Showing results by narrator "Karen Cass" in All Categories

The Classic Crime Collection is a collection of 12 classic detective novels, read by an esteemed cast of award-winning narrators. Included here are stories by some of the most iconic crime writers in history, including Arthur Conan Doyle; Wilkie Collins; Josephine Tey; AA Milne; and more.

Lovely Alice Lacey was a true Incomparable, and her marriage to the Duke of Ferrant was the event of the Season. But almost none realised, however, that Alice was secretly in love with someone else - or that she had confided her feelings to a clever talking mynah bird who determined to announce these intimacies at the moment of the couple's wedding!

Homes don’t come much more idyllic than Primrose Hall. Set against the backdrop of the beautiful Primrose Woods, Pia Temple still has to pinch herself that she gets to wake up there every day. Waking up next to Jackson Moody is pretty great too. Ever since the couple rekindled their teenage romance, they’ve become an unstoppable team running Primrose Hall’s packed calendar of events, surrounded by the friends and family who make up the crew at the hall. But not everything is perfect at Primrose Hall.

"Asylum-seeker"; "refugee". All the major British political parties have brought these words to the top of the political agenda. Some newspapers shout about the swarms of refugees arriving on our shores; others criticize our government's lack of humanitarian principles. But what do we know about the refugees themselves what it means to leave your home, your family, your past? Author Rose George has travelled to Liberia and Ivory Coast and also met refugees in Britain to discover what really happens when you are uprooted by war, greed, and guns.

On still nights, when the curve of a winter moon is smudged in the flow of the River Quaggy, the dead clamor for him. And sometimes he coaxes the living to join them. To other people, his victims might be mere medical oddities. To him, they are fascinating specimens, worthy of display. Above all, he is a collector, eager for recognition even as he hides in the shadows. Detective Sergeant Etta Fitzroy is the first to recognize the connection between the disappearance of a young girl and a cold case that almost cost her the career she's sacrificed so much for.

Julia and Lauren are sisters, but definitely not best friends. They rarely even speak to each other. But when Lauren's fortieth birthday is ruined by her latest boyfriend dumping her, Julia feels a sudden and unexpected burst of sympathy, and offers to go with her on the special holiday he'd paid for as a birthday present. Unfortunately the holiday turns out not to be a glamorous hotel in a holiday hotspot, but a self-catering cottage in a tiny village called Deepcombe, in the middle of Dartmoor. And it's January.

Moments after she is born, tiny kitten Tallulah, with her bright eyes and silver and white fur edged with gold, is whisked away from her father Solomon and dumped in the hedge like rubbish. After a tough start to life, neglected and abandoned, Tallulah eventually finds a new home with the Lee family and forms a special bond with their daughter Tammy. But Tammy has a terrible secret and Tallulah must do all in her power to keep the family safe.

There’s a world of difference between making a living and having a life. Balancing the demands you face every day can feel like being trapped in a frustrating maze, but there is a way out: you can take control and live the life you want to live - and love your work at the same time.Live Life, Love Work, from bestselling NLP expert and coach Kate Burton, is full of ideas for reviewing your priorities and re-charging your energy levels.

Here today. Dead tomorrow? Last night I almost died. A fire consumed the hotel room where my best friend, Emily, and I slept. Emily was killed. But I can't afford to cry, to grieve. It was meant to be me. And he'll be coming for my daughter next. The press thinks it was me that died. At best that gives me 24 hours. Twenty-four hours to find Polly and disappear. Twenty-four hours to stay alive.

Ali turned towards the cottage, anger flooding through her. She’d believed she and Meg were friends; that they’d bonded over a vision of motherhood...a world where your baby deserved everything you could give it. She’d pulled Meg’s words - Meg’s life - around her, like a comfort blanket. But that shared vision had never existed. And Ali was alone now, with nothing to protect her.

