Showing results by narrator "Olivia Dowd" in All Categories

On an island off the coast of Ireland, guests gather to celebrate two people joining their lives together as one. The groom: handsome and charming, a rising television star. The bride: smart and ambitious, a magazine publisher. It’s a wedding for a magazine or for a celebrity: the designer dress, the remote location, the luxe party favors, the boutique whiskey. The cell phone service may be spotty and the waves may be rough, but every detail has been expertly planned and will be expertly executed.

Platform Seven at 4am: Peterborough Railway Station is deserted. The man crossing the covered walkway on this freezing November morning is confident he's alone. As he sits on the metal bench at the far end of the platform it is clear his choice is strategic - he's as far away from the night staff as he can get. What the man doesn't realise is that he has company. Lisa Evans knows what he has decided. She knows what he is about to do as she tries and fails to stop him walking to the platform edge. Two deaths on Platform Seven. Two fatalities in 18 months - surely they're connected?

On a summer's night in 1994, 16-year-old Flora Powell vanished from her sleepy seaside town without a trace. Their hearts shattered, Flora’s mother, her sister Heather, and Heather’s best friend Jess had to somehow carry on not knowing what happened. Twenty-five years later, tragedy strikes again when Heather walks into a stranger's house and allegedly kills two people in cold blood. Why would this loving wife and doting new mother commit such a heinous crime? Jess, now a reporter, returns to the hometown she left behind to cover the case and dig for answers.

It’s been years since Grace, Felicity, Alice, and Hannah were together. The “Wild Girls,” as they were once called, are no longer so wild. Alice is a teacher. Hannah has a new baby. Grace is a homebody. Only Felicity seems to have retained her former spark. Then Felicity invites them all on the weekend of a lifetime—a birthday bash in Botswana. It will be a chance to have fun and rekindle their once bomb-proof friendship… and finally put that one horrible night, all those years ago, behind them for good.

Jess Walker has come to a concrete campus under the flat gray skies of East Anglia for one reason: to be taught by the mesmerizing and rebellious Dr. Lorna Clay, whose seminars soon transform Jess' thinking on life, love, and Agatha Christie. Swept up in Lorna's thrall, Jess falls in with a tightly knit group of rule-breakers - Alec, a courageous South African journalist with a nihilistic streak; Georgie, a seductive, pill-popping aristocrat; and Nick, a handsome geologist with layers of his own.

Ava Bonney is a compassionate and studious fourteen-year-old girl with a dark secret: she has an obsessive interest in the macabre. She is fascinated by the rate at which dead animals decompose. The highway she lives by regularly offers up gifts of roadkill, and in the dead of night Ava loves nothing more than to pull her latest discovery into her roadside den and record her findings. One night, she stumbles across the body of her classmate and, fearing that her secret ritual could be revealed, she makes an anonymous call to the police.

Humorous cosy-crime caper from the author of the beloved, bestselling Vinyl Detective series in which a feisty, amoral book dealer uses her unique skills to solve fiendish crimes, A love letter to Agatha Christie murder mysteries and classic whodunnits.

Maggie is trapped. Dumped on her wedding day, rejected by her family and hounded by a man determined to make her suffer. Charlotte is desperate. Double-crossed by her only friend and facing total ruin, she will go to any lengths to save what matters. Two women, one night. A decision that will change everything.

On an island off the windswept Irish coast, guests gather for the wedding of the year – the marriage of Jules Keegan and Will Slater. Old friends. Past grudges. Happy families.Hidden jealousies. Thirteen guests.One body. The wedding cake has barely been cut when one of the guests is found dead. And as a storm unleashes its fury on the island, everyone is trapped. All have a secret. All have a motive.One guest won’t leave this wedding alive....

Nick: Failed writer. Failed husband. Dog owner. Bee: Serial dater. Dress maker. Pringles enthusiast. One day, their paths cross over a misdirected email. The connection is instant, electric. They feel like they’ve known each other all their lives. So they decide to meet.

