Showing results by narrator "Richard Burnip" in All Categories

In this spellbinding collection, Sara Paretsky showcases her extraordinary talents with 14 short stories, including one new V.I. story and seven other classics featuring the indomitable detective. In 'Miss Bianca' a young girl becomes involved in espionage when she befriends a mouse in a laboratory that is conducting dark experiments. Ten-year-old V.I. Warshawski appears in 'Wildcat', embarking on her very first investigation to save her father.

Monica Jones was Philip Larkin's partner for more than four decades and was arguably the most important woman in his life. She was cruelly immortalised as Margaret Peel in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim and widely vilified for destroying Larkin's diaries and works in progress after his death. She was opinionated and outspoken, widely disliked by his friends and Philip himself was routinely unfaithful to her. But Monica Jones was also a brilliant academic and an inspiring teacher in her own right.

The year is 1976, and Jack Sheffield never wants to leave his job. Jack has been the deputy head teacher at Newbridge Primary School for six years now, and he's happy exactly where he is - even if it sometimes feels like there are a few things missing from his life. After all, the kids keep him busy and there's always a game of rugby to play. But it's a time of change, and Jack's world is no exception. New and old faces appear in his life, and a romance blossoms, bringing with it a buried secret and hidden threat.

York railway station, December, 1925. Detective Inspector Jim Stringer is enjoying a pint in the Parlour Bar before accompanying his wife, Lydia, to a charitable function. But when the couple meet at their regular spot near the footbridge, Jim is alarmed to see a man pointing a revolver in his direction. His thoughts go spinning back to a hot day at the end of August, when he attended the York Summer Gala in company with his boss, Superintendent Saul Weatherill, aka 'the Chief'.

This is an epic audiobook set in an age of dramatic change. Siward, scion of a great dynasty, commands the Varangian Guard and has vowed to defend the Roman Empire to the last. Makkim, renowned general to Ottoman rule, has vowed to destroy it. They are enemies in war, but unknown to them, they are also rivals to inherit one of Europe's greatest fortunes. Even worse, they are competing for the love of the same woman .

The Western Front is a wasteland of barbed wire, shell craters and mud-filled trenches. Winston Churchill, searching for a solution to the stalemate, commits the Allies to a disastrous Gallipoli campaign. As men on both sides die in droves, miners and mill-workers work tirelessly for the war effort while families confront the broken bodies of returning soldiers. Nurses, soldiers, politicians, factory-workers and children - all are torn apart by war, and for husbands and sons, mothers and wives, the old way of life is vanishing.

June 1914. The beginning of another long, prosperous summer for Britain. But beneath the clear skies, the chill wind of social discontent swirls around this sceptred isle. Shots ring out in a distant European land - the assassination of a foreign aristocrat. From that moment the entire world is propelled into a conflict unlike any seen before. This is the story of five British communities, their circumstances very different, but who will all share in the tragedy that is to come.

The close-knit villages of the Dearne Valley were home to four generations of the Hollingworth family. Spanning Richard Benson's great-grandmother Winnie's 92 years in the valley, and drawing on years of historical research, interviews and anecdotes, The Valley lets us into generations of carousing and banter as the family's attempts to build a better and fairer world for themselves meet sometimes with triumph, sometimes with bitter defeat.

Vienna, 1939. Professor Speckstein's dog has been brutally killed and he wants to know why. When an unexpected house call leads Doctor Beer to Speckstein's apartment, he finds himself in the bedroom of Zuzka, the professor's niece. Wide-eyed, flirtatious, and not detectably ill, Zuzka leads the young doctor to her window and opens up a view of their apartment block that Beer has never known. Does one of these enigmatic neighbours have blood on their hands?

On 9th September 1560 Amy Robsart, the wife of Queen Elizabeth’s favourite courtier, Robert Dudley, was found lying dead at the foot of a staircase. It was a death that scandalised Tudor England. Was it an accident, suicide or murder? Robert Dudley’s open flirtation with the young Queen Elizabeth only fuelled rumours that he had orchestrated his own wife’s death. With Dudley now conveniently widowed, perhaps the queen had found her consort at last.

Ray Greenland is an exemplary family man, a Thames River pilot who guides others to safety, while his wife Lily runs a dating agency, navigating others to happy futures. What none of those around him know, including Lily and their children, is that Ray's life is not his own. An act committed when he was twelve has meant that Ray must live under a false identity for the rest of his life.

It looks like Mr Cheng has finally lost his mind! So when everything starts to spiral out of control, it's not long before Jonathon and the Fang Gang have to get involved. Enjoy more fiendishly funny stories from Jonathon the Fang Gang and the grisly neighbours of Goolish.

January, 1981. Jim Dowd and Maureen O'Brien, special forces soldiers, enter a bitterly divided Belfast on an undercover mission to infiltrate one of the city's most dangerous Catholic neighbourhoods and help change the course of a war that nobody is winning. The Ardoyne is a perilous world, where a hint of their true identities would prove fatal. But it is also full of courage and loyalty. Jim admires this community - and feels guilt at their deception.

The illegal underground movement of Protestant separatists from Elizabeth I's Church of England is a story of subterfuge and danger, arrests and interrogations, prison and executions. It starts with Queen Mary's attempts to burn Protestantism out of England, which created a Protestant underground. Later, when Elizabeth's Protestant reformation didn't go far enough, radicals recreated that underground, meeting illegally throughout England, facing prison and death for their crimes. They went into exile in the Netherlands, where they lived in poverty - and finally the New World.

Buenos Aires, 1981. Inspector Alzada's work in the Buenos Aires police force during the Dirty War exposes him to the many realities of life under a repressive military regime. Personally, he prefers to stay out of politics, but when his hot-headed revolutionary brother, Jorge, is disappeared, Alzada knows he will stop at nothing to recover him.

Welcome to a world where every desire is visible, rising from the body as a plume of Smoke. A world where bodies speak to one another and infect each other with desire, anger, greed. It is 1909, and this world stands on a precipice - some celebrate this constant whisper of skin to skin, and some seek to silence it forever. Enter Eleanor, a young woman with a strange power over Smoke and niece of the Lord Protector of England. Running from her uncle and home, she finds shelter in a New York theatre troupe.

In the Full Light of the Sun follows the fortunes of three Berliners caught up in a devastating scandal of 1930s Germany. It tells the story of Emmeline, a wayward young art student; Julius, an anxious middle-aged art expert; and a mysterious art dealer named Rachmann, who are at the heart of Weimar Berlin at its hedonistic, politically turbulent apogee and are whipped up into excitement over the surprising discovery of 32 previously unknown paintings by Vincent van Gogh.

Vienna 1770: Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen unveils an amazing invention, The Mechanical Turk, an unbeatable chess playing automaton. Hailed as the greatest innovation of the century, the chess machine is really a brilliant illusion, secretly operated from inside by the Italian dwarf Tibor. But when a beautiful and seductive countess dies mysteriously in the presence of the automaton, the machine and its inventor become the target of espionage, persecution, and intrigue.

With the constant threats now posed by gangs, drugs turf wars and terrorism, the world of police protection has changed almost beyond recognition. But the story of these incredible officers is also the story of Britain's most dramatic and traumatic news events. In Bodyguard: The Real Story we meet individuals with first-hand recollection of these indelible events with powerful stories to tell.