A serial killer is terrorising London, removing a body part from each victim and leaving in its place a single pink rose. Dr Vernon Sange, a multiple murderer awaiting extradition, seems to know the culprit’s identity - but he’ll only talk to profiler Ziba MacKenzie, the woman responsible for putting him away. Though there’s something he wants in return from her. And time is running out. With one killer whispering in her ear and another running rings around the police, Ziba must play a game in which only her opponent knows the rules, and the forfeit is death.

Single mother Sally Lachlan has a secret that has haunted her for a decade, although perhaps it is time to let it go. A chance meeting with a fellow scientist, the charismatic geneticist Anthony Blake, reawakens her desire for love. But as Sally finally lets down her guard, her teenage daughter, Charlie, begins to ask questions about her late father.

When Laura’s bride-to-be sister, Polly, organises a surprise reunion for her fiancé and his long lost American friend, Laura grudgingly agrees to help keep the secret. And when the plain-spoken, larger-than-life Hunter McQueen steps off the bus in her rainy Devon town and only just squeezes into her tiny car, it confirms that Laura has made a big mistake in going along with her sister's crazy plan.

Shortly before Christmas, Professor James Lowell is found brutally attacked in his rooms at Walsingham College, where Anna Hopkins works as an administrator. Baffled as to why anyone would wish to harm such a gentle, scholarly man, Anna discovers that Lowell had a connection with her fellow dogwalker Isadora Salzman, who knew him as an undergraduate in the 1960s, a comember of the so-called Oxford Six. It turns out that Isadora has been keeping a surprising secret all these years.

Pretending to be her boss’ mistress is one thing - but now everyone in the office thinks Harriet is Matthew Cole’s fiancée. Harriet has to keep reminding herself it’s all just for convenience - but how far is Matthew prepared to go with the arrangement?

It is 1939 - war has been declared, and spymaster Fitzroy wastes no time in preparing his goddaughter, Hope, for a secret mission. As Euphemia Martins' daughter, Hope has the potential to be one of British Intelligence's greatest agents, but when she is ousted from an all-male think tank and relegated to the typing pool, even she starts to doubt herself. Meanwhile, Hope's rebellious friend, Bernie, announces her engagement to a man Hope does not trust; Harvey, Hope's only asset, has vanished; and, most awful of all, Hope fears that her father is dying.

It is 1940, and, as the Battle of Britain takes to the air, Hope Stapleford is recruited to join the Special Operations Executive. On her way to Scotland, she is pulled from a train and driven to spymaster Fitzroy's stately home. She is his intelligence operative, and he wants to send her to a Scottish airfield where Harvey is already stationed undercover as a mechanic. At the airbase, Hope and Harvey find a community in turmoil. Pilots talk of strange sightings in the air, and local mechanics report mysterious scratches appearing on the wings and fuselage of the aircraft.

Anna Hopkins' daily walk through Oxford's Port Meadow is rudely interrupted one autumn morning when her white German shepherd, Bonnie, unearths a blood-soaked body in the undergrowth. For Anna it's a double shock: she'd met the victim previously. Naomi Evans was a professional researcher who had told Anna she was working on a book about a famous Welsh poet and who offered to help Anna trace Bonnie's original owner.

When the bohemian, sophisticated Innes Kent turns up by chance on her doorstep, Lexie Sinclair realises she cannot wait any longer for her life to begin, and leaves for London. There, at the heart of the 1950s Soho art scene, she carves out a new life for herself, with Innes at her side. In the present day, Elina and Ted are reeling from the difficult birth of their first child.

The perfect escapist listen, for all fans of Cathy Bramley and Scarlett Bailey. A Year at the Star and Sixpence is Holly Hepburn's four Star and Sixpence novellas collected together as a novel for the first time. When sisters Nessie and Sam inherit a little pub in a beautiful country village, they jump at the chance to escape their messy lives and start afresh. But when they arrive at the Star and Sixpence, it's not quite what they imagined - it's pretty much derelict, ruined by debts, and it's going to be a huge job....