Showing results by narrator "Angela Ness" in All Categories

1838, England: When eighteen-year-old Frances Dickinson impulsively marries Lieutenant John Geils, all her hopes for her future are quickly shattered as she finds there is much about her husband she did not know. A cruel and violent man, John keeps Frances in isolation on his family's estate, while spending her fortune and preying upon their maids. Frances yearns to break free from her marriage but the law is not on her side. Only when John's abuse escalates can she set in motion a daring plan to secure her freedom.

When a Scottish village is struck by grief, those left behind must help one another find hope. It is 1881, and when a violent storm devastates the Scottish fishing village of Eyemouth, few families escape unscathed. Newlywed Rosabelle Maltman loses her husband, and her mother-in-law Effie loses her husband and three sons. For these women and their neighbours in the close-knit community, life will never be the same again. Yet as the months pass, the women must learn to look to the future, to live and to love again.

Nobody likes the North Edinburgh Health Enforcement Team, least of all the people who work for it. An uneasy mix of police and health service staff, Mona, Bernard and their colleagues stem the spread of the Virus, a mutant strain of influenza, by tracking down people who have missed their monthly health check. Now two young female students are missing. Why were they drinking in a bikers' bar? Who are the mysterious Children of Camus cult? And why is the German government interfering in the investigation?

Experience Mia's remarkable journey of resilience and healing in a story that the listener will find profoundly moving. Innocent Victims is a powerful memoir that will touch your heart and inspire your own path to recovery.

When Tuppence was born, I thought I was complete. Even when my marriage to Leon began to falter, at least I had my baby girl to look after. Adults have problems all the time, but children have a way of making them seem so insignificant. But then Tuppence goes missing and I realise how my life has been teetering on the brink for so long. Now it's just me and my husband again, the two of us and all our problems, and we're forced to work together as a team to get our beloved daughter back.

When Alice Mistlethwaite is shipped off to boarding school in Scotland, it's nothing like she imagines. Run by the mysterious Major, there are no punishments, and the students are more likely to be taught about body painting or extreme survival than maths or English! Then Alice's dad goes missing, and she must run away to find him. Can she persuade her new friends to help? So begins an epic quest across wild Scottish highlands and islands, where the children will face danger and excitement at every turn.

When Scotland's leading virologist goes missing, Mona and Paterson from the Health Enforcement Team are dispatched to London to find him. In a hot and unwelcoming city, Mona has to deal with a boss who isn't speaking to her, placate the professor's overbearing assistant and outwit the people who will stop at nothing to make sure the academic stays lost. Meanwhile, back in Edinburgh, Bernard is searching for a missing prostitute while Maitland is trying to keep the chair of the Parliamentary Virus Committee from finding out quite how untidy the HET office is....

The body of Paul Shore toppled onto him, a stream of blood pooling around them on the concrete. Bernard lay back and waited to see if he too was going to die. An undercover agent gone rogue is threatening to shoot a civil servant a day. As panic reigns, the Health Enforcement Team races against time to track him down - before someone turns the gun on them.

A potentially deadly, mutant strain of flu has hit the UK. It's up to the North Edinburgh Health Enforcement Team to contain it, by making sure all citizens attend their monthly health check. But now the pandemic's spreading.... On Friday, three civil servants leading virus policy hold a secret meeting at the Museum of Plagues and Pandemics. By Monday, two are dead and one is missing. Can Mona and Bernard of the HET find the missing official before panic hits the streets?

It was New Year’s Eve the night that dead blackbirds descended, hours before 14-year-old Alex McCarthy's sister Olivia went missing from a party. Committed to finding out what happened to her sister within the previously safe walls of their subarctic Orkney village, Alex knows that dishevelled, sometimes intoxicated Detective Inspector Birkens is her best shot.

Isla's got the designer clothes and dream job as head stylist at an exclusive salon. She's been so single-minded in this quest that she's forgotten to have a life outside of it. When her aunt is in desperate need at her own salon, Isla heads to the remote island of Auchenmor to help. Finn is 35, and reality has just hit him hard. Now his best friends are about to have a baby, and everything is changing. When into his life walks Isla...

From an irresponsible baron whose body is discovered beneath a silver birch tree, to a classic detective duo solving a historic case as the lights go out across Europe, and an exclusive Tony Hill and Carol Jordan story, the characters McDermid conjures are enigmatic and dangerous. These evocative, atmospheric tales will shock and delight.

Jade was 13 when she disappeared five years ago, and DS Bill Murphy suspects someone from her family is responsible for recent Dundee murders. But is it her mother, Diane, who now suffers from OCD? Or Emma, her twin sister, who was catatonic for a year after Jade’s disappearance. Or Jade’s brother Ryan, who enjoys dressing in women’s clothes and is going through a sexuality crisis, unsure whether he is gay.

Two years on from the start of a devastating pandemic, food shortages are becoming critical, and rationing looms. So it's more than embarrassing when a truck full of luxury food for Scottish Virus Minister's banquet goes missing. When Bernard and Maitland from the HET team find it, the food is missing—but there is a dead body.

For almost two decades before her or execution at Fotheringhay Castle in 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots was a prisoner. From her chambers, she wrote countless letters, many encrypted using complex ciphers to prevent her communications from being intercepted. In this way, she used language to exert her will and her influence, even while incarcerated. More than 400 years after Mary's death, the discovery of further encoded letters has led to renewed interest in the breadth of her encrypted correspondence in captivity.

The scale and nature of the First World War, and the manner in which the dead were treated, created conditions in which a very particular language of grief and remembrance of the war dead flourished. A Century of Remembrance explores the deeply personal ways in which people mourned their loved ones, and memorialised them, and examines the cornerstones of national-scale remembrance that took hold in Britain throughout the 1920s, from the poppy to the cenotaph.

The Queen of Scottish Gangland Thrillers is back! Donnie Black. Charming, successful... and utterly terrifying, he rules the Glasgow underworld with an iron fist. Nothing - or no one - will stop him and he's not afraid to get his hands dirty to grow his fortune. Layla Black. She's been married to Donnie for twenty years, enjoying the lavish world he has worked hard to create. But behind the perfect image, Layla is crumbling, numbing her pain with alcohol. But Layla doesn't know the secrets Donnie keeps - and the truth will send her spiralling.

When a chance for freedom arrives will she dare to take it? Odilie Rutherford is known in the small Scottish town of Lauriston for two things - her beauty, and her father, Canny. As a self-made man, Canny has the wealth he dreamed of but not the status and hatches a plan to marry his daughter to local bachelor of note, the Duke of Maudesley. Yet Odilie cannot bear the thought of a life with the ill-mannered Duke, and when the annual summer fair arrives in town for three days she seizes a chance to enjoy the freedom she craves.

Can Lark take the path of the woman who went before her and learn to follow her heart? Lark is a much-loved forces sweetheart spreading comfort as she sings in the music halls while Scotland’s sons fight in the Great War. But despite her fortune, Lark yearns for a life away from the crowds. She sets out to make a fresh start in the Border country seeking the contentment that has eluded her. Decades earlier, Lark’s great-grandmother, Jane, found herself in the same hills, in unhappy circumstances.

They have survived the worst they could imagine - now they must face the future. After a catastrophic storm tears through the village of Eyemouth in 1881, the villagers have slowly started to move on. Inconsolable at the loss of her husband, Rosabelle Maltman has left Scotland to start a new life, leaving her son behind. Meanwhile, Jessie, her sister-in-law, is finding ways to manipulate the men of the village for her own gains.