Showing results by narrator "Cathleen McCarron" in All Categories

My nine-year-old daughter Hollie should be leaving school smiling and laughing with all the other children but she’s not here. I run frantically, checking everywhere, my voice growing louder, but I can’t see her bright blue eyes and heart-shaped face anywhere. Pure panic washes over me. This is my worst nightmare. Her teacher asks me if she should call the police. My heart stops. I shake my head and pretend I’ve made a mistake. I see a look of suspicion creep into the teacher’s eyes. But the police can’t know. No one can. My hands shake as I realise I’m completely on my own.

Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she's thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy. But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office.

When a 15-year-old girl fails to make it home after school, DI Heather Filson believes she’s dealing with just another teenage runaway. The girl’s grandfather, a notorious Glasgow gangster, disagrees. Convinced one of his underworld enemies has grabbed her, he’s prepared to bathe the city in blood in order to bring his princess home.

1539. Anne of Cleves wins the dangerous prize of becoming Henry VIII’s fourth wife. From the start, Anne’s royal blood, education and fierce intelligence count for nothing as the king pursues young Katherine Howard. Katherine is a pawn in the political manoeuvres of her ambitious family; unprepared for the dangers that await, she steps into their trap. At her side is kinswoman Jane Boleyn, who has served - and betrayed - one queen already: her sister-in-law Anne, who died on Henry’s scaffold. Will Jane betray a second queen to the headsman?

When a lobster fisherman on an early morning run pulls in his traps, he finds something he wasn't expecting to catch - a body. When police discover the dead man was the brother of a senior Scottish government official who vanished without a trace, Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie takes over the investigation. At the same time, a woman in the wealthy enclave of Perth is clearing out her sister's home after a fatal road accident and finds a mysterious camper van in the garage containing a skeletonized body. But who is it?

The death of legendary jazz trumpeter Joss Moody exposes an extraordinary secret. Unbeknown to all but his wife Millie, Joss was a woman living as a man. The discovery is most devastating for their adopted son, Colman, whose bewildered fury brings the press to the doorstep and sends his grieving mother to the sanctuary of a remote Scottish village. Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, Trumpet by Jackie Kay is a starkly beautiful modern classic about the lengths to which people will go for love.

It's been 17 months since the Bloodsmith butchered his first victim, and Operation Maypole is still no nearer catching him. The media is whipping up a storm, and the top brass are demanding results, but the investigation is sinking fast. Now isn't the time to get distracted with other cases, but Detective Sergeant Lucy McVeigh doesn't have much choice. When Benedict Strachan was just 11, he hunted down and killed a homeless man. No one's ever figured out why Benedict did it, but now, after 16 years, he's back on the streets again.

From the outside, Glenfarach looks like a quaint, sleepy village, nestled in the heart of Cairngorms National Park, but things aren't what they seem. The place is thick with security cameras, and there's a strict nine o'clock curfew, because Glenfarach is the last safe haven for people who've served their sentences but can't be safely released into the general population. For Detective Constable Edward Reekie, this was supposed to be a simple delivery job—drive his new boss up to HMP Grampian and collect Marky Bishop, take him to Glenfarach, then head back home again.

When the castle she works in is sacked by the army of Prince Edward of England, kitchen maid Agnes Fitzgerald manages to escape north of Inverness to throw herself at the mercy of the Lord and Lady at Ravenscraig Castle. Although safe for now, the people of Scotland are fighting hard for their independence, and the threat of the English hangs heavy over the land. But when Agnes spies Cam Buchanan swimming in the loch, her mind turns away from war and towards love. Agnes even dares to dream of a happy future, until she learns that Cam must go and fight alongside Robert de Brus.

Born on a farm outside Edinburgh in the mid-19th century, Agnes Watt is embraced by family, community, and tradition. Her youthful hopes and dreams are quashed but she falls in love and marries William Miller, a Gordon Highlander. Life spirals into dark places as the couple become ensnared in the nightmare that descended on the Scottish working class during the industrial revolution. The triumphs of the great Victorian era came at an appalling human cost and Agnes fights against disease and grinding poverty.

