Showing results by narrator "Ciaran Saward" in All Categories

A robbery rocks the entire household, and everyone is a suspect. Twelve-year-old trainee housemaid Alice and reclusive young aristocrat Theo are determined to solve the case. As they investigate upstairs and downstairs to track down the culprit, the mystery deepens, and danger looms closer.

Britannia - AD 60. When her husband dies, Boudicca, queen of the Iceni, expects Rome to enter into a new power-sharing agreement with her people. However, when Rome reneges on the agreement and her daughters are raped by Roman soldiers, Boudicca raises an army to fight back against the occupation. The Britannic tribes rise up and join her in a campaign against their oppressors, and soon her enormous army is sweeping across Britannia in an unstoppable campaign of brutality.

When a championship jockey discovers the body of a young woman during a cold morning’s training ride, the local racing community is shocked to its core. Everyone says she was the perfect friend, the perfect daughter and the perfect fiancée. But as Detective Mark Turpin delves into the girl’s fateful last hours, he discovers a past full of lies and mystery. Investigating the truth behind her savage death, Mark uncovers jealousy and ambition within the tiny community, accompanied by a disturbing reluctance to help the police.

To many of us, Bowie was so much more than a pop idol. But why? In Why Bowie Matters, Professor Will Brooker answers that question persuasively, as both a fan and an academic. A Bowie obsessive since childhood, he hit the headlines over the course of a year-long immersive research project that took him from London to Berlin and New York, following in Bowie’s footsteps, only listening to music and reading books he loved, and even at times adopting his fashion.

It started with an invitation to dinner. An evening of good food and good company at a luxury villa. But as the night progresses, the party takes a dark turn. The host makes you an offer, a party favour he calls it: another guest has committed a heinous crime, you can end their life, stop their terror. He tells you there will be no consequences; do you believe him? Your decision will change your life. Choose carefully.

Seth Beauman can’t sleep. He stays up late, calling strangers from his phone book, hoping to make a connection, while his wife, Maeve, sleeps upstairs. A crossed wire finds a suicidal Hadley Serf on the phone to Seth, thinking she is talking to The Samaritans. But a seemingly harmless late-night hobby turns into something more for Seth and for Hadley, and soon their late-night talks are turning into daytime meet-ups. And then this dysfunctional love story turns into something altogether darker when Seth brings Hadley home.... And someone is watching....

In the 1970s the US military believed they could create a ‘super soldier’ - one who could use psychic powers to walk through walls, disarm the enemy through telepathy or kill a goat by staring at it. The brain behind these techniques was Michael Murphy, one of the founders of New Age spiritualism in the hippy enclaves of San Francisco. But Murphy’s primary goal was to use these powers in sport to create a supreme athlete capable of extraordinary feats.

Ravi Gupta’s dark secret is unravelling. After years of hiding a dangerous portal discovered through foolish magic, the regretful academic worries his brilliant student has recklessly used it to travel to an alien world. And though he’s loath to go back, he stealthily opens a passage and journeys to the perilous land, desperate to save the missing scholar.

This term begins with a school trip to the coast, where Harley stumbles upon a mysterious fossil. Could it be that Harley has discovered an entirely new dinosaur species? Meanwhile, eager to best her class nemesis Fenelda in the contest for best invention, Harley dreams big with her attempt to invent a time travel machine. It doesn't seem to work, but soon strange happenings all over Inventia make her question whether the time travel machine might work after all! But what to do about the huge dinosaur that has been spotted in Forgetown?

Little Henry Wallace was eight years old and 100 miles from home before anyone talked to him. His mother placed him on a train with a label around his neck, asking for him to be kept safe for a week, kept away from Hinton Hollow. Because something was coming.

Nine people arrive one night on Chelsea Bridge. They’ve never met. But at the same time, they run and leap to their deaths. Each of them received a letter in the post that morning, a pre-written suicide note, and a page containing only four words: Nothing important happened today. That is how they knew they had been chosen to become a part of the People of Choice: a mysterious suicide cult whose members have no knowledge of one another.

