Showing results by narrator "John Hopkins" in All Categories

On a hot July night in 1983, six school friends go camping in the forest. Bright and brilliant, they are destined for great things, and young Aurora Jackson is dazzled to be allowed to tag along. Thirty years later, a body is discovered. DCI Sheens is called to the scene, but he already knows what's waiting for him: Aurora Jackson, found at long last. But that's not all. The friends have all maintained their innocence, but the body is found in a hideaway only the six of them knew about. It seems the killer has always lurked very close to home....

Dorset, 1935. Stationmaster Ted has never cared much for romance. Occupied with ensuring England’s most beautiful railway runs on time, love has always felt like a comparatively trivial matter. Yet when he meets Annie Galbraith on the 8:42 train to Lynford, he can’t help but instantly fall for her. But when the railway is forced to close and a terrible accident occurs within the station grounds, Ted finds his job and any hope of a relationship with Annie hanging in the balance.

In 1965, the German journalist Horst Krüger attended the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, where 22 former camp guards were put on trial for the systematic murder of more than one million men, women and children. Twenty years after the end of the war, this was the first time that the German people were confronted with the horrific details of the Holocaust executed by 'ordinary men' still living in their midst.

A little girl found a leg on the shore of my lake. The authorities won’t drain the lake to look for the rest of the body. They say it’s impossible, that 5,000 acres is too much, even to look into a potential murder. The thing is...they emptied it out a while ago just to clean up some old sewage. They absolutely can drain the lake if they want to. But maybe they know better than to try.

In August 1942, beleaguered Malta was within weeks of surrender to the Axis, because its 300,000 people could no longer be fed. Churchill made a personal decision that at all costs, the ‘island fortress’ must be saved. The largest fleet the Royal Navy committed to any operation of the western war was assembled to escort 14 fast merchantmen across a thousand of miles of sea defended by 600 German and Italian aircraft. This is the saga Max Hastings unfolds in his first full-length narrative of the Royal Navy, which he believes was the most successful of Britain’s wartime services.

Ralph is turning 45, and the only gift he wants is his ex-wife. Gemma, his trophy girlfriend, won’t let anything ruin her plans for an engagement. Sarah, the ex-wife, has agreed to attend Ralph’s party, with her new man in tow. And Jack, her partner, will stop at nothing to keep Sarah out of her ex-husband’s clutches. It’s a celebration like no other. The whole extended family in a villa on the beautiful Amalfi coast. But by the end of the trip, two people will be dead. At this birthday party to remember, will anybody unwrap the truth?

The West is in shock. Al-Qaeda has struck the US on 9/11, and thousands are dead. Within weeks, UK Special Forces enter the fray in Afghanistan alongside the CIA's Team Alpha and US troops. Victory is swift but fragile. Hundreds of jihadists surrender, and two operatives from Team Alpha enter Qala-i Jangi - the 'Fort of War' - to interrogate them. The prisoners revolt; one CIA man falls, and the other is trapped inside the fort. Seven members of the SBS - elite British Special Forces - volunteer for the rescue force and race into danger and the unknown.

Award-winning writer and filmmaker Laurence Rees has spent nearly 20 years meeting people who were tested to the extreme during World War II. He has come face to face with rapists, mass murderers, even cannibals, but he has also met courageous individuals who are an inspiration to us all. His quest has taken him from the Baltic States to Japan, from Poland to America and from Germany to China.

Aidan Poole logs on to his laptop late at night to Skype his girlfriend, Zoe. To his horror, he realises that there is someone else in her flat, and Aidan can only listen to the sounds of a violent struggle - and then the chilling sound of silence. Aidan is desperate to find out if Zoe is OK. But then why is he so hesitant to call the police? When his messages finally reach them, DCI Jonah Sheens and his team take the case - and discover the body.

Detective Jonah Sheens is enjoying a moment of peace and quiet, when a teenage girl wanders out of the wood. She's striking, with flame-red hair and a pale complexion. She's also covered in blood. She insists she's fine. It's her sister he needs to worry about. Jonah quickly discovers that Keely and her sister, Nina, disappeared from a children's home a week ago. Now, Keely is here—but Nina's still missing.

