Showing results by narrator "Elizabeth Knowelden" in All Categories

It’s Christmastime, 1919. Three years before, seventeen-year-old Margot Allan, a respectable vicar’s daughter, fell passionately in love. But she lost her fiancé, Harry, to the Great War. In turn, she gained a desperate secret, one with the power to ruin her life and her family’s reputation, a secret she guards at all costs. Now Margot’s family is gathering at the vicarage for the first time since the War ended. And Harry, it turns out, isn’t dead. He’s alive and well, and looking for answers.

In Paris, a bomb blast triggers a chain of events that contaminates every aspect of Stephanie's life. It's clear she's been betrayed. But by whom? She must identify the threat before she can run from it! Stephanie saves herself by taking a hostage, but soon, the tension between captive and captor accelerates dangerously beyond her control.

Mary Coles and her husband, Graham, have just moved to a cottage on the edge of a small village. The house hasn't been lived in for years, but they are drawn to its original features and surprisingly large garden, which stretches down into a beautiful apple orchard. It's idyllic, remote, picturesque: exactly what they need to put the horror of the past behind them.

Professor Beth Pickering is on the verge of finally capturing the rare Deathwhistler bird when Professor Devon Lockley swoops in, capturing both her bird and her eye. For his part, Devon has never been more smitten than when he first set eyes on Beth. When a competition to become Birder of the Year by capturing an endangered caladrius bird is announced, Beth and Devon are forced to team up to have any chance of winning.

Nazi England, 2014. Jessika Keller is a good girl - a champion ice skater, model student of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, and dutiful daughter of the Greater German Reich. Her best friend, Clementine, is not so submissive. Passionately different, Clem is outspoken, dangerous, and radical. And the regime has noticed. Jess cannot keep both her perfect life and her dearest friend, her first love. But which can she live without?

When the teenage son of Holly Gold's school friend brutally murders his parents before killing himself, her sleepy home town is rocked by the sudden tragedy. Appalled, Holly investigates. What could have caused the happy-go-lucky boy she remembers to commit such a heinous crime? When another teen commits suicide, she uncovers a horrifying link between the recent deaths and a dark conspiracy to hide the truth.

Her name was written in the pages of someone else's story: Lucy Westenra was one of Dracula's first victims. But her death was only the beginning. Lucy rose from the grave a vampire, and has spent her immortal life trying to escape from Dracula's clutches - and trying to discover who she really is and what she truly wants. Her undead life takes an unexpected turn when, in twenty-first-century London, she meets another woman who is also yearning to break free from her past.

On the eve of her wedding to Adam, Lily’s best friend Josh unexpectedly walked out of her life, and she hasn’t seen him since. Lily and Adam are blissfully happy, until he falls ill. As she cares for him in his final hours, Adam asks her to make a mysterious promise: to find Josh—and forgive them both.

Aruna is an epidemiologist dedicated to food and avian politics. One is heaven, the other earth. The two passions blend in unexpected ways when Aruna is asked to research a handful of isolated bird flu cases reported across Indonesia. While it's put a crimp in her aunt's West Java farm, and made her own confit de canard highly questionable, the investigation does provide an irresistible opportunity. It's the perfect excuse to get away from corrupt and corrosive Jakarta and explore the spices of the far-flung regions of the islands with her three friends.

In this ambitious novel, Phillips creates a dazzling kaleidoscope of historical fiction, one that illuminates the dark legacy of Europe’s obsession with race and blood. At the center of The Nature of Blood is a young woman, a Nazi death camp survivor, devastated by the loss of everyone she loves. Her story is interwoven with a cast of characters from both the present and past: her uncle Stephan, Othello the Moorish general, three Jews in 15th century Venice, and an Ethiopian Jew struggling for acceptance in contemporary Israel.

