Showing results by narrator "Leighton Pugh" in All Categories

The oak is our most beloved and most common tree. It has roots that stretch back to all the old European cultures, but Britain has more ancient oaks than all the other European countries put together. More than half the ancient oaks in the world are in Britain. Many of our ancestors - the Angles, the Saxons, the Norse - came to the British Isles in longships made of oak. For centuries the oak touched every part of a Briton's life - from cradle to coffin. It was oak that made the 'wooden walls' of Nelson's navy, and the navy that allowed Britain to rule the world.

Katerina inherits a spice box after her grandmother Mariam dies. It contains letters and a diary written in Armenian. Katerina learns that Mariam's childhood was shattered by the Armenian tragedy of 1915. Exiled from her home in Turkey and separated from her beloved brother, Mariam's life was marred by grief. Katerina tries to find resolution in her own life as she completes Mariam's story on a journey that takes her across Cyprus and then half a world away to New York.

Alongside Jack the Ripper there is another brutal serial killer roaming the streets of Victorian London.... Spring, 1890. The spectre of Jack the Ripper still haunts Inspector Walter Day; he alone is convinced that the Ripper remains at large. But now a new killer is terrorising the citizens of London. They call him the Harvest Man; he hides away in the attics of the unsuspecting, emerging at night to terrorise his victims.

A gripping thriller full of twists you won't see coming... Seven years ago, psychiatrist Dr Claps assisted police in capturing Giacomo Riondino, a man accused of abducting, torturing and murdering two women. On arrest, tests had revealed that Riondino suffered from a rare and disturbing psychiatric condition and was sectioned. Six years later, Riondino is on the run after escaping from a rehabilitation centre, leaving a trail of bloody murders in his wake.

The search for a missing child reveals she is not the only one... In a little village in Lombardy, it's a cold November morning when Ami steps out of her house to go to school... and never comes back. As soon as her father raises the alarm, a frantic search begins. The investigation is led by Police Commissioner Sensi. His men immediately find a trail to follow, but it soon proves to lead nowhere. Three months later, Police Commissioner Sensi decides to visit Dr Claps, an old friend and a renowned criminologist, who guesses from his first few words the real reason for the visit.

Sultan Gadaffi has escaped from Libya with a fistful of dangerous secrets. The British Government want ex-Special Forces operative Steve Range, the go-to man for any Black-Ops missions, to lead an ultra-covert mercenary group to seize him from his near-impregnable desert stronghold. Saed is defended by Tuareg warriors armed to the teeth with stolen NATO hardware. If Range's team can somehow overcome them, then they will earn themselves gold bullion worth $500 million.

A masterful anthology featuring 19 pieces of short fiction, Growing Things is an exciting glimpse into Paul Tremblay's fantastically fertile imagination. From global catastrophe to the demons inside our heads, Tremblay illuminates our primal fears and darkest dreams in startlingly original fiction that leaves us unmoored. As he lowers the sky and yanks the ground from beneath our feet, we are compelled to contemplate the darkness inside our own hearts and minds.

The fox is our apex predator, our most beautiful and clever killer. We have witnessed its wild touch, watched it slink by bins at night and been chilled by its high-pitched scream. And yet we long to stroke the tumbling cubs outside their tunnel homes and watch the vixen stalk the cornfield. There is something about foxes. They captivate us like no other species. Exploring a long and sometimes complicated relationship, The Wild Life of the Fox captures our love - and sometimes loathing - of this magnificent creature in vivid detail and lyrical prose.

From the two-time winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award, the first full depiction of the wave of anti-Jewish pogroms that followed the Russian Revolution and how they laid the groundwork for the Holocaust.

Twelve-year-old Carl Hunter has been snatched at gunpoint from his home on Jersey. He and his kidnapper have vanished without a trace. Enter Ben Hope, now working freelance to rescue kidnapped children. But as Ben begins his search for Carl, he soon discovers that nothing about this case is as it seems. Behind the mystery of the boy's disappearance lies a sinister secret that threatens to destroy anyone who comes into contact with it...

