Showing results by narrator "Cathleen McCarron" in All Categories

The day Anna McDonald's quiet, respectable life explodes starts off like all the days before: Packing up the kids for school, making breakfast, listening to yet another true crime podcast. Then her husband comes downstairs with an announcement, and Anna is suddenly, shockingly alone. Reeling, desperate for distraction, Anna returns to the podcast. Other people's problems are much better than one's own - a sunken yacht, a murdered family, a hint of international conspiracy. But this case actually is Anna's problem. She knows one of the victims from an earlier life.

Alex Morrow faces her toughest opponents yet in this brilliant new thriller about criminals, consequences, and convictions. Police detective Alex Morrow has met plenty of unsavory characters in her line of work, but arms dealer Michael Brown ranks among the most brutal and damaged of the criminals she's known. Morrow is serving as a witness in Brown's trial, where the case hinges on his fingerprints found on the guns he sells.

The death of legendary jazz trumpeter Joss Moody exposes an extraordinary secret. Unbeknown to all but his wife Millie, Joss was a woman living as a man. The discovery is most devastating for their adopted son, Colman, whose bewildered fury brings the press to the doorstep and sends his grieving mother to the sanctuary of a remote Scottish village. Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, Trumpet by Jackie Kay is a starkly beautiful modern classic about the lengths to which people will go for love.

It’s April 2020 and Edinburgh is in lockdown, but that doesn’t mean crime takes a holiday. It would seem like a strange time for a cold case to go hot—the streets all but empty, an hour’s outdoor exercise the maximum allowed—but when a source at the National Library contacts DCI Karen Pirie’s team about documents in the archive of a recently deceased crime novelist, it seems it’s game on again. What unspools is a twisted game of betrayal and revenge, but no one quite expects how many twists it will turn out to have.

The year is 2025, and a mysterious virus has broken out in Scotland - a lethal illness that seems to effect only men. When Dr. Amanda MacLean reports this phenomenon, she is dismissed as hysterical. By the time her warning is heeded, it is too late. The virus becomes a global pandemic - and a political one. The victims are all men. The world becomes alien - a women's world.

In the frigid summers of the Antarctic continent, the sun never sets, and Olivia Campbell has long dreamed of spending a sunlit night in this beautiful, remote place. So when her boyfriend—a high-powered art dealer with a taste for the finer things in life—decides to stage an ostentatious, career-making auction aboard a luxury cruise liner to Antarctica, Olivia can hardly believe her luck. That is, until the ship sets sail and her boyfriend is nowhere to be found, and she is left to manage both the auction and her own creeping fear of the open ocean entirely alone.

It's been 17 months since the Bloodsmith butchered his first victim, and Operation Maypole is still no nearer catching him. The media is whipping up a storm, and the top brass are demanding results, but the investigation is sinking fast. Now isn't the time to get distracted with other cases, but Detective Sergeant Lucy McVeigh doesn't have much choice. When Benedict Strachan was just 11, he hunted down and killed a homeless man. No one's ever figured out why Benedict did it, but now, after 16 years, he's back on the streets again.

In Broken Ground, cold-case Detective Karen Pirie faces her hardest challenge yet. Six feet under in a Highland peat bog lies Alice Somerville’s inheritance, buried by her grandfather at the end of World War II. But when Alice finally uncovers it, she finds an unwanted surprise - a body with a bullet hole between the eyes. Meanwhile, DCI Pirie is called in to unravel a case where nothing is quite as it seems. And as she gets closer to the truth, it becomes clear that not everyone shares her desire for justice. Or even the idea of what justice is.

It's the summer of 1822, and Edinburgh is abuzz with rumours of King George IV's impending visit. In botanical circles, however, a different kind of excitement has gripped the city. In the newly installed Botanic Garden, the Agave Americana plant looks set to flower - an event that only occurs once every few decades. When newly widowed Elizabeth arrives in Edinburgh to live with her late husband's aunt, Clementina, she's determined to put her unhappy past in London behind her. As she settles into her new home, she becomes fascinated by the beautiful Botanic Garden.

In this remarkable blend of memoir, cultural history, and travelogue, poet and author Kathleen Jamie touches points on a timeline spanning millennia, and considers what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past. From the thawing tundra linking a Yup'ik village in Alaska to its hunter-gatherer past to the shifting sand dunes revealing the impressively preserved homes of neolithic farmers in Scotland, Jamie explores how the changing natural world can alter our sense of time.

