering the help she seems so desperate for. Hours later, Sharon’s body is discovered with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Tortured by guilt, Alex wants answers.

January '42. LA reels behind the shock of Pearl Harbor. Local Japanese are rounded up and slammed behind bars. Massive thunderstorms hit the city. A body is unearthed in Griffith Park. The cops tag it as a routine dead-man job. They’re wrong. It’s an early warning signal of chaos. There’s a murderous fire and a gold heist. There’s Fifth Column treason on American soil. There are homegrown Nazis, commies and race racketeers. There’s two dead cops in a dive off the jazz-club strip. And three men and one woman have a hot date with history.

In a top-secret location deep in the Ural Mountains, Russian President Gennadiy Gryzlov has built his nation's most dangerous weapon since the atomic bomb - a fearsome tool to gain superiority in Russia's long-running battle with the West. From inside Perun Aerie - an intricate network of underground tunnels and chambers that is the heart of the Russian cyberwarfare program - he is launching a carefully plotted series of attacks on an unsuspecting US and its European allies.

In the new edge-of-your seat thriller from New York Times best-selling author Alex Kava, Ryder Creed, his K9 search-and-rescue dogs and FBI agent Maggie O'Dell find themselves at the centre of a dire and mysterious case. In Chicago, a young man jumps from his thirtieth-story hotel room; along the Missouri river, a hunter and his son find a lake whose surface is littered with snow geese, all of them dead.

Professor David Ullman is among the world's leading authorities on demonic literature. Not that he's a believer. He sees what he teaches as a branch of the imagination and nothing more. So when offered a luxury trip to Venice to consult on a 'phenomenon', he accepts, taking his 11-year-old daughter, Tess, with him. Amidst the decadent splendour of the city, David makes his way to the address he's been asked to visit. What he witnesses in the tiny attic room shakes him to the core: a man restrained in a chair, clearly insane. But what David hears the man say is worse. The voice of his father, dead for 30 years, repeating the last words he ever spoke to his son.

As a secret service agent, Nick Averose spent a decade guarding the most powerful people in the US. Now, he's a mock killer, testing the security around the highest officials to find vulnerabilities, before America's enemies can. Nick's latest assignment leads him to the home of a former CIA director. But when he breaches the director's study, Nick is entangled in a vicious crime. One that will shake Washington to its foundations. Nick needs to find out who is framing him and why. If he can't uncover the truth, a dark conspiracy will consume him and everyone else in the Oval Office....

Emma Vane blurs the line between human and plant in this short story featuring a lily that has developed a mouth and can moan. Concern is soon raised for the safety of the central protagonist, botanist Carl Brense.

When the Cutter family's next-door-neighbours, the Langleys, are gunned down in their house one hot August night, the Cutters' world is turned upside down. That violent death should have come so close to them is shocking enough in suburban Promise Falls, but at least the Cutters can console themselves with the thought that lightning is unlikely to strike twice in the same place. Unless, of course, the killers went to the wrong house.

Mick Hardin is back in the hills of Kentucky. He'd planned to touch down briefly before heading to France, marking the end to his 20-year Army career. In Rocksalt, his sister Linda the sheriff is investigating the murder of Pete Lowe, a sought-after mechanic at the local racetrack. After another body is found, Linda and her deputy Johnny Boy Tolliver wonder if the murders are related. Linda steps into harm's way just as a third body turns up and Mick ends up being deputised again, uncovering evidence of illegal cockfighting, and trying to connect all the crimes.

This extraordinary biography of the legendary screen star Marilyn Monroe was originally published in 1973 by Norman Mailer, one of America's most important writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century. Mailer, the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, was the first writer to explore the relationship between Monroe and Bobby Kennedy.

Washington, London and Peking - terror sweeps the globe. The Vice-Premier of the People's Republic has been brutally murdered by a legendary assassin and everyone is asking the same fearful questions: Why has Bourne come back? Who is paying him? Who is next on his death list? But US officials know the shocking truth: there is no Jason Bourne. There never was. But someone has resurrected the name, and if he is not stopped, the world will pay a devastating price. Jason Bourne must live again.

A short story from the British Library Tales of the Weird collection Evil Roots. Best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, this short story by Conan Doyle preceded the famous detective by almost a decade. After an altercation, a disgruntled American storms off into the night, only to disappear mysteriously. Could a giant flytrap really be capable of engulfing an adult victim?

In the vein of Graham Greene and John le Carré, The Matchmaker delivers a chilling Cold War spy story set in West Berlin, where an American woman targeted by the Stasi must confront the truth behind her German husband's mysterious disappearance. Berlin, 1989. Protests across East Germany threaten the Iron Curtain, and communism is the ill man of Europe.