In this remarkable blend of memoir, cultural history, and travelogue, poet and author Kathleen Jamie touches points on a timeline spanning millennia, and considers what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past. From the thawing tundra linking a Yup'ik village in Alaska to its hunter-gatherer past to the shifting sand dunes revealing the impressively preserved homes of neolithic farmers in Scotland, Jamie explores how the changing natural world can alter our sense of time.

Ailsa Rae is learning how to live. She’s only a few months past the heart transplant that - just in time - saved her life. Now, finally, she can be a normal 28-year-old. She can climb a mountain. Dance. Wait in line all day for tickets to Wimbledon. But first, she has to put one foot in front of the other. So far, things are as bloody complicated as ever. Her relationship with her mother is at a breaking point, and she wants to find her father. Then, there's Lennox, whom Ailsa loved and lost. Will she ever find love again?

Between tending to the whims of her seven-year-old and the demands of her boss, Viv barely gets a moment to herself. It’s not quite the life she wanted, but she hasn’t run screaming for the hills yet. But then Viv’s husband, Andy, makes his midlife crisis her problem. He’s having an affair with his (infuriatingly age-appropriate) colleague, a woman who - unlike Viv - doesn’t put on weight when she so much as glances at a cream cake. Viv suddenly finds herself single, with zero desire to mingle.

Suzy Medley is having a bad day...when a shabby terrier turns up at her door. Just like Suzy, Scout has been abandoned, although only Suzy has been left with a financial mess and a business in tatters thanks to her ex. Suzy takes Scout in, and her chaotic world changes in unexpected ways: strangers have never been more welcoming, and her teenage kids can’t wait to come home to visit. Then a chance encounter on a windy Hebridean beach makes things more complicated, because Suzy isn’t the only one who needs a friend.

Everyone's invited. Everyone's a suspect. And everyone's talking about it. In a remote hunting lodge, deep in the Scottish wilderness, old friends gather for New Year. The beautiful one. The golden couple. The volatile one. The new parents. The quiet one. The city boy. The outsider. The victim. Not an accident - a murder among friends.

When a much-loved Kilmarnock police constable is found beaten to death in his home, all signs point to a burglary gone wrong. But, when a second officer is slain while walking the beat, it becomes clear that something much more sinister is afoot. Somebody is murdering cops. Harassed by an infuriating new partner and a teenage true crime podcaster, DI Heather Filson must track down a brutal killer while tensions between the police and the public explode into violence.

After the death of his third wife, Jane Seymour, King Henry VIII of England decides to take a new wife, but this time, not for love. The Boleyn Inheritance follows three women whose lives are forever changed because of the king’s decision, as they must balance precariously in an already shaky Tudor Court.

It’s April 2020 and Edinburgh is in lockdown, but that doesn’t mean crime takes a holiday. It would seem like a strange time for a cold case to go hot—the streets all but empty, an hour’s outdoor exercise the maximum allowed—but when a source at the National Library contacts DCI Karen Pirie’s team about documents in the archive of a recently deceased crime novelist, it seems it’s game on again. What unspools is a twisted game of betrayal and revenge, but no one quite expects how many twists it will turn out to have.

The day Anna McDonald's quiet, respectable life explodes starts off like all the days before: Packing up the kids for school, making breakfast, listening to yet another true crime podcast. Then her husband comes downstairs with an announcement, and Anna is suddenly, shockingly alone. Reeling, desperate for distraction, Anna returns to the podcast. Other people's problems are much better than one's own - a sunken yacht, a murdered family, a hint of international conspiracy. But this case actually is Anna's problem. She knows one of the victims from an earlier life.

Sweden, 1732. Strong-willed Jess van Sandt knows only too well that it's a man's world. She believes she's being swindled out of her inheritance by her stepfather and she's determined to stop it. When help appears in the unlikely form of handsome Scotsman Killian Kinross, Jess finds herself both intrigued and infuriated by him. In an attempt to recover her fortune, she proposes a marriage of convenience.