Mostrando resultados por narrador "Michael Tudor Barnes" en Todas las categorías

Just as the bidding gets exciting in a Bath auction house, three armed men stage a hold-up and attempt to steal Lot 129, a medieval carving of the Wife of Bath. The highest bidder, appalled to have the prize snatched away, tries to stop them and is shot dead. Peter Diamond, head of the murder squad, soon finds himself sharing an office with the stone wife - until he is ejected. To his extreme annoyance the lump of stone appears to exert a malign influence over him and his investigation.

1325: in the gilded cage that is the Palace of Westminster, Isabella, Queen of England, is troubled by court intrigue. Her jealous husband, Edward II, has removed all her privileges, her regal status and even her children. When Isabella is dispatched to France to negotiate peace with the French King, Sir Baldwin de Furnshill travels with her to ensure her safety. But it seems that no one can be trusted, not least the queen’s own retinue.

1324: a disastrous autumn looms large. As the leaves begin to fall there are those who wish to bring the kingdom down as well. In Dartmouth, a man is found lying dead in the road. Dismissing his death as a drunken accident, the locals turn their attentions to more worrying matters - piracy. Rumours abound that spies are being sent to the great traitor Roger Mortimer. If this is true, civil war in England is inevitable. The kingdom’s most powerful and ruthless men demand that Sir Baldwin de Furnshill and Bailiff Simon Puttock uncover the truth, and quickly.

A nightmare discovery in the boot of a stolen BMW plunges car thief Danny Stapleton into the worst trouble of his life. What links his misfortune to the mysterious disappearance of an art teacher at a private school for girls in Chichester? Orders from above push Peter Diamond of Bath CID into investigating a police corruption case in the Chichester force, and he soon finds himself reluctantly dealing with spirited schoolgirls, eccentric artists and his formidable old colleague, Hen Mallin.

In the small hours of a Sunday morning in the city of Bath a policeman on beat duty is shot dead by an unseen gunman - the third killing of an officer in Somerset in a matter of weeks. The emergency services are summoned. Ambitious to arrest the Somerset Sniper, the duty inspector, Ken Lockton, seals the crime scene, which is confined by the river on one side and a massive retaining wall on the other. He discovers the murder weapon in a garden - and is himself attacked and left for dead.Enter Peter Diamond, Bath's burly CID chief.

Peter Diamond, head of Bath CID, takes a city break in Vienna, but everything goes wrong and his companion, Paloma, calls a halt to their relationship. Meanwhile, strange things are happening to jobbing musician Mel Farran, who finds himself scouted by methods closer to the spy world than the concert platform. The chance of joining a once-famous string quartet in a residency at Bath Spa University is too tempting for Mel to refuse. Then a body is found in the city canal, and the only clue to the dead woman's identity is the tattoo of a music note on one of her teeth.

Apothecary John Rawlings has been summoned to Devon by Elizabeth di Lorenzi, his beautiful but unpredictable mistress. Leaving his young daughter Rose in the good care of her grandfather Sir Gabriel Kent, Rawlings sets off for Exeter on board the stagecoach. His fellow-passengers are a motley crew, and incelude a large and talkative German lady; Cuthbert Simms, a dance-master; and Jack Beef, the so-called ï¿¿ï¿¿ï¿¿Black Pyramid", a bare-knuckle fighter.

Battle and burial are built into the history of Lansdown Hill, so it is no great shock when part of a skeleton is unearthed there. But Peter Diamond, Bath's Head of CID, can't ignore the fresh corpse found close to the folly known as Beckford's Tower. The hill becomes the setting for one of the most puzzling cases he has investigated, involving golf, horseracing, Civil War re-enactment and the Cyrillic alphabet.

This audiobook will take the listener on the slow train to another era when travel meant more than hurrying from one place to the next, the journey meaning nothing but time lost in crowded carriages, condemned by broken timetables. On the Slow Train will reconnect with that long-missed need to lift our heads from the daily grind and reflect that there are still places in Britain where we can stop and stare. It will tap into many things: a love of railways, a love of history, a love of nostalgia.

