Showing results by narrator "Lloyd Matthew Davies" in All Categories

Natchez, Mississippi, once had more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in America, and its wealth was built on slavery and cotton. Today it has the greatest concentration of antebellum mansions in the South, and a culture full of unexpected contradictions. Prominent White families dress up in hoopskirts and Confederate uniforms for ritual celebrations of the Old South, yet Natchez is also progressive enough to elect a gay Black man for mayor with 91 percent of the vote.

When Hetheridge saves the outspoken, impetuous young detective from getting the sack, siding with her against Scotland Yard's powerful male hierarchy, his cold, elegantly balanced world spins out of control. Summoned to London's fashionable Belgravia to investigate the brutal murder of a financier, Hetheridge must catch the killer while coping with his growing attraction to Kate, the reappearance of an old flame, and the secret that emerges from his own past.

In exchange for a vial of dragon's blood to save her brother's life, Melanie Hall offers herself up as a sacrifice to one of the British dragon-shifter clans. Being a sacrifice means signing a contract to live with the dragon-shifters for six months to try to conceive a child. Her assigned dragonman, however, is anything but easy. He's tall, broody, and alpha to the core. There's only one problem - he hates humans.

From the ruins of Persepolis to lawless outposts of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, The Mesopotamian Riddle whisks you on a wild adventure through the golden age of archaeology in an epic quest to understand our past.

Charlie Matters' life has always been a fight for survival. Orphaned with no prospects, Charlie steals what he needs, living day-to-day until he can enlist in the battle against the Germans.

London. July, 1399. As rumors spread that his ambitious cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, has returned from exile in France, King Richard's grip on the English throne grows ever more precarious. Meanwhile, the body of a young woman is discovered at Dowgate sluice. When it's established that the dead woman was a novice from nearby Barking Abbey, the coroner calls in his friend, Brother Chandler, to investigate. Who would cut the throat of a young nun and throw her remains in the river? And what was she doing outside the confines of the priory in the first place?

The people who call End of the Line need hope. They need reassurance that life is worth living. But some are unlucky enough to get through to Laura. Laura doesn’t want them to hope. She wants them to die. Laura hasn’t had it easy: she’s survived sickness and a difficult marriage only to find herself heading for forty, unsettled and angry. She doesn’t love talking to people worse off than she is. She craves it. But now someone’s on to her—Ryan, whose world falls apart when his pregnant wife ends her life, hand in hand with a stranger. Who was this man, and why did they choose to die together?

In the quaint village of Birdswing, the winter of 1939 is bitterly cold. Still haunted by his ex-wife’s murder and eager to contact the Fenton House ghost, Ben enlists Lady Juliet in an amateur séance. But the surprise return of Juliet’s rogue husband, Ethan, upends her life, setting tongues wagging. While she fights to make him sign divorce papers, a bloodless, naked corpse confronts Ben. The murdered man, handsome but uneducated and known to make passes at all things female, is discovered in an oh-so-proper estate.

Martin Amis first tackled the Holocaust in 1991 with his bestselling novel Time's Arrow. He returns again to the Shoah with this astonishing portrayal of life in "the zone of interest," or "kat zet"—the Nazis' euphemism for Auschwitz. The narrative rotates among three main characters: Paul Doll, the crass, drunken camp commandant; Thomsen, nephew of Hitler's private secretary, in love with Doll's wife; and Szmul, one of the Jewish prisoners charged with disposing of the bodies.

On the trail of an aristocrat's secret son, enquiry agent Mark Braglewicz finds his quarry in a music hall, performing as a trapeze artist with his twin sister. Graceful, beautiful, elusive, and strong, Pen Starling is like nobody Mark's ever met - and everything he's ever wanted. But the long-haired acrobat has an earldom and a fortune to claim.

Paige Chadwick is having the worst day of her life. Her tyrant boss has made her three days late for her sister's destination wedding trip, and now she's stuck on the wrong Caribbean island with the wedding just hours away. Enter Mac Gamble, a brooding yet irresistibly attractive pilot, who reluctantly agrees to get her to the church on time. When a fast-moving storm leaves them stranded on a deserted island, they're forced to rely on each other to survive. As they navigate their new surroundings, tempers flare and an undeniable attraction grows.

The battle for freedom has left Emaneska reeling and desolated. Both Scalussen and Arka are scattered to the winds. With the Blazing Throne now empty and the Arka Empire for the taking, the race to claim Emaneska has begun. Farden and Mithrid have been stranded alone in strange eastern lands by errant magick. They battle not to return home, but to uncover an ancient weapon capable of defeating a god. A god who desires nothing but chaos.

Sir Philip Gibbs served as one of five official British reporters during the First World War. In this book he relays the experiences of British soldiers and offers a detailed narrative of the events of World War I, while trying to draw broader conclusions about the nature of war and how it can be prevented in the future.

William Finchley carries a secret from childhood which he has never shared with anyone, not even his closest friends. When his brother commits suicide, Finch becomes the new Duke of Sommersby. He attend his first season with no plans to ever wed—until he meets Lady Pemberton, an optimistic, brave widow.

People have been drawing lines on maps for as long as there have been maps to draw on. Sometimes rooted in physical geography, sometimes entirely arbitrary, these lines might often have looked very different if a war or treaty or the decisions of a handful of tired Europeans had gone a different way. By telling the stories of these borders, we can learn a lot about how political identities are shaped, why the world looks the way it does―and about human folly.

Wounds is a confounding, strange, and utterly entrancing collection of six stories, including one new novella from Shirley Jackson Award-winning author Nathan Ballingrud. From the eerie dread descending upon a New Orleans dive bartender after a cell phone is left behind in a rollicking bar fight in The Visible Filth to the search for the map of hell in “The Butcher’s Table”, Ballingrud’s beautifully crafted stories are riveting in their quietly terrifying depictions of the murky line between the known and the unknown.

The Nysis is unlike any other river. Mysteries unfold with each port of call. Not many can navigate these channels; not many know of its whirlpools and sandbanks, of the ravenous creatures that lurk beneath the surface. Cady used to have the necessary knowledge and the powers of spectral navigation, but her glory days are well behind her now. This might well be her final journey.

There is a wild man who lives in the deep quiet of Greenhollow, and he listens to the wood. Tobias, tethered to the forest, does not dwell on his past life, but he lives a perfectly unremarkable existence with his cottage, his cat, and his dryads. When Greenhollow Hall acquires a handsome, intensely curious new owner in Henry Silver, everything changes. Old secrets better left buried are dug up, and Tobias is forced to reckon with his troubled past - both the green magic of the woods and the dark things that rest in its heart.

After centuries locked in an endless cycle of poverty, persecution, and barbarity, Europe has finally emerged into the Age of Enlightenment. Scientists, philosophers, scholars, and poets alike believe this to be a new era of reason and hope for all. But the forces of darkness haven’t completely dissipated, as Spain hunts and butchers any who dare to defy its ironclad Catholic orthodoxy. Only one nation can fight the black shadow that threatens this new age, and that is Britain, now ruled by a brilliant young Queen Elizabeth I.

Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus (46 ce - after 119) was born in Chaeronea, Boeotia, to a wealthy Greek family. He made the most of his varied background and experience as a philosopher, magistrate, ambassador and priest at the Delphic Temple of Apollo, to become one of the most important biographers and essayists of classical Greek and Roman times. Parallel Lives is his best-known text. But Moralia, his collection of essays on a rich variety of subjects, continues to fascinate and educate. Translations by Richard Shilleto.