Showing results by narrator "Jane McDowell" in All Categories

It's 1932 and 27-year-old Jessica is living London life to the full when her younger brother, Tim, an ancient Egyptian archaeology expert, goes missing. Teaming up with Sir Montague Chamford - who can resist neither a damsel in distress nor the chance of adventure - Jessie vows to find her beloved brother. Following the clues Tim has left in his wake, Jessie and Monty head to Egypt. In the relentless heat of the desert, romance is kindled between them, but danger also lurks in every shadow. And then Jessie starts to wonder how much Monty really knows about her brother's disappearance....

When a serial killer strikes across a series of towns, and the only potential witness is unable to speak, it is up to FBI special agent Riley Paige to enter the mind of this complex man and learn what, if anything, he knows. What do these victims have in common? What exactly did this man witness? In this dark psychological suspense thriller, Riley Paige must battle her own demons as she is summoned to solve a crime that leaves all others stumped - one that will force her to enter too deep into the mind of a psychopath.

When 12-year-old Katherine Howard comes to live in the Duchess of Norfolk's household, poor relation Cat Tilney is deeply suspicious of her. The two girls couldn't be more different: Cat, watchful and ambitious; Katherine, interested only in clothes and boys. Their companions are in thrall to Katherine, but it's Cat in whom Katherine confides. Summoned to court at 17, Katherine leaves Cat in the company of her ex-lover, Francis, and the two begin their own, much more serious love affair.

Escape to Italy with this sumptuous story of secrets and friendships under Mediterranean skies. A recipe for life should be a simple thing: love and happiness, family, friends and a little food. But life is rarely straightforward.... Alice wants to make the most of life - after all, she knows how fragile it can be - and knows she never feels more alive than when she's cooking. Babetta has spent a lifetime tending the garden of her tiny house on the Italian coast, supplying food to feed a family now grown and gone.

Not until she was16 did Stella Arnold learn the full truth about her father, how handsome, charming James turned out to be a cold-blooded, psychotic extortionist, racketeer and killer. Knowing now what her father was capable of, she decides to study psychology and the criminal mind, and to further her education in America. In the spring of 1962 she flies to Boston where, being beautiful, bright and fashionably English, she becomes someone of huge fascination and on every invitation list.

Born into poverty, illiterate, eighteen-year-old Sarah Evans has been raised to believe she has no rights at all. She and her childhood friend, Lucy Burnes, struggle daily to find food and shelter, drawing strength and comfort from their friendship. When she is falsely accused and found guilty of theft, Sarah is sentenced to transportation, but, instead, she is secretly transferred to Coldbath Fields, one of London's most notorious prisons, at the request of its sadistic governor, Thomas Aris.

This isn't a midlife crisis, OK? For a start I'm not old enough yet to have one of those. I'm calling it a happiness project. I've stolen an entire summer from my life, and by the time it's over I plan to leave this place with a list in my hand. The ten things that make me happy, that's all I want to know. How difficult can it be? They may be small things - a perfect cup of coffee, a day without rain - or bigger ones. It's still the beginning, so how can I know?

An Italian novel in translation about the relationship between a teacher and a young Romanian girl serving time on Nisida, Naples' juvenile-detention centre.

Still reeling from her former partner Lucy’s death and from her partner Bill’s PTSD, FBI Special Agent Riley Paige does her best to try to keep herself stable and to patch together her family life. She has to decide what to about April’s boyfriend, recovering from his abusive father, and about Blaine, who is ready for their relationship to move ahead. But before she can work it out, Riley is summoned for a new case. In an idyllic suburban town in the Midwest, teenage girls are going missing - and a body has already turned up.

On a remote farm, an elderly woman takes a fall outside and, unable to move, is consumed overnight by two of her pigs. The victim was the renowned and reclusive photographer Sophie Bertilak - and the first photo she ever took remains her most infamous: a missing girl who was never seen again. Most strangely, inside the house, all the photos have been removed from their frames..