The war is over, but Berlin is a desolate sea of rubble. There is a shortage of everything: Food, clothing, tobacco. The local population is scrabbling to get by. Kasper Meier is one of these Germans, and his solution is to trade on the black market to feed himself and his elderly father. He can find anything that people need, for the right price. Even other people. When a young woman, Eva, arrives at Kasper's door seeking the whereabouts of a British pilot, he feels a reluctant sympathy for her but won't interfere in military affairs.

The Kalashnikov AK47. A weapon with a unique image. A symbol of freedom fighters and terrorists across the globe. Undercover officer Andy Knight has infiltrated an extremist group intent on bringing the rifle to Britain - something MI5 have been struggling for years to prevent. He befriends Zeinab, the young Muslim student from Yorkshire who is at the centre of the plot. All Zeinab needs to do is travel to the impoverished high-rise estates of Marseilles and bring one rifle home on a test run. Then many more will follow - and with them would come killing on an horrendous scale.

Some of the most extraordinary stories of courage and endurance in the Second World War concern the freedom trails, the escape routes out of Nazi-occupied Europe. Over 5,000 British, Commonwealth and American servicemen made the journey over the Pyrenees, the Slovenian mountains and the Italian Alps. Many also died en route, killed by the perilous conditions or caught by the German army. In this audiobook, Monty Hall recreates the stories of some of the most charismatic figures of the Second World War.

Russia has been locked into a winter of authoritarian rule at home and military adventures abroad under Vladimir Putin. In Kremlin Winter, Robert Service, one of our finest historians of Russia, plots the seasonal shifts in events since 2012 and those that may be expected in the immediate future. When Mikhail Gorbachëv introduced perestroika in the mid-1980s, the USSR went through a springtime of growth and release.

Babes in the Wood by Graham Bartlett with Peter James takes us to the heart of a murder case that shocked the nation. Both gripping police procedural and an insight into the motivations of a truly evil man, it is a unique account of what became a 32 year fight for justice. On 9 October 1986, nine-year-olds Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway went out to play on their Brighton estate. They would never return home, their bodies discovered the next day concealed in a small clearing in a local park. This devastating crime rocked their close-knit community and the whole country.

In Blood on the Snow, Robert Service returns to the subject that has formed the backbone of his long and distinguished career: the Russian Revolution. For Service, the great unanswered question is how to reconcile the two vital narratives that underpin the extraordinary but troubled events of 1917. One puts the blame squarely on Tsar Nicholas II and on Alexander Kerensky’s provisional government that deposed him. The other is the view from the bottom, that of the workers and peasants who wanted democratic socialism, not the Bolshevik dictatorship imposed by Lenin and his successors.

19 October 1950. The war is not going to plan. In Paris, politicians gather to discuss what to do about Indochina. The conflict is unpopular back home in France: too expensive, and too far away for the public to care. Withdrawal is not an option – a global power cannot surrender to an army of peasants – but victory is impossible without more soldiers and more money. The soldiers can be sourced from the colonies, but the money is out of the question. A solution needs to be found.

At the height of the Cold War, officials at the Ministry of Defence conducted a highly secret investigation into unusual events that occurred along a strip of rugged Pembrokeshire coastline. The events made national headlines: objects hovering in the sky, ghostly figures peering into windows and poltergeists plaguing a terrified family. Thirty years later, the official files were finally released for public scrutiny and prompted a new witness to come forward.

In the late 1950s, during his National Service, Drummond meets the two people who will change his life: Carter, a rich, educated young man sent down from Oxford, and Gwen, a barmaid with whom he feels an instant connection. His feelings for both will be tested at a military base known as Doom Town. It is an experience that will colour the rest of his - and his family’s - life. The Blind Light moves from the '50s through to present day, taking in the global and local events that will shape and define Drum’s family.

DI Steven Keogh spent over half of his 30-year police career as a Scotland Yard detective, helping to hunt down terrorists and some of the worst murderers in London. Step inside the mind of an investigator in a never-before-seen look into what it takes to catch killers and bring them to justice. In a journey from crime scene to trial, you will witness the emotional highs and lows of cracking real-life murder cases and discover why people kill, while debunking the myths that surround this detective work.