Showing results by narrator "Clare Wille" in All Categories

The first chapter of a manuscript arrives on Publisher Marina’s desk. She assumes it’s just another novel by another aspiring writer. As the chapters arrive one by one, Marina is convinced they are about her past. There’s only one person who can know everything about the scandal, the trial, and the trauma that nearly broke her. This is one story that should never be told, and Marina is so desperate she will do anything to stop it getting out.

As her reputation steadily grows, Posie Parker is asked to accompany the utterly charming Inspector Richard Lovelace of Scotland Yard on an undercover mission of entrapment. Their destination is a glittering New Year’s Eve party at the remote Maypole Manor in Kent, the cliff-top home of Lord Robin Glaysayer.

Wrong Place is the second gripping crime novel in the DC Maggie Neville series from Michelle Davies, following her critically acclaimed debut Gone Astray. Two women lie hospital beds, both subjects of police investigations. One, a vulnerable old lady, has been assaulted in her own home...

England, 1911. When a free-spirited young woman arrives in a sleepy Berkshire village to work as a maid in the household of The Reverend and Mrs Canning, she sets in motion a chain of events which changes all their lives. For Cat has a past - a past her new mistress is willing to overlook, but...

First appearing in 1782, Dangerous Liaisons is one of the most scandalous and controversial novels in European literature. The plot unfolds through a series of letters as the two main protagonists, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, attempt to bring about the seduction of a young woman. The epistolary nature of the novel gives a multi-faceted perspective of the action, which places the book firmly in the tradition of libertine literature.

Posie Parker, London’s premier female Private Detective, is only just back in town when she receives an unexpected visitor. The mysterious magician, Count Olli Onneri, pupil of the legendary American magician Harry Houdini, invites Posie to take part in the opening night of his show at the nearby Holborn Empire, helping him with a ‘magic mirror’ trick, the like of which has never been seen before.

In the depths of a harsh winter, following the death of their grandmother, Erica Calcott and her sister Beth return to Storton Manor, a grand and imposing Wiltshire house where they spent their summer holidays as children. When Erica begins to sort through her grandmother's belongings, she is...

From sickly child to pioneering Victorian explorer, Isabella Bird defied convention. After back surgery in 1850 and the recommendation of life in the open air, she finally looked her malaise and her pain in the eye and set off across the world completely alone. In Colorado she covered 800 miles on horseback, climbing mountains, wrangling cattle, sleeping in snow and finding herself drawn to a violent, one-eyed outlaw with a soft spot for poetry, known as ‘Mountain Jim’.

London glitters during a snowstorm, and Posie Parker, Private Detective, and her best friend, Dolly, Countess Cardigeon, enjoy a fashion show hosted by Liberty on Regent Street. Rudolph Valentino, the most famous movie star in the whole world, is also there, incognito, and he seeks Posie’s help: he’s in the country researching for a new film, but he’s also been asked to be this year’s surprise guest who will switch on the Christmas lights at Piccadilly, among crowds of excited shoppers.

It’s snowing heavily outside, but in the little white Swiss Church in central London, packed to the rafters with Posie Parker’s beautifully-dressed wedding guests, and half of Scotland Yard, everything is just right. All going to plan. Or is it?

A vivid love story and adventure tale, Oroonoko is a heroic slave narrative about a royal prince and his fight for freedom. The eponymous hero, Oroonoko, deemed royalty in one world and slave in another, is torn from his noble status and betrayed into slavery in Surinam, where he is reduced to chains, fetters, and shackles. But his high spirit and admirable character will not be suppressed.

Prepare for tales of unexplained murders, long-concealed mysteries, strange visitors in the night, and a secret in Posie’s own past, about her parents, which haunts her to this very day. But something is afoot. Several of the guests are acting shiftily, and when a sparkling Christmas gift under the tree is revealed to be a ticking time bomb, designed to cause multiple murders and mayhem, Posie and Lovelace have to locate the perpetrator, fast. Who would want to cause such untold misery, and why?

When a Lesley Kinnock buys a lottery ticket on a whim, it changes her life more than she could have imagined . . . Lesley and her husband Mack are the sudden winners of a £15 million EuroMillions jackpot. They move with their 15-year-old daughter Rosie to an exclusive gated estate in...

As England swelters during the hottest summer on record, Posie Parker, Private Detective, is summoned to Worton Hall Film Studios, where she steps into the heart of a sinister new mystery. Silvia Hanro, the blonde movie star du jour, has received death threats and a severed human finger alongside her morning coffee, and it’s all got too, too much.

If you are susceptible to Miss Marple and Harriet Vane you must read The Adventures of Maud West. You will never know the difference between fact and fiction again. Jill Paton Walsh, author of the Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane mysteries Maud West ran her detective agency in London for more than...

Posie Parker, Private Detective, has been summoned to Chelsea, to the House of Sinne, the London perfume house. Anouk Sinne, the most brilliant perfumier of her age, and famous for her spoiled bald cat, has been receiving blackmail demands, and she asks Posie to investigate. But is blackmail just the tip of the iceberg?

In the lush Shropshire countryside, free-spirited Hazel Woodus is torn between two men: the gentle parson Edward Marston and the passionate, fox-hunting squire Jack Reddin. Her wild side, deep connection to nature, and love of animals–especially Foxy, her pet fox–make for clear internal conflict: she wants to find contentment in her chaste marriage to Edward, but the allure of Reddin is inescapable....

The Serpent of Division features murder and mystery, a charming pirate, Oxford colleges and libraries, a buxom bookseller reminiscent of the Wife of Bath and a Persian physician with a fondness for Rumi. All have a part to play, as the granddaughter of Geoffrey Chaucer fights for survival...

The writer known as M. is living in exile while her home country wages war on a neighbouring state. Wracked by shame and severed from her language, M. finds herself unable to write, unmoored in a present where the future feels unknowable. When she travels to a nearby country for an event, a twist of fate leaves her stranded in an unfamiliar city, phoneless and untraceable. In this rupture, she feels a flicker of liberation – the possibility of starting over – but memories of childhood, books, films and tarot cards pull her back, the last fragments of a vanishing world.

She had no opinion of marriage or of men, but is her cold heart proof against true love? The last thing Clara Mantell wishes for is a husband. The daughter of a rake, she has learned to despise men and marriage, and considers love with contempt. Instead, she seeks out men like her father, wielding her considerable charm as a weapon to take them down a peg or two. Lawrence Simpford has been in love with Clara for years but, not being a rake, is unable to gain her attention.