The year 1777 is bleak indeed for the cause of American Independence, with the British army twice defeating Washington and taking the capital city of Philadelphia and the Royal Navy sweeping aside the defenses of the Delaware Bay. For Captain Isaac Biddlecomb and the men of the half-built frigate Falmouth, things are direr still. After managing to slip through a British blockade, they find themselves trapped in a desolate harbour on the New Jersey coast and menaced not by the British but by the outlaw bands that terrorise the countryside and see Falmouth as a potentially valuable prize.

The Cotswolds, 1924. At the Old Forge in the quiet village of Maybury-in-the-Marsh a cry of anguish rings out: lady of the house Amy Phelps has been discovered dead. But with all the windows and doors to her room locked from inside, how – and by whom – was she killed? Arbuthnot ‘Arbie’ Swift finds himself in the unlikely position of detective. The celebrated author of The Gentleman’s Guide to Ghost-Hunting is staying at the Old Forge to investigate a suspected spectre, but now the more pressing matter of Amy’s murder falls to him too.

The Missing of the Somme has become a classic meditation upon war and remembrance. It weaves a network of myth and memory, photos and films, poetry and sculptures, graveyards and ceremonies that illuminate our understanding of, and relationship to, the Great War.

Each of these startlingly original stories is set in modern Britain. Their characters include a people-trafficking gang-master and a prostitute, a migrant worker and a cocksure estate agent, an elderly musician doubly befuddled by dementia and the death of his wife, a pest-controller suspected of paedophilia and a librarian so well-behaved that her parents wonder anxiously whether she’ll ever find love.

Aisling's two sons, Ethan and Finn, mean everything to her. Ever since becoming estranged from her own parents, though, she's always felt like a piece of her is missing. Desperate to find answers - about her family, and herself - Aisling uploads her DNA to an ancestry website, and is thrilled when it finds a match. But instead of finding answers, she comes face to face with a detective. Aisling's DNA is a match for a recent crime scene - the latest in a string of murders by a dangerous serial killer, known as 'the bonfire killer'.

Saffron vowed to love Miles no matter what life threw at them both. But when her mother-in-law moves into their happy family home, Saffron’s shiny life begins to tarnish. Even as Caprice’s barbed comments turn to something more sinister, Saffron hopes the new nanny’s arrival will shield her from the worst of it. She’s starting to feel paranoid in her own home. Little does she realise that Caprice longs for a new daughter-in-law—and she’ll do anything to make that happen.

Louise wakes up. Her head aches, her mouth is dry, her memory is fuzzy. But she suspects she's done something bad. She rolls over towards her husband, Niall. The man who, until recently, made her feel loved. But it's not Niall who's lying beside her. In fact, she's never seen this man before. And he's dead. As Louise desperately struggles to piece her memories back together, it's clear to Detective Jonah Sheens and his team that she is their prime suspect - though they soon find she's not the only one with something to hide.

In this brilliantly focused and haunting portrait of the people, the politics, the land and the poetry of Nicaragua, Salman Rushdie brings to the forefront the palpable human facts of a country in the midst of revolution. Rushdie went to Nicaragua in 1986. What he discovered was overwhelming: a land of difficult, often beautiful contradictions, of strange heroes and warrior-poets. Rushdie came to know an enormous range of people, from the foreign minister, a priest, to the midwife who kept a pet cow in her living room.

Yefgenii Yeremin is a flyer and a phantom. Destined to go down in Soviet history books as 'Ivan the Terrible', the most deadly fighter pilot of the Korean War, one moment of madness sees Yefgenii throwing his reputation to the wind. Exiled to a remote Arctic base, his name unknown and victories uncelebrated, he must endure a fate worse than death: anonymity. But when a man arrives from Moscow's Space Committee in search of a volunteer prepared to sacrifice himself for his country, Yefgenii seizes his one last chance of immortality.

On the morning of the Tory Party conference, the bones of a young woman’s hand are discovered in a London building site. Prime Minister Robin Sandford is accused of killer her. With his career on the brink of ruin, he enlists the unofficial help of MI5. A decision which leads him into a new world of espionage, mass executions and murder. The deeper he goes, the more treacherous the game becomes. And if he fails to expose the truth, the whole country will pay the price…