Showing results by narrator "Caroline Lennon" in All Categories

It's the week before Christmas. Catherine Berlin sits alone gazing at a bank of monitors, each capturing a slice of a vast industrial estate. A van appears: two men delivering crates, moving quickly. Her boss tells her to ignore them, but she can't. Berlin's scars have faded, but she still walks with a limp. Broke, she's working nights as a relief CCTV operator, and looking for something more substantial. Her heroin habit is under control - only just. The night shifts end, but now Berlin herself is being watched.

Sally and her sister Bridget are New Yorkers now – they’ve settled in and feel at home in the bustling city. Life in New York is exciting enough that the girls can rise above life with Catherine, their mean cousin. At work one day, Bridget finds a photograph of a young man between the pages of a book. She shows it to her employer Miss Cameron who dismisses it, but her blush and flustered manner intrigue Bridget. She soon discovers he was a suitor, but not allowed by Miss Cameron’s family as he came from a poor background.

February, AD 668, and Cashel is full of distinguished visitors. Under the old Irish custom, Fidelma of Cashel and Eadulf of Seaxmund's Ham, having been joined together for a year and a day, are to be married. But on the eve of the ceremony, the pious Abbot Ultán is found murdered in his chamber. Worse still - one of the most distinguished guests, the King of Connacht, is seen fleeing from the scene and charged with the murder. He demands his right to appoint Fidelma in his defence.

Lured by her aunt’s promise of a restful Irish vacation, Maggie agrees to help out at the Movie Theater Café in exchange for bed and board. Things are looking up - until the most hated woman on Whisper Island is poisoned at the café. With her aunt as the prime suspect, Maggie and her rock-hard muffins are hurled into the murder investigation.

When Maggie loses a lucrative contract for her P.I. agency due to an accidental full frontal flashing, she’s forced to accept the only other job on offer: one involving her nemesis, the pampered show cat, Quibbles. Maggie and her wacky associate Lenny are hired to escort Quibbles to the final round of auditions to become the face of a luxury cat food brand, Purrfect Paws. Instead of the five-star hotel they were promised, Maggie and Lenny find themselves trapped in a run-down hostelry in the middle of a hurricane.

Bridget and Josie are leaving rural Ireland for New York, to stay with a distant relative, Catherine, who has found jobs for them. On the journey they meet a young orphaned girl, Julia, who is travelling alone in hopes of staying with her long-absent brother. When they get to the brother's address, he is no longer there, and no one knows where he has gone to. In the following weeks they do their best to search for him, but are unsuccessful as he has a common name, and the police are not particularly interested in finding yet another lost Irish man.

No one in Carniskey has ever understood what led local fisherman Sean Delaney to risk his life in a high storm in the dead of night. Three years on from that tragic night, his wife, Alison, is struggling with grief and increasing financial worries. She has grown distant from her daughter and estranged from her friends and fellow villagers, particularly her best friend, Kathleen, who harbours a secret of her own. But the arrival of an outsider artist and lifelong nomad, William, offers Alison a new perspective on life and love that threatens to unearth the mysteries of the past.

Forensic investigator Reilly Steel is back in Florida, hoping that a relaxing stay at the home of her old FBI mentor, Daniel Forrest, will help her. But Reilly soon finds herself drawn into a local investigation, a gruesome murder where the body of a woman has literally been torn in two. And when another disturbing killing occurs, Reilly can't help but feel that she has come across something like this before. But where?

Irish singing star Daniel O'Donnell's mother, Julia, grew up on a remote island off the northwest coast of Ireland, going barefoot and doing hard labour as a child during the poverty-stricken 1920s. The hard work continued through her teenage years as she picked potatoes in the fields and travelled to Scotland to gut fish in the ports. After she married and settled in Kincasslagh, Julia's beloved husband, Francie, was forced to leave his family for months on end to work on farms, again in Scotland.