From the outside, Glenfarach looks like a quaint, sleepy village, nestled in the heart of Cairngorms National Park, but things aren't what they seem. The place is thick with security cameras, and there's a strict nine o'clock curfew, because Glenfarach is the last safe haven for people who've served their sentences but can't be safely released into the general population. For Detective Constable Edward Reekie, this was supposed to be a simple delivery job—drive his new boss up to HMP Grampian and collect Marky Bishop, take him to Glenfarach, then head back home again.

When a body is discovered in the remote depths of the Highlands, DCI Karen Pirie finds herself in the right place at the right time. Unearthed with someone's long-buried inheritance, the victim seems to belong to the distant past - until new evidence suggests otherwise, and Karen is called in to unravel a case where nothing is as it seems. It's not long before an overheard conversation draws Karen into the heart of a different case, however - a shocking crime she thought she'd already prevented. As she inches closer to the twisted truths at the centre of these murders, it becomes clear that she's dealing with a version of justice terrifyingly different to her own....

1910, Edinburgh. Jessie MacRae has been sent to a tenement building by her recently deceased father to bear a child for a wealthy man and his fiancee. The harrowing events that follow lead to a curse on the building and its residents—a curse that will last for the rest of the century. Over nine decades, 10 Luckenbooth Close bears witness to emblems of a changing world outside its walls.

Snow is falling, fires are crackling merrily, and Lockton tradition has everyone hanging a promise they’re determined to keep this Christmas on the tree in the village square... Meg Scott has promised to make a success of her first solo Christmas. She runs a year-round Christmas shop in the little Scottish village, and is a fan of all things mulled, sparkly and festive. So when her warring family shows up on her doorstep, ready to spread discord and tension, Meg is determined not to let them ruin her favourite time of the year.

It’s just a normal morning for Anna McDonald. Gym kits, packed lunches, getting everyone up and ready. Until she opens the front door to her best friend, Estelle. Anna turns to see her own husband at the top of the stairs, suitcase in hand. They’re leaving together and they’re taking Anna’s two daughters with them. Left alone in the big, dark house, Anna can’t think, she can’t take it in. With her safe, predictable world shattered, she distracts herself with a story: a true-crime podcast.

1846. Glasgow is a city on the cusp of great social change, but behind the curtains, neighbours are watching, and rumours of improper behaviour spread like wildfire on the respectable Blythswood Square. When Charlotte Nicholl discovers that the fortune she has been bequeathed by her father is tied up in a secret collection of erotic art, she is faced with a terrible dilemma: sell it and risk shaming her family's good name or lose her home.

Born on a farm outside Edinburgh in the mid-19th century, Agnes Watt is embraced by family, community, and tradition. Her youthful hopes and dreams are quashed but she falls in love and marries William Miller, a Gordon Highlander. Life spirals into dark places as the couple become ensnared in the nightmare that descended on the Scottish working class during the industrial revolution. The triumphs of the great Victorian era came at an appalling human cost and Agnes fights against disease and grinding poverty.

The year is 1746. The Jacobite rebellion has failed catastrophically and Scotland is reeling in the devastating aftermath of the battle of Culloden. Far to the west, on an island in the Outer Hebrides, twenty-four-year-old Flora Macdonald is woken in the dead of night by a messenger with urgent intelligence. Bonnie Prince Charlie is outside, begging for her help. With Flora's assistance, the Stuart prince is disguised as an Irish maid and smuggled to the Isle of Skye, evading government troops.

When Jemima loses her beloved grandfather, keeping his allotment alive seems like ideal way to feel close to him. She's never fitted in before - is this her chance to find where she really belongs? Finally Melissa has the allotment she's been longing for to distract her while her husband works away - even if it is chest-high in weeds. But when she looks for help in the wrong place, she finds she's the hottest topic of gossip.

On a freezing winter morning, fishermen pull a body from the sea. It is quickly discovered that the dead man was the prime suspect in a decade-old investigation, when a prominent civil servant disappeared without trace. DCI Karen Pirie was the last detective to review the file and is drawn into a sinister world of betrayal and dark secrets. But Karen is already grappling with another case, one with even more questions and fewer answers. A skeleton has been discovered in an abandoned camper van and all clues point to a killer who never faced justice - a killer who is still out there.