Crete, May 1941. In the face of a German invasion, Sergeant Jack Tanner is embroiled in a deadly game of survival that will test his resolve more than ever before. Not only has he fallen out with his commander but he has mortally offended Alopex, a powerful local chieftain. As if that wasn't enough, Tanner and the rest of his battalion are caught in vicious close-quarter fighting against crack German paratroopers.

1325: King Edward II’s reign seems cursed. Although he has rejected his wife, Queen Isabella, he still relies on her. Even now, she is in France to negotiate peace with her brother, King Charles IV of France - but he fears for the outcome. Meanwhile, Sir Baldwin de Furnshill and his friend Bailiff Simon Puttock return from France with an urgent instruction for the King. It is to be their last mission.

Exeter, 1323. A strange man is entering people’s houses at night, causing panic amongst householders. Although many had thought him harmless, now he seems to have committed murder. A man lies dead in his own home, slaughtered merely for trying to protect his children, and the folk of Exeter want this menace caught and hanged. Sir Baldwin de Furnshill suspects that the solution isn’t that simple.

'I was anxious to fight. Hitler was the bastard who had started all this and he needed sorting out. We were under threat. Everything we stood for: our country, our families and our way of life was being attacked by this maniac. He could not be allowed to win. So for me and many, many others like me, there was no alternative. We were in a pickle and something had to be done.’ Johnny Johnson is 92 years old and one of very few men who can recall first-hand the most daring and ingenious air raid of all time.

The Gropes are an old English family based in Northumberland, separated from the rest of society and as eccentric as they come. It is a line dominated by strong-willed and oversexed women, determined to produce more female heirs regardless of whether their desired partners are willing.... At the dawn of the new millennium, timid and gormless teenager Esmond is abducted and lured to Grope Hall by a descendant of the Gropes.

After the British military lose an officer to Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, a desperate race begins to find his killers. Little do the assailants know that the precious information they have stolen could bring down the entire network of Western intelligence in the Mid-East. But then one of them is captured by US troops and flown to the States for interrogation. And so begins a nail-biting, claustrophobic and explosive thriller that will ultimately lead British operative John Stratton to the Styx penitentiary, America's undersea prison.

On 3 May 1961, after a trial conducted largely in secret, a man named George Blake was sentenced to an unprecedented 42 years in jail. By his own confession he was a Soviet spy, but the reasons for such a severe punishment were never revealed. To the public, Blake was simply the greatest traitor of the Cold War. Yet his story touches not only the depths of treachery, but also the heights of heroism.

Michael Williams has spent the past year travelling along the fascinating rail byways of Britain for this new collection of journeys. Here is the 'train to the end of the world' running for more than four splendid hours through lake, loch and moorland from Inverness to Wick, the most northerly town in Britain. He discovers a perfect country branch line in London’s commuterland, and travels on one of the slowest services in the land along the shores of the lovely Dovey estuary to the far west of Wales. Here is a unique travel companion celebrating the treasures of our railway heritage....

Apothecary John Rawlings is intrigued when a letter arrives asking him to investigate an impostor claiming to be the long-lost step-son of a wealthy Bristol merchant in possession of his dead wife's diamond inheritance. John Rawlings' father, Sir Gabriel Kent joins him on the trip to take the healing waters at Hotwell where they socialize with the crème of Bristol society. But Rawlings is compelled to try and solve the mystery and so he must trawl through the underbelly of 18th-century society.

After leading a raid in Afghanistan, elite operative John Stratton is contacted by an old friend in military intelligence with a curious message about being hunted by an assassin. When the officer vanishes, Stratton gets drawn into a desperate race to secure a missing nuclear warhead, stolen from the Pakistan military. Against an unknown enemy, he conducts a terrifying search for the bomb - from a Taliban hideout a few miles outside Bagram Air Base to the crowded streets of Manhattan.

Two hundred miles south of the Devon coastline, Palestinian freedom fighter Abed Abu Omar and 20 men prepare for their most daring mission yet - the hijack of a supertanker, a five-storey superstructure laden with oil. Meanwhile, in an Elizabethan country house, SBS operative Stratton has been seconded to bodyguard work and is bored by the lack of challenge. Not for long.