In 1920s inner city Dublin Tenements, Ivy Rose Murphy struggles to survive in the harsh poverty-stricken environment she was born into. She is trying to adapt to her new role as a married woman. There are those jealous of the improvements she has managed to make in her life. To Ivy it seems everyone wants a piece of her. Ivy's friends gather around to offer support, but somehow Ivy is the one who gives hope to them.

For the first time in her seventy-nine years, Evie McCarthy is plagued by the smell of roses. Death is coming for her. Clear as day. She's lucky she has the gift of second sight. It's served her well as Ballyhay's matchmaker, and now she's being forewarned. She just wants enough time to help her daughter and granddaughters realise the important things in life. Her big-hearted granddaughter Rosie is in love again. Rosie's married sister, Molly, with two small boys, is sleep-deprived, exhausted and wondering what happened to her life. Motherhood isn't supposed to be like this, is it?

Molly's perfect life comes crashing down following the unexpected death of her husband David. She is left alone with a big, old house to maintain, finances in disarray and her hopes for happiness in a heap. But Molly is a survivor. Despite objections from her two daughters, Molly fears that the only solution will be to sell their beloved home.

Fun, feisty Eva Gordon's never been one to shy away from helping her friends - whether they want her help or not - but this time she might have found a problem that's too big even for her.... When Eva and her family head to Seacove for their summer holidays, she's looking forward to seeing Kate again, but it turns out things have gone very wrong for Kate. Her granny's in the hospital, and with no else to look after her, Kate's hiding out at home by herself, afraid she's going to be taken into care.

“When I rolled out of bed at the butt crack of dawn, I had no idea my day would start with a missing sheep and end with a dead dude in a crotchless mankini". Armed with her newly issued private investigator’s license, Maggie Doyle is on the case...of a sheep that went missing 22 years ago. When she trips over a dead body on the first day of the investigation, Maggie realizes there’s more to this cold case than a fight over lamb chops.

Andrea and Lexi thought they would be best friends for ever. Through thick and thin, growing pains and wild nights out, they were inseparable. But it was their biggest adventure that was to tear them apart: travelling through Australia, Andrea and Lexi are involved in a catastrophic accident. Andrea is left scarred but her best friend is nowhere to be found. What happened to Lexi? Two years later, Andy's scar means she's too scared to go out into the real world.

As the daughter of a well-known matchmaker, Catríona Daly is no stranger to the business of love—and sees it as her ticket away from the sleepy village that only comes alive during the annual matchmaking festival. When Andrew, son of Lord Osborne, returns to the festival after being disappointed by a rival matchmaker’s failed setup, Catríona seizes the opportunity to make a better match for the handsome man—and for herself! Cattle farmer Donal Bunratty is in desperate need of a wife after loss left him to handle the farm and raise his daughter on his own.

Brianna Kelly has worked at Ballymacool House and Boarding School since she was a wee girl and will likely die there. Despite a sense that she was made for something more, Brianna feels powerless to change her situation, so she consoles herself by exploring the Ballymacool grounds, looking for hidden treasures to add to the secret trove beneath the floorboards of her room.

1980: Josephine flees her home in Ireland to start a new life in London - but can't leave her traumatic childhood behind. Seventeen years and two children later, her sister calls: their mother is dying and wants to see Josephine. It's a summons she can't refuse....

Georgina Corrigan is worried. The first women sent to her Percy Place home by the BOBs - an organisation which supports women escaping difficult home lives - are ready to step out into the world again. Some have found opportunities in Dublin, others in New York. Will those travelling to America find employment with the Harvey Company? Thousands try every year to become Harvey Girls - young women who serve in restaurants and hotels on the railway line. Will they be successful when so many fail?

Resurrecting buried scandals, audacious hoaxes and private tragedies, Emma Donoghue has written a sequence of short stories about peculiar moments in the history of the British Isles. Here artists mix with poisoners and countesses rub shoulders with cross-dressers, vicars and revolutionaries; the Second Coming is proclaimed in Scotland; and a miniature girl becomes a tiny skeleton in a London museum.