They are chameleons. Beyond the law, beyond morality, they’ve survived by adapting, whatever the circumstances - and by trusting nobody but themselves. Stephanie Patrick, more comfortable under an alias than she was with herself, has traversed the world and forgotten who she is. Now, she wants to put her past behind her. Konstantin Komarov. The FBI call him the Don from the Don. Today, at the heart of a financial empire created by the Russian crime pandemic, he’s as comfortable in Manhattan as he is in Moscow or Magadan. Between them exists Koba, an old alias for a new threat.

The year is 1590, and Queen Elizabeth's Spanish Armada victory has done nothing to quell her brutal persecution of the English Catholics. Katharine de L'Isle is living at Lufanwal Hall, the manor of her uncle, Sir Edward. Taught by her cherished uncle to read when a child, Katharine is now a 31-year-old widow. She has resigned herself to a life of reading and keeping company with her cousins and their children.

Scientific and weapons secrets and personnel are being sent via the people-smuggling routes from China, through Albania and the former Yugoslavia to Europe and Britain. Stephanie's personal feelings for one of the victims of this trade causes her to make a rare professional mistake, and the consequences are far-reaching, vicious, and challenging, even for her skills and expertise.

As a widowed mother of three, new love seems impossible for Freya - until she meets Duncan, and suddenly she feels alive again. While Freya’s older children are less than welcoming, six-year-old Sophie helps Duncan find his place in the family - but even Sophie harbours fears that threaten to overshadow any chance of a new start. The past is hard to leave behind when pictures of Freya’s idolised late husband hang in every room, and the more Duncan tries to find the source of Sophie’s anxiety, the more he is convinced that Reuben was not the perfect husband and father Freya remembers.

Stephanie Patrick thought her double life was over. But a call from her past throws her back into the world where international crime and terrorism meet. The target is Koba: a Russian criminal with influential connections, whose true identity remains a dangerous secret. From New York through Europe to Moscow, Stephanie tracks Koba. But in a game of betrayal where trust is weakness and violence is routine, one false move could prove fatal....

Jacob Flanders is a uniquely ambiguous protagonist: he is defined almost entirely by others’ impressions and is nearly unknowable as a result - but that does not at all detract from the vitality of Virginia Woolf’s story. In her experimental first novel, she tracks Jacob through the seemingly mundane early years of his life - from a boyhood trip to the Cornwall coast to his college years at Cambridge to his time as an adult in London and Greece - before arriving at his shocking, even tragic, entry into war.

Sixteen-year-old Bluebelle, also known as BB or Big Bones, lives her life unapologetically. She loves life! She loves food! When BB has a worse-than-usual asthma attack, her mom insists she go to the doctor. There, she is told that she is overweight (no surprise) and prediabetic (big surprise) and must lose weight, move more, and keep a food diary. To get out of this immediate health crisis, she agrees to make an effort. Then a tragedy occurs in the family, and things get seriously complicated. Suddenly, losing weight and moving more are the least of her worries.

Late in the twenty-first century, drought and wildfires prompt an exodus from southern Europe. When twelve-year-old Caleb is separated from his mother during their trek north, he soon falls prey to traffickers. Enslaved in an enclave outside Manchester, the resourceful and determined Caleb never loses hope of bettering himself. After Caleb is befriended by a fellow victim of trafficking, another road opens. Hiding in the woodlands by day, guided by the stars at night, he begins a new journey - to escape to a better life, to meet someone he can trust, and to find his family.

In 2031 mankind's survival instinct is put to the test when a civil war in China spirals into a global conflict. Nations are torn apart. Millions are killed. And for many, like Air Force pilot Alec Killian, survival will mean shedding some of their flesh in exchange for biotech and machine.

When rumours of an assassination plot against the Queen begin to circulate, Alice is immediately assigned to the case. However, she won't be working alone. Enter Daniel Bixby. Unflappable master spy and Alice's greatest rival. Together they must assume the identity of husband and wife in order to gain access to the traitor party. Alice is determined to remain professional. This is work after all. But when an attraction starts to grow there may be more at stake than just the throne.