England, 1941. The world is at war. London is under siege as the German blitz pounds the city without warning, without mercy. Rose Hamilton did her part as a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force until she was unfairly discharged following a tragic loss. Working as a secretary on a Devon farmland, Rose is out of harm’s way, but she needs to contribute to something greater than herself to truly recover.

Nineties girl band Breathe were the girls every teenage girl wanted to be – until the lead singer, Enola, went missing at the height of her fame and was never found. Conspiracy theories abounded, and the people closest to her came under suspicion; her boyfriend Max, her manager, her stepdad, and even Angel, the lead singer of rival girl band Attitude. But no evidence of any wrongdoing was ever found and, bar various unverified sightings of her over the years, no trace of Enola has ever been found.

Between working at her brother’s school and typing up Inspector Robert Curran’s police reports, Harriet Gordon has little time for personal pursuits and she has been enjoying the rehearsals for her role in the Singapore Amateur Dramatic and Musical Society’s latest production - Pirates of Penzance. But Harriet quickly discovers tensions run deep within the theatre company and when the leading man is found murdered, suspicions abound, exposing scandalous behavior as well as some insidious crimes.

An international prize of one billion has been offered to the first man to complete an interplanetary trip, and Dale Curtance, a millionaire adventurer, emerges as the British entrant. With a hand-picked crew, he blasted off from Salisbury Plain in the spaceship Gloria Mundi, destination—the planet Mars. Once free of Earth's atmosphere, they discover a stowaway—a woman. Her extraordinary story helps them prepare for the dangers they encounter on the Red Planet, and the fantastic world that exists there.

At just 20 years old, Tara Tremain has everything: she's a trainee doctor, engaged to the man of her dreams—a passionate American biology student called Alex Carter. But just when life seems perfect, Alex betrays her in the worst way possible. Ten years later, she’s moved on. But when she’s pulled back into her wealthy family’s orbit for an unmissable party in the heart of Costa Rica, she finds herself flung into crisis: a child is desperately ill and the only remedy is several days’ trek into the heart of the jungle.

When Alice and Leo move into a newly renovated house in The Circle, a gated community of exclusive houses, it is everything they’ve dreamed of. But appearances can be deceptive… As Alice is getting to know her neighbors, she discovers a devastating secret about her new home, and begins to feel a strong connection with Nina, the therapist who lived there before. Alice becomes obsessed with trying to piece together what happened two years before. But no one wants to talk about it. Her neighbors are keeping secrets and things are not as perfect as they seem…

In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, ‘I have no critical training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.’ This collection of 20 reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades tells the story of what happened next.

Orphaned from infancy, Catherine de’ Medici endured a tumultuous childhood. Married to the French king, she was widowed by forty, only to become the power behind the French throne during a period of intense civil strife. In 1546, Catherine gave birth to a daughter, Elisabeth de Valois, who would become Queen of Spain. Two years later, Catherine welcomed to her nursery the beguiling young Mary Queen of Scots, who would later become her daughter-in-law. Together, Catherine, Elisabeth, and Mary lived through the sea changes that transformed sixteenth-century Europe.

When a set of rare, impossible-to-find yoga books are stolen from a West London ashram, its leaders turn to Cordelia, the paperback sleuth, to recover them—a set-up that's a little awkward as they've previously barred her from yoga classes for selling marijuana to their students. But what begins as a hunt for missing paperbacks soon becomes a murder investigation as those involved with the ashram can't seem to stop dropping down dead—murdered with a whisky bottle to the head or a poisoned curry.

The Ultimate Classics Collection: Volume One is a continent-hopping, century-spanning collection of 10 of the greatest classic novels ever written, from British, Irish, American, and German authors, read by a cast of incredible narrators including Joanne Froggatt, Stephen Fry, Jonathan Keeble, David Rintoul, and many more.