Showing results by narrator "William Hope" in All Categories

Grand Master Ursula K. LeGuin has been recognised for almost fifty years as one of the most important writers in the SF field - and is likewise feted beyond the confines of the genre. The Wind's Twelve Quarters was her first collection and it brings together some of finest short fiction, including the Hugo Award-winning 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas', the Nebula Award-winning 'The Day Before the Revolution', and the Hugo-nominated 'Winter's King', which gave listeners their first glimpse of the world later made famous in her Hugo- and Nebula-winning masterpiece The Left Hand of Darkness.

Jefferson Winter is no ordinary investigator. The son of one of America's most renowned serial killers, Winter has spent his life trying to distance himself from his father's legacy.When he accepts a particularly disturbing case in London, Winter arrives to find a psychopath on the loose who likes abducting and lobotomising young women. Winter must use all his preternatural brain power in order to work out who is behind the attacks, before another young woman becomes a victim.

Sailing on a boat by yourself out at sea and out of sight of land can be exhilarating or terrifying, compelling or tedious - sometimes it can be all of these things just in one morning. It is an adventure at odds with our normal, sociable lives, carried out floating on a medium wholly inimical to our existence. But the deep ocean is also a remarkable place on which to think. Richard King's enormously engaging and curious book is about the debt we owe to solo sailors: women and men, young and old, who have set out alone.

A new thriller from the master of suspense - When stuntman Noah Flynn finds a strange medallion with what appear to be ancient cuneiform markings, little does he suspect there will be disastrous consequences for those around him. When the Arabic would-be assassin of aid agency diplomat Adeola Davis turns out to have been wearing a similar medallion, she and Noah join together to discover what this can all mean, as the death toll continues to rise...

Ethan Frome is an entrancing but sad story of a poverty-stricken Massachusetts farmer caught in a loveless marriage. An emerging love for his young cousin leads to one day of explosive emotions with tragic consequences.

It's 1959, and Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, one-time high school sports superstar, is going nowhere. At twenty-six he is trapped in a second-rate existence - stuck with a fragile, alcoholic wife, a house full of overflowing ashtrays and discarded glasses, a young son and a futile job. With no way to fix things, he resolves to flee from his family and his home in Pennsylvania, beginning a thousand-mile journey that he hopes will free him from his mediocre life.

Zane Grey wrote about the West and lived it as well. Tales of Lonely Trails is a collection of true travel tales describing his explorations of uninhabited areas of the west, much of it on pack horses with a guide. Here are descriptions of his hunting, camping, and exploring trips in the wild and desolate parts of the West, including Arizona territory, Colorado, Death Valley, the Tonto Basin, the Grand Canyon, and more. These adventures gave him the firsthand experience that he later used in writing his descriptions of the landscape and characters of his Western novels.

It's 1979, and Rabbit is no longer running. He's walking and beginning to get out of breath. That's okay, though - it gives him the chance to enjoy the wealth that comes with middle age. It's all in place: he's chief sales representative and co-owner of Springer motors; his wife, at home or in the club, is keeping trim; he wears good suits; and the cash is pouring in. So why is it that he finds it so hard to accept the way that things have turned out?

Michael has travelled a long way from his boyhood under the endless skies of the Midwest. His retirement is peaceful, if solitary. But one day there is a visitation: a mysterious car on the seafront, and a package delivered. From its contents, Michael understands that he has been commissioned to undertake a final journey. As Michael makes his way deep into a distant desert—a strange and liminal landscape that lies between hell and redemption—he undertakes another journey, into long-suppressed memories.

Mark Franklin came from the American West to Edwardian England with two long-barrelled .44s in his baggage and a fortune in silver in the bank. Where he had got it and what he was looking for no one could guess, although they wondered - at Scotland Yard, in city offices, in the glittering theatreland of the West End, in the highest circles of society (even King Edward was puzzled), and in the humble pub at Castle Lancing.

