Showing results by narrator "David Thorpe" in All Categories

Bloomsbury presents Swamp Songs by Tom Blass, read by David Thorpe. 'Bracingly original' Kathryn Hughes, Guardian 'A mixture of travelogue, local history and reportage, Swamp Songs brims with evocative word sketches' Times Literary Supplement From Romney Marsh to the Danube Delta, from Cyprus to...

Tough City brokers Dekker Ward created, and dominate, the turbulent market in Latin American bonds. Ricardo Ross is their most successful trader: they call him the Marketmaker. You're either with him or you've made an enemy for life. Disgruntled academic Nick Elliot is Dekker's greenest trader, content to ride his luck as the new boy on the stand. Until strange things start happening to Dekker's employees. One top trader is fired, another dies in a bungled robbery. Nick falls for his colleague Isabel. Then she is kidnapped.

Prior to assuming his new role with a different constabulary, Danny Maik has taken a holiday in Singapore to reconcile with an old friend, Guy Trueman. When a street brawl turns deadly, Danny is facing a charge of manslaughter, but when evidence emerges that he may have planned the victim's murder, Maik is looking at the death penalty. Back in Norfolk, Maik's replacement is trying to resurrect his career after an earlier serious error. At first, the signs are promising. His astute observations turn the apparent suicide of a local pheasant farmer into murder.

Disgraced former Foreign Office clerk Laurence Jago and his larger-than-life employer the journalist William Philpott have escaped America - and Philpott's near imprisonment for libel - by the skin of their teeth. They return to Laurence's home town of Helston in Cornwall in the hope of rest and recuperation, but instead find themselves in the middle of a tumultuous election. Only two men may vote in this rotten borough, and when one of them dies in suspicious circumstances, Laurence is ordered to investigate on behalf of the town's political patron, his old master the Duke of Leeds.

Wall of Hadrian. Britannia, 382 AD. War is creeping back into the land. As silent as snowfall, as inevitable as winter. They've had sixteen years of peace, but all things must end. Tribune Sixtus Victorinus has grown old, complacent. It is his friend, Prefect Gaius Felicius, who first spots the signs. Once more, the Caledonian tribes are rearing their heads in the north, but the greatest danger does not lie with them. For there is a new pretender to the throne of the West.

One of the most turbulent reigns in history paved the way for the first modern revolution. After the Tudors came the Stuarts... August 25, 1689 The English Army is besieging Carrickfergus in Ireland. Brilliant but unusual gunner Holcroft Blood of the Royal Train of Artillery is ready to unleash...

Tobias Campion, rector of Moreton St Jude, is delighted to welcome the widowed Lady Chase as his parishioner. Although charming and generous-spirited, she harbours a secret sorrow: her son, Hugo, is missing, presumed dead. Her late husband's nephew, Sir Marcus Bramhall, making a prolonged, unwelcome visit to Moreton Hall, speaks darkly of bringing a court case to declare him the heir.

Battle-ready factions converge above Darien, all with the same objective. The goal is control over this newly-discovered planet and access to the powerful weapons at its heart. Despotic Hegemony forces dominate much of known space and they want this world too, but Darien's inhabitants will fight for their future. However, key players in this conflict aren't fully in control. Hostile AIs have infiltrated key minds and have an agenda, requiring nothing less than the destruction or subversion of all organic life.

Virtual reality is the technology of the future, and Mark Fairfax’s brother Richard runs the leading company in the field worldwide. He has also been murdered. Mark is a City trader: sharp, young, ambitious. He is left to pick up the pieces at his brother’s company in Scotland’s 'Silicon Glen'. Struggling to keep the business in the black, and with corporate predators closing in, Mark must learn fast and trust no one. With his brother’s killer on the loose, bankruptcy may prove to be the least of his problems.

Makana, a former police inspector who fled from Sudan to Cairo, lives on a rickety Nile houseboat. When the notorious and powerful Saad Hanafi hires him to track down a missing person, Makana is in no position to refuse him. Hanafi is the owner of Cairo’s star-studded football team; his most valuable player has just vanished and Adil Romario’s disappearance threatens to bring down not only Hanafi’s private empire but the entire country. But why should the city’s most powerful man hire its lowliest private detective?

DI Liam McLusky, freshly transferred from Southampton and just recovered from having been injured in the line of duty, has no time to settle in before he is pushed in at the deep end in a new and unfamiliar city. Everyday objects, transformed into explosive devises by a man trying to revenge himself on the world for reasons unknown, are being left across Bristol, maiming or killing those who pick them up.

The Real Crime. Hans Holbein, King Henry VIII's portrait painter, died in the autumn of 1543. A century later a chronicler reported that the artist had succumbed to plague, yet there is no contemporary evidence to support this. Suspicions have been raised over the centuries, but the mystery of what actually happened remains unsolved to this day. Our Story. Young London goldsmith Thomas Treviot is awaiting a design for a very important jewellery commission from Hans Holbein.

Fifth century of the Byzantium Empire. Flavius Belisaurius is son of the governor of Dorostorum City, and his father has two goals: to keep out the barbarians and to expose the deep roots of secular and ecclesiastical corruption. Seeking to prevent a raid, the Governor enlists the help of the powerful magnate, Senuthius Vicinus. Vicinus's corruption is widespread but his support is crucial to win the battle.

If you thought you knew who you were, THINK AGAIN. Did you know that half your DNA isn't human? That somebody, somewhere has exactly the same face? Or that most of your memories are fiction? What about the fact that you are as hairy as a chimpanzee, various parts of your body don't belong to you...

Chris works as a librarian in a small-town library in the south of England. This is the story of the library, its staff, and the fascinating group of people who use the library on a regular basis. We'll meet characters like the street sleepers Brewer, Wolf and Spencer, who are always the first through the doors. The Mad Hatter, an elderly man who scurries around manically, searching for books. Sons of Anarchy Alan, a young Down's syndrome man addicted to the American TV drama series.

John Motram has the chance of a lifetime. A cell biologist convinced that the Black Death was not caused by bubonic plague but by an unknown virus, he is asked to examine preserved bodies buried under the ancient abbey at Dryburgh. However, Motram’s excavations end up in disaster when he first becomes violent and then dangerously ill after entering the secret tomb.

A killer is targeting former students of the Bloomsbury Academy of Law. The victims - all female - are gruesomely butchered according to a pattern corresponding with the legal syllabus. Even more disconcerting are riddles sent by the killer to investigating officer, Chief Inspector Jake Carver, offering clues as to who is next and where they will die.

To love and protect. The code of the good dog is clear. When single mother Tuesday took on mongrel pup Stupendo, she made a friend for life. Through the best and the worst of times, Stupendo has been there for her. Ever faithful, ever loyal, ever true. Nothing could break their bond. Until last week. Stupendo doesn't know why Tuesday is suddenly ignoring him or why his doggy antics no longer seem to soothe Baby William. It takes his worst enemy - the cat next door - to break the news that Stupendo has become a ghost. 

In February 1915, the Great War is still raging on the Western Front, but in Westminster, at the centre of Hardcastle's bailiwick, a policeman is shot dead. At first, Hardcastle believes the murderer to have been a disturbed burglar. But as enquiries continue, attention focuses on an antiquarian bookseller, a struggling artist, a reporter, officers of the Royal Flying Corps, both in England and in France, and the activities of Isabel Plowman, the wife of one of them and the lover of others.

I’ve watched her from afar for weeks. And she has no idea. Bleu MacAllister ran from me three months ago. She thought she could disappear from my life. My beloved believed I’d let her go.