Showing results by narrator "Imogen Church" in All Categories

The day my path crossed with Simon Fox I thought I’d already lost everything, but then he almost ran me off the road with his flash car and belittling jibes. The men in my life had undermined me for too long. Enough was enough. Fuelled by alcohol and the desire to get even, I decided a spot of petty vandalism would make me feel a whole lot better. Wrong. Very wrong. I hadn’t realised that Simon Fox was not a man to be messed with.

Is your workplace riven by tribal conflict? Are your meetings governed by dozens of unspoken rituals? Is there something faintly religious about the way your colleagues worship the CEO? If so, then you might need a lesson in business anthropology. For a century, anthropologists have had an unusual method: immersing themselves deep inside 'alien' tribes and uncovering, from the inside, how they tick. Today, a new generation of anthropologists are using this approach to explain modern businesses - revealing the hidden rituals that define what we buy, who we sell to and how we work.

DS Jane Bennett takes charge of South London's Lewisham murder squad following the temporary suspension of her boss, DI Mike Lockyer. His involvement with a female witness resulted in her murder. Mike returns to work, but he's a shadow of the detective he was a few months before. Bennett gets a desperate call from an old friend to say that her husband, retired colleague Mark Leech, has gone missing. Blood spatters found in the home suggest she doesn't have long to find him.

The Wilderness Years are over. But not for long. At the end of Bridget Jones's Diary, Bridget hiccuped off into the sunset with man-of-her-dreams Mark Darcy. Now, in The Edge of Reason, she discovers what it is like when you have the man of your dreams actually in your flat and he hasn't done the washing-up, not just the whole of this week, but ever.

November 1944. A German rocket strikes London and five young lives are atomised in an instant. November 1944. That rocket never lands. A single second in time is altered and five young lives go on - to experience all the unimaginable changes of the 20th century. Because maybe there are always other futures. Other chances.

A dazzling urban satire of modern human relations? An ironic, tragic insight into the demise of the nuclear family? Or the confused ramblings of a pissed thirty-something? The third installment in Bridget Jones' journey, Mad About the Boy, will be out in October 2013.

Without even noticing, Esther Fairchild has become locked into routine. Living with her adored brother, Christian, she divides her time between illustrating children's books, nightly shifts as a waitress, weekly visits to her father and fortnightly meetings with her married lover. Then one day she encounters a face in the crowd which jolts her out of her mundane existence and makes her question both her life and the past that has helped to shape it.

Thirty years ago something terrible happened to Luna's mother. Something she's prepared to reveal only after her death. In settling her mother's affairs, Luna finds more questions than answers until something impossible and magical happens.... Luna meets her mother as a young woman back in the summer of 1977. If she can truly travel back in time, she can change things. But in order to save her mother's life, will she have to sacrifice her own?

Three women have been found brutally murdered in south London, the victims only feet away from help during each sadistic attack. And the killer is getting braver.... Sarah Grainger is rapidly becoming too afraid to leave her house. Once an outgoing photographer, she knows that someone is watching her. A cryptic note brings everything into terrifying focus, but it’s the chilling phone calls that take the case to another level. DI Mike Lockyer heads up the regional murder squad. With three bodies on his watch, and a killer growing in confidence, he frantically tries to find the link between these seemingly isolated incidents.

The text message is just three words: I need you. Isa Leigh drops everything, packs up her baby daughter and heads straight to Salten, where she and her three best friends attended prestigious boarding school Salten House. Only Kate still lives in the area, at the crumbling Tide Mill she inherited when her disgraced art tutor father vanished when she was just 17. Each of the women is running from something, from an act that has haunted them for many years but which they have tried their best to bury.

When Catherine learns that she is dying, she remembers the words her husband once jokingly uttered and decides to leave him the ultimate posthumous gift: a time capsule containing photographs of their life together along with tape recordings in which she recounts every secret she ever kept, every unspoken thought whether loving or treacherous - the things they never said.

When she stumbles across the advert, she's looking for something else completely. But it seems like too good an opportunity to miss: a live-in nanny position, with a staggeringly generous salary. And when Rowan arrives at Heatherbrae House, she is smitten by the luxurious 'smart' home fitted out with all modern conveniences, by the beautiful Scottish Highlands, and by this picture-perfect family. What she doesn't know is that she's stepping into a nightmare - one that will end with a child dead and her in a cell awaiting trial for murder.

Eleven years ago, Jem and Ralph fell in love. They thought it would be forever, that they’d found their happy ending. Then two became four, a flat became a house. Romantic nights out became sleepless nights in. And they soon found that life wasn’t quite so simple anymore. Now two people who were so right together are starting to drift apart. As they try to find a way back to each other, back to what they once had, they both become dangerously distracted. But maybe it’s not too late to recapture happily ever after....

The man Clemency loves belongs to someone else. She has to hide her true feelings - but when she ropes in an unsuspecting friend to help, wires start to get crossed. For the first time in Ronan's life his charm has failed him in winning over the woman he wants. Loving her from afar appears to be his only option. Belle seems to have the perfect boyfriend, but something isn't quite right. And now a long-buried secret is slowly rising to the surface. The truth has a funny way of revealing itself, and when it does St Carys will be a very different place indeed....

Tor, Cress and Kate have been best friends for as long as they can remember. Through all the challenges of marriage, raising children and maintaining their high-flying careers, they have stuck together as a powerful and loyal force to be reckoned with - living proof that 21st-century women can have it all, and do. It is only when the captivating Harry comes into their lives that things begin to get complicated, as Tor, Cress and Kate are drawn into Harry's dangerous games....

Someone's getting married. Someone's getting murdered. Nora hasn't seen Clare for 10 years. Not since Nora walked out of school one day and never went back. Until, out of the blue, an invitation to Clare’s hen do arrives. Is this a chance for Nora to finally put her past behind her? But something goes wrong. Very wrong.

This was meant to be the perfect trip. The northern lights. A press launch on a luxury cruise ship. A chance for travel journalist Lo Blackwood to recover from a traumatic break-in that has left her on the verge of collapse and to work out what she wants from her relationship. Except things don't go as planned. Woken in the night by screams, Lo rushes to her window to see a body thrown overboard from the next-door cabin. But the records show that no one ever checked in to that cabin, and no passengers are missing from the boat.

London, 1920. Arlette works in Liberty by day and by night is caught up in a glamorous whirl of parties, clubs, cocktails and jazz. But when tragedy strikes she flees the city, never to return. More than half a century later, in the grungy mid-'90s, her granddaughter Betty arrives in London. She can't wait to begin her new life. But before she can do so, she must find the mysterious woman named in her grandmother's will. What she doesn't know is that her search will uncover the heartbreaking secret that changed her grandmother's life and might also change hers for ever.... 

Agatha Christie is one of our most beloved authors - a storyteller unparalleled in her clever plots and twisting tales. But Agatha was also a forensic expert; in each of her books she employs an expert weaving of human observation, ingenuity and genuine science of the era. In Murder Isn't Easy Carla Valentine illuminates all of Agatha's incredible knowledge, showing how she stayed at the cutting edge of forensics from ballistics to fingerprint analysis, as seen through much-loved characters such as Poirot and Miss Marple.

'This was where her dreams drifted to if she didn't blot her nights out with drink; this was where her thoughts settled if she didn't fill her days with chat. She remembered this tiny, remote foreign village on a molecular level and the sight of it soaked into her like water into sand, because this was where her old life had ended and her new one had begun.'