In this heart-pounding thriller, women are being found dead on train tracks across the country, forcing the FBI into a mad race against time to catch the serial killer. FBI Special Agent Riley Paige may have finally met her match: a sadistic killer, binding victims to the tracks to be killed by incoming trains. A killer smart enough to evade capture across many states - and charming enough to go unseen. She soon learns it will require all of her faculties to enter into his sick mind - a mind which she unsure she wants to enter.

Fetishist of working women Arthur Munby, irascible antiquary General Pitt Rivers, feminist Barbara Bodichon, and other historical figures of the Victorian epoch wander through the backdrop of the novel as Anna's anomalous love for Lore Ritter, and her friendship with freethinking and ambitious Miriam Sala, carry her into areas of uncharted desire, while Beatrice, forced to choose between her beloved Will Anwyl and the evangelist Christian Ritter, who marked her out as a wife when she was only a child, is pulled between passion and duty.

My name is not actually Penny Dreadful. It is Penelope Jones. The ‘Dreadful’ bit is my dad’s JOKE. But it is not even true that I am dreadful.

What has happened to Cornelia Blackwood? She has a loving marriage. But she has no friends. Everyone knows her name. But no one will speak it. Why? Cornelia Blackwood is about to do something very wrong, for reasons she believes to be right. A paperback best seller with her debut novel, The Things We Never Said, and nominated for an RNA Award in 2014, Susan Elliot Wright’s novels are perfect for fans of Maggie O’Farrell and Anne Tyler.

My heart is less than 1% of my body, it weighs hardly anything; it's only a tiny piece of me, yet it's the part Helen finds most interesting. Once it was inside her body, a tiny piece of the son she gave birth to. Now her boy is gone and his heart is keeping me alive. Born with a heart defect, Vivienne Clark's life was saved by a transplant. Now a journalist, she doesn't allow herself to think about the donor, the boy who died so she could live; she can't bear to.

A serial killer is killing victims at rapid speed, and in each crime scene, he leaves an unusual signature: an hourglass. The sand in it is designed to fall for 24 hours and when it is empty, a new victim appears. Amidst intense media pressure, and in a frantic race against time, FBI Special Agent Riley Paige is summoned, with her new partner, to crack the case.

Stella lives with her mother, a smothering narcissist. Her world has shrunk since the terrible accident that left her a shut-in. Her days are broken up by deliveries from a courier that she always returns and by the irresistible urge to watch the life of a stranger - beautiful Connie - unfold on social media. But why is she so drawn to a woman she has never met? And what caused the accident she doesn't want to speak about?

Perfect for fans of warm contemporary women's fiction from Jo Thomas and Adriana Trigiani, Nicky Pellegrino returns with a perfect summer listen. Janetta has never wanted to live a small, everyday sort of life. She's an adventurer, a food writer who travels the world visiting far-flung places and eating unusual things. Now she is about to embark on her biggest adventure yet - a relationship. She has fallen in love with an Italian man and is moving to live with him in Venice, where she will help him run his small guesthouse.

Every summer Teresa follows her father to his childhood home in Puglia, down in the heel of Italy. Everything changes when she meets the three boys who live on the masseria next door: Nicola, Tommaso and Bern - the man Teresa will love for the rest of her life. The three boys share a complex, intimate and seemingly unassailable bond. But no bond is unbreakable and no summer is truly endless, as Teresa soon discovers. There is resentment underneath the surface of that strange brotherhood, a twisted kind of love that protects a dark secret.

1915. Japanese-occupied Korea. Najin Han, the privileged daughter of a calligrapher, longs to choose her own destiny. When her traditional father seeks to marry her into an aristocratic family, her mother defies generations of obedient wives and instead sends Najin to serve in the King's court as a companion to a young princess. But the King is assassinated, and the centuries-old dynastic culture comes to an end.