The latest freshers have more than fitting in to fear when a forbidden entity is unleashed in an ancient seat of learning. New arrivals Nick and Annabel feel out of place at university, but when they are attacked by a creature straight out of their worst nightmares, their first term becomes less pass-fail than do-or-die. As the bodies pile up, their college’s dark secret cannot stay hidden for long. And when their tutors fall prey to mysterious forces, can Nick and Annabel enroll the night climber Giles to help banish the beast before freshers’ year becomes their last?

Russia is the largest country in the world, with the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. Over a thousand years this multifaceted nation of shifting borders has been known as Rus, Muscovy, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Thirty years ago, it was reinvented as the Russian Federation. Russia is not an enigma, but its past is violent, tragic, sometimes glorious, and certainly complicated. Like the rest of us, the Russians constantly rewrite their history. They too omit episodes of national disgrace in favour of patriotic anecdotes, sometimes more rooted in myth than reality.

Eli Hagin can’t finish anything. He hates his job, but can’t seem to quit. He doesn’t want to be with his girlfriend, but doesn’t know how end things with her, either. Eli wants to write a novel, but he’s never taken a story beyond the first chapter. Eli also has trouble separating reality from fiction. When his best friend kills himself, Eli is motivated, for the first time in his life, to finally end something himself, just as Mike did. Except sessions with his therapist suggest that Eli’s most recent ‘first chapters’ are not as fictitious as he had intended.

Giles Chamberlain returns to a snowbound Cambridge after Christmas spent with his girlfriend. Determined to prove himself to her family, he sets out to discover what became of her missing brother. But when he encounters a sinister figure prowling the college’s rooftops, he suspects last semester’s creature was not the only entity to cross into our world.

When a young teenager is stabbed to death at a busy fairground, Detective Mark Turpin is assigned the task of finding the boy’s killer. But this was no random murder. Mark knows the victim, and the man who ordered his death. As he sifts through the young victim’s final days, he uncovers a powerful crime syndicate that will do anything to protect its interests. Then tragedy strikes, and suddenly Mark isn’t just trying to solve a murder - he’s fighting for his own survival.

For five years, Ben Coates lived alongside a major channel of the river in Rotterdam, crossing it daily, swimming and sailing in its tributaries. In The Rhine, he sets out by bicycle from the Netherlands where it enters the North Sea, following it through Germany, France and Liechtenstein, to its source in the icy Alps. He explores the impact that the Rhine has had on European culture and history and finds out how influences have flowed along and across the river, shaping the people who live alongside it.

What if some secrets were never meant to stay buried? When a parish priest is brutally murdered in cold blood, a rural community is left in shock - and fear. New to the Vale of the White Horse, Detective Sergeant Mark Turpin discovers the murder bears the hallmark of a vicious killer who shows no remorse for his victim, and leaves no trace behind. After a second priest is killed, his broken body bearing similar ritualistic abuse, the police are confronted by a horrifying truth - there is a serial killer at large with a disturbing vendetta....

Oswald doesn’t want a new friend either, especially not a book-loving, bed-making, broccoli-eating boy. But when an imaginary friend gets a new assignment, they’re stuck there until the kid no longer needs them. And with Oswald’s home world of Imagination mysteriously crumbling away into nothing, befriending Reggie seems like a safer bet than disappearing with it. But when Oswald forgets Reggie’s birthday, Reggie runs away to Imagination.

In November 1974, British MP and former cabinet minister John Stonehouse walked into the sea off a beach in Miami and disappeared, seemingly drowned. Then he was found—on the other side of the world, in Australia—and his extraordinary story began to come to light: a Labour cabinet minister and a devoted family man, also in a long-term affair with his secretary, and a spy for the Czech State Security agency, who had committed fraud and attempted to fake his own death to escape catastrophic business failures.