Showing results by narrator "Olivia Dowd" in All Categories

On an island off the windswept Irish coast, guests gather for the wedding of the year – the marriage of Jules Keegan and Will Slater. Old friends. Past grudges. Happy families.Hidden jealousies. Thirteen guests.One body. The wedding cake has barely been cut when one of the guests is found dead. And as a storm unleashes its fury on the island, everyone is trapped. All have a secret. All have a motive.One guest won’t leave this wedding alive....

When Alice and Leo move into a newly renovated house in The Circle, a gated community of exclusive houses, it is everything they’ve dreamed of. But appearances can be deceptive. As Alice is getting to know her neighbours, she discovers a devastating, grisly secret about her new home - and begins to feel a strong connection with Nina, the therapist who lived there before. Alice becomes obsessed with trying to piece together what happened two years before. But no one wants to talk about it. Her neighbours are keeping secrets, and things are not as perfect as they seem.

Twenty-one years ago, Dr Richard Carter and his wife, Pamela, were killed in what has become the most infamous double murder of the modern age. Their 10-year-old daughter - nicknamed the Angel of Death - spent eight years in a children’s secure unit and is living quietly under an assumed name with a family of her own. Now, on the anniversary of the trial, a documentary team has tracked down her older sister, compelling her to break two decades of silence.

London, Burning is a novel about the end of the 1970s and the end of an era. It concerns a nation divided against itself, a government trembling on the verge of collapse, a city fearful of what is to come and a people bitterly suspicious of one another. In other words, it is also a novel about now. Vicky Tress is a young policewoman on the rise who becomes involved in a corruption imbroglio with CID. Hannah Strode is an ambitious young reporter with a speciality for skewering the rich and powerful. 

England, 1917. Reeling from the death of her fiancé, Stella Marcham welcomes the opportunity to stay with her pregnant sister, Madeleine, at her imposing country mansion, Greyswick - but she arrives to discover a house of unease and her sister gripped by fear and suspicion. Before long, strange incidents begin to trouble Stella - sobbing in the night, little footsteps on the stairs - and as events escalate, she finds herself drawn to the tragic history of the house.

Bettina and Bart have grown up as best friends, so surely they will end up together? After all, Bettina is young, rich, headstrong...and gay. Bart is young, rich, charismatic...and also, definitely, gay. Any doubts are dispelled by, in short order: that ghastly kiss; a torrid encounter for Bettina in the school boiler-rooms; and an eye-opening Parisian visit for Bart. Society will never stand for it. What else can they do but enter into a ‘lavender marriage’ and carry on indulging their true natures in secret?

In a luxury lodge on Botswana’s sun-soaked plains, four friends reunite for a birthday celebration. Arriving at the safari lodge, a feeling of unease settles over them. There’s no sign of the party that was promised. There’s no phone signal. They’re alone, in the wild. 

Nell and Charlie feel a spark when they meet by chance in a café. But they don’t trade numbers, or surnames, so there’s no way they’ll meet again. But the next day, Nell’s phone rings at work. Somehow, impossibly, Charlie is on the other end. And he needs her help. Nell is about to save a life, fall in love...and risk everything for a perfect stranger.

Platform Seven at 4am: Peterborough Railway Station is deserted. The man crossing the covered walkway on this freezing November morning is confident he's alone. As he sits on the metal bench at the far end of the platform it is clear his choice is strategic - he's as far away from the night staff as he can get. What the man doesn't realise is that he has company. Lisa Evans knows what he has decided. She knows what he is about to do as she tries and fails to stop him walking to the platform edge. Two deaths on Platform Seven. Two fatalities in 18 months - surely they're connected? 

Start-ups are born to fail. Around three quarters of venture capital-backed new companies never return cash to investors. Upscale is about the other 25 percent. At a time when more people than ever are starting companies in Britain - over 2,000 new businesses are launched every day - Upscale focuses on the moment founders floor the accelerator and their company goes from a bunch of friends in a co-working space to hundreds of employees often scattered around the world.  

Lexie loves her home. She feels safe and secure in it - and loved, thanks to her boyfriend, Tom. But recently, something’s not been quite right. A book out of place. A wardrobe door left open. A set of keys going missing.... Tom thinks Lexie’s going mad - but then, he’s away more often than he’s at home nowadays, so he wouldn’t understand. Because Lexie isn’t losing it. She knows there’s someone out there watching her. And, deep down, she knows there’s nothing she can do to make them stop.

The ultimate myth-busting nutrition bible. Registered dietitians Rosie Saunt and Helen West are the founders of The Rooted Project, set up to translate the latest research direct to your plate and make evidence-based nutrition accessible and engaging. In this book, they explore everything from the danger of anecdotal evidence and unsubstantiated 'facts' about food to the real science behind the nutrients we consume every day. 

Welcome to The Island. Where your worst fears are about to come true. It was supposed to be the perfect holiday: a week-long trip for six teenage friends on a remote tropical island. But when their guide dies of a stroke leaving them stranded, the trip of a lifetime turns into a nightmare. Because someone on the island knows each of the group’s worst fears. And one by one, they’re becoming a reality.

Marguerite Demers is 24 when she leaves Paris for the sleepy southern village of Saint-Sulpice, to take up a job as a live-in nurse. Her charge is Jerome Lanvier, once one of the most powerful men in the village, and now dying alone in his large and secluded house, surrounded by rambling gardens. Manipulative and tyrannical, Jerome has scared away all his previous nurses. 

You never know what’s going on behind closed doors.... If you passed it on the street, you’d see an ordinary London townhouse. You might wonder about the people who live there, assume they’re just like you. But inside a family is trapped in a nightmare. In the kitchen, a man lies dead on the blood-soaked floor. Soon the police will come, and they’ll want answers. Perhaps they'll believe the family’s version of events - that this man is a murderer who deserved to die. But would that be the truth?

In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, ‘I have no critical training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.’ This collection of 20 reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades tells the story of what happened next.

People disappear when they most want to be seen. Jess Walker, middle child of a middle class family, has perfected the art of vanishing in plain sight. But when she arrives at a concrete university campus under flat, grey East Anglian skies, her world flares with colour. Drawn into a tightly knit group of rule breakers - led by their maverick teacher, Lorna Clay - Jess begins to experiment with a new version of herself. But the dynamic between the friends begins to darken as they share secrets, lovers and finally a tragedy.

Rose Hamilton is in desperate need of a fresh start. There are so many reasons she should ignore the advertisement: the war, those treacherous seas, her family, her fiancé...but she cannot help herself. Within weeks, she is boarding an enormous convoy, already too attached to five-year-old Walter Lucknow.

Frances’ parents were not prepared for her birth: they had a blanket and an easel and some paint, but not anything useful, like a car or a phone. So it’s no wonder Frankie has always had a temper. She was born on a beach, in a storm. What Frances was not prepared for was dying in a freak natural disaster that wiped out her whole town. Waking up 100 years later, Frances finds a whole load of new things to be angry about. And that’s before the visitors start turning up, treating her home like it’s a tourist attraction. Which it is.

On a summer's night in 1994, 16-year-old Flora Powell vanished from her sleepy seaside town. She left no trace - only heartache for her mother and her sister, Heather. Twenty-five years later, Heather walks into a stranger's house. There, the loving wife and doting new mother kills two people in cold blood. So only one remains...Jess is sent to report on the case that shocked the hometown she left behind. But it's anything but business to her.