Showing results for "John telfer" in Literature & Fiction

The Sleeping and the Dead is a tense and twisting detective story from Ann Cleeves, creator of the Shetland and Vera Stanhope series. Northumberland detective Peter Porteous is called to Cranwell Lake, where a diving instructor has made a gruesome discovery. In the water lies a corpse – the...

London, 1921. The Great War has recently ended and tensions in England are high. Now, prominent Cabinet minister Lord Amersham has been shot dead outside his Regent's Park home. The signs point to a professional hit. Charged with solving one of the most sensitive and high-profile cases Scotland Yard has ever faced, DCI Paul Stark is under pressure to get the job done quickly.

Impossible crime stories have delighted people since the invention of detective fiction as puzzle-lovers sought more cerebral entertainment. Following on from Miraculous Mysteries, CWA Diamond Dagger Award-winning crime writer Martin Edwards brings together a whole new casebook of mystifying locked room mysteries and impossible crimes. Featuring more great stories by John Dickson Carr, Julian Symons and Margery Allingham alongside newly rediscovered writers, this selection of stories will bring you more insight into one of the most celebrated and dazzling sub-genres of detective fiction.

There is no better hiding place for clues - or red herrings - than inside the pages of a book. With Martin Edwards as librarian and guide, delve into an irresistible stack of tales perfect for every book lover and armchair sleuth, featuring much-loved Golden Age detectives such as Nigel Strangeways, Philip Trent and Detective Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn. But listeners should be warned that the most riveting tales often conceal the deadliest of secrets.

This is the second novel in the series of four, depicting the meeting, courtship and ultimate fulfilment of two modern heroes, Christopher Tietjens and Valentine Wannop, despite social condemnation, personal travails and World War I.

The first volume of Parade's End introduces the central characters: Christopher Tietjens, a brilliant, unconventional mathematician; his dazzling but unfaithful wife Sylvia; and the young Suffragette Valentine Wannop. It starts with the cataclysmic meeting of Tietjens and Valentine: a weekend whose violence prefigures the coming war.

1937: Hitler sent an expedition to Tibet in search of the lost land of Thule. 1941: Himmler spent a huge fortune, and sacrificed the lives of hundreds to turn Wewelsburg Castle in Germany into a shrine to the SS. 2008: Art recovery expert Jamie Saintclair is astonished to discover that the gentle grandfather he thought he knew was a decorated war hero, serving in the Special Air Service in World War Two. And his grandfather has one more surprise.

The Last Post, the fourth and final volume of Parade's End, is set on a single post-war summer's day. Valentine Wannop and Christopher Tietjens share a cottage in Sussex with Tietjens' brother and sister-in-law. Through their differing perspectives, Ford explores the tensions between his characters in a changing world, haunted by the experience of war, facing an insecure future for themselves and for England.

Everyone needs a break now and then but sometimes getting away from it all can be murder. Martin Edwards presents a jam-packed travel case of 18 mysteries, featuring short stories from crime legends, such as Christianna Brand, Anthony Berkeley and Ethel Lina White, alongside more obscure writers revived in this anthology. Grab your ticket for a journey from the classic 1920s seaside holiday to the 1980s homebody’s dream – perfect for an armchair reverie or a summer getaway.

With Europe temporarily at peace, Napoleon Bonaparte has dispatched his victorious army with a vast fleet to the Caribbean. Its aim is to re-impose French authority in the region but first they must reconquer Saint-Domingue. Captain Nathan Peake is sent from England with a small squadron, tasked with disrupting French supply lines at sea and running guns to the rebel forces. But if the men are caught, they will be disowned by the British and US governments and very likely hanged by the French as pirates.

A Man Could Stand Up, the third volume of Parade's End, brings Ford's characters to the 'crack across the table of History', across which lie their uncertain post-war futures. Divided into three parts, the novel is a kaleidoscopic vision of a society at climactic moment.

Edward is throwing a dinner party with Binny, his mistress. Aware that she has long been denied those small intimacies that his wife takes for granted – choosing a birthday present for his sister, for example, or sorting his socks – he wants to give her a chance to feel more involved in his life, to socialise with some of his friends (the discreet ones). Things are a little awkward to begin with, but everything seems to be going well. Then some uninvited and rather forceful guests arrive, and it doesn’t look like Edward is going to make it home on time…

1359, Northern France. With the ink still drying on the Treaty of Bretigny, an agreement most believed to be nothing more than a stalemate between King Edward III of England and John II of France, the country is left riddled with both English and French armies – exhausted, adrift and directionless. An atmosphere ripe for rebellion. Berenger Fripper returns to the only life he truly understands, among the troops of Hawkwood's company. But danger and treachery lurks around every abandoned French farm or village.

March, 1605. Country doctor and former ship surgeon Gabriel Taverner is ready for his next adventure. He can't wait to leave Devon and tend to the crew of the Luipaard while sailing the Eastern seas. As years pass by, Gabriel's family and friends back home are struggling with his substitute physician. Doctor Maudsley Cheverell turned out to be as incompetent as they come and unpleasant at best. So when he is found dead in a ditch one day, no one seems to be too surprised. Only, when examining the body, it seems like Cheverell was tortured using a specific method from the East . . .

John Pearce discovers that Madrid plans to desert the British-led coalition and join the enemy. In company with Lord Langholm, he has taken a Spanish treasure ship but is forced into a deep bay overlooked by Spaniards who have a cannon aimed at the entrance. Pearce must take the lead and find a way to get Langholm's frigate and the damaged Santa Leocadia through the bottleneck. His orders take him via Gibraltar, then to Admiral Jervis to warn of Spanish duplicity.

The streets of London have been home to many great detectives since the days of Sherlock Holmes and Watson, with some of the best authors in the genre taking to the short story form to pit their sleuths against crimes ranging from murders on the Tube to heists from the capital's finest jewellers. Featuring a roster of Scotland Yard's meticulous best, a cohort of daring doctors and a cadre of characterful private investigators, this new selection by Martin Edwards includes 18 vintage mystery stories which showcase the city's most compelling classic cases.

1358, Northern France. In a land ravaged by war, King John II is the prisoner of the King of England. His son, the teenaged Dauphin, must battle to impose control over the fractured kingdom. But King Charles of Navarre wants to wrestle power for himself. He leads Parisians and the Jacquerie to open rebellion, upending the social order, pitting noble against commoner in a brutal struggle for power.

A grisly spirit turns travelling companion for the unwitting passenger of a London bus; a repulsive neighbour returns from the grave, rejected by the very earth; an innocuous back garden becomes the stage for a nightmare encounter with druidic sacrifice. From deep in the British Library vaults emerges a new selection of E.F. Benson's most innovative, spine-tingling and satisfyingly dark 'spook stories'. Complete with an introduction exploring the fascinating story of Benson's life, and including the never-before-republished story 'Billy Comes Through'.

France, 1356. Ten years have passed since the battle of Crécy, and the English fighters are still abroad, laying siege to cities, towns and villages. Meanwhile the Prince of Wales raids across the continent to draw King John into a battle for sovereignty over all France. Berenger Fripper, having lost everything during the plague, is now captain of a company of mercenaries, but treachery and deceit dog him when his travels with the company lead him to Uzerche.

The Saint is back – 50 audiobooks are now available starring the debonair classic crime hero. Curious events almost seem to cry out for the Saint's intervention, and in these stories he is faced with enough peculiar crimes to keep him well occupied. The various adventures he gets himself into lead him to kiss a policewoman, buy a racehorse, invest in bootlegging, dabble in antiques, rent a flat, recover a treaty, get arrested, demonstrate an invention - and always come out on top.