It's 1969, and the times are changing. America is about to land a man on the moon, the Vietnamese war is in full swing, and racial tension is on the rise. Things just aren't as simple as they used to be - at least not for Rabbit Angstrom. His wife has left him with his teenage son, his job is under threat and his mother is dying. Suddenly, into his confused life - and home - comes Jill, an 18-year-old runaway who becomes his lover.

It's 1989, and Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom is far from restful. Harry is 56 and overweight, and he has a struggling business on his hands and a heart that is starting to fail. His family, too, are giving him cause for concern. His son, Nelson, is a wreck of a man, a cocaine addict with shattered self-respect. Janice, his wife, has decided that she wants to be a working girl. And as for Pru, his daughter-in-law, she seems to be sending out signals to Rabbit that he knows he should ignore but somehow can't.

Milly Theale is a young, beautiful, and fabulously wealthy American. When she arrives in London and meets the equally beautiful but impoverished Kate Croy, they form an intimate friendship. But nothing is as it seems; materialism, romance, self-delusion, and ultimately fatal illness, insidiously contaminate the glamorous social whirl.

Frank Bascombe has a younger girlfriend and a job as a sportswriter. To many men of his age, 38, this would be a cause for optimism, yet Frank feels the pull of his inner despair and especially of his recent losses - his preferred career has ended, his wife has divorced him, and a tragic accident took his elder son. In the course of this Easter weekend, Frank will lose all the remnants of his familiar life, though he will emerge heroic, with spirits soaring.

Two backcountry skiers find the body of a young woman embedded in the ice of a remote mountain creek. All through the night police work with arc lights and chainsaws to prise her out. Identifying her doesn't take so long. Abbie Cooper is wanted for murder and her picture is on law enforcement computers all across America. But how did she die? And what was the trail of events that led this golden child of a loving family so tragically astray?

Destroyed by fire years ago, the infamous Philadelphia State Hospital was known as a warehouse for the criminally insane. But one man never left. By night Luther walks Philadelphia's backstreets, drawing to him the mad, the corrupt, the fallen. By day he roams the catacombs beneath the city, killing his prey. Detectives Kevin Byrne and Jessica Balzano are called to a bizarre murder scene: a man has been killed by a railroad spike driven into his head and left sitting on a bench in a local park.

Nothing will ever be the same again.... In the heart of Philadelphia's badlands, homicide detectives Byrne and Balzano are called out to a particularly chilling crime scene. Once the pillar of the neighbourhood, an abandoned church has become a killing room. At first it looks like a random act of violence. But then a second body is found, and a third. Each crime scene more disturbing than the last, each murder more brutal.

Metropolitan newspaper writer Zack Walker has a knack for stumbling onto deadly stories. But it's one that his good friend Trixie Snelling doesn't want told that's about to unleash a storm of trouble. As a professional dominatrix in the suburbs, Trixie has her share of secrets, but Zack has no idea what she's really hiding when a local newspaperman threatens to do an exposé on her - not until Zack finds a dead body strapped to the bondage cross in her basement dungeon.

Jonathan Craine has left his old life in Hollywood behind him, content to live out his days with his son on a rural farm in California. But when infamous mobster Bugsy Siegel is murdered, Craine is forced to face his past once again. Summoned to Las Vegas to meet mob head Meyer Lansky, Craine is given the impossible task of finding Siegel’s murderers. All he has to help him is an ageing hit man and a female crime reporter with her own agenda. And he knows that if he doesn’t succeed in five days, both he and his son will pay for it with their lives....

About to turn 40, there’s no doubt in her mind that suburban wife and mother-of-two Claire Taylor has settled. A wild week in Chicago may have shaken things up a bit, but as she turns the key in her Wisconsin home on the eve of Hallowe’en, she knows that this is where her life is. Except that it’s all gone. The house stripped, her husband Danny, her daughters, all gone: no message, nothing.