Showing results by narrator "Seán Barrett" in All Categories

Paganini – showman, womaniser, dazzling virtuoso – is one of the most fascinating characters in the history of classical music. His violin is now kept in Genoa, where it is played once every two years by the winner of an international competition. This year, an unsavoury art dealer is found dead in his hotel room the day after the concert. Clutched in his fist is a scrap of sheet music torn off a page that belongs to the competition winner. But how did the dead man get hold of it? And why?

A nine-to-five job away from the frontline isn't all it's cracked up to be for Grace Macallan. So when she's sent to investigate a suicide at Glasgow's notorious Barlinnie prison, Grace gladly escapes her desk. The dead inmate is Tommy McMartin, heir to a ferocious criminal family - though his murder conviction for killing his gay lover saw him cast out. The investigation drags Grace into contact with old McMartin adversaries - but the dynasty is under threat, and as it topples, buried secrets are unearthed.

Forced to flee England and live in America during the 1890s, Professor James Moriarty - arch-enemy of Sherlock Holmes - returns to London in 1900 to find that his huge criminal empire has been infiltrated and plundered by the coming crime boss, Idle Jack Idell. As if this was not enough, he has evidence that one of his closest lieutenants, a member of the self-styled Praetorian Guard, is betraying him.

In 1962 the American statesman Dean Acheson famously charged that Britain had lost an empire and failed to find a new role. Nearly 60 years later the rebuke rings true again. Britain's postwar search for its place in the world has vexed prime ministers and government since the nation's great victory in 1945: the cost of winning the war was giving up the empire. After the humiliation of Anthony Eden's Suez expedition, Britain seemed for a time to have found an answer.

On May 23, 1992, a roadside explosion killed the Palermo judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three police officers. A few weeks later judge Paolo Borsellino and five police officers were killed in the center of Palermo. These anti-mafia judges became heroes but the violence spread to the region of Bari in Puglia, where we meet a new, memorable character, Maresciallo Pietro Fenoglio, an officer of the Italian Carabinieri. Fenoglio, recently abandoned by his wife, must simultaneously deal with his personal crisis and the new gang wars raging around Bari.

June 1941: Nazi troops surround the city of Leningrad, planning to shell and starve the people into submission. Most of the cultural elite is evacuated, but the famous composer Shostakovich stays behind to defend his city. That winter, the bleakest in Russian history, the Party orders Karl Eliasberg, the shy, difficult conductor of a second-rate orchestra, to prepare for the task of a lifetime. He is to conduct a performance of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, a haunting, defiant new piece.

Grace Macallan is at breaking point, and a new investigation is testing her to the limit. An undercover officer is missing and a woman is washed up, traumatised and barely alive, on the shores of Berwickshire. As she untangles the woman's story, Grace is drawn into a cold-blooded criminal world headed by Pete Handyside, a notorious gangland boss who will fight hard and dirty to control his empire. But a traitor in his midst is intent upon betrayal, triggering an uncontrollable wave of violence. As she hones in on crucial evidence, Grace knows that one wrong move could end in tragedy.

In the backstreets of Istanbul, a young woman's body is found. Dumped in a dustbin and covered in cut flowers, she is the victim of a frenzied and vicious stabbing. Inspector Ikmen discovers that the woman was well known in Istanbul. Newspapers had been calling her the blessed woman, cured of cancer in a Christian miracle and a proclaimed messenger of the Virgin Mary.

What is the connection between crawling through a jungle and your ‘to do’ list? What can ejecting out of a stealth bomber teach you about the importance of thinking the worst? What can surviving in extreme situations teach us about surviving everyday life? John Hudson, chief survival instructor to the British military, knows what it takes to survive. Combining firsthand experience with 20 years of studying the choices people have made under extreme pressure, How to Survive is a lifetime’s worth of wisdom about how to apply the principles of survival to everyday life..

When policewoman Eva Perry goes deep undercover to help bring a vicious local crime ring to justice, both she and her boss - Chief Detective Inspector Beverley Wharton - know there are huge risks involved. A series of unexplained and bizarre suicides forces Beverley into close contact with her former lover, the renegade forensic pathologist John Eisenmenger, who is already investigating the sudden suicide of his colleague Daisy Pemberton.

In January 2014 I was informed that I had cancer. However, Quicksand is not a book about death and destruction but about what it means to be human. I have undertaken a journey from my childhood to the man I am today, writing about the key events in my life and about the people who have given me new perspectives. About men and women I have never met but wish I had. I write about love and jealousy, about courage and fear. And about what it is like to live with a potentially fatal illness.

A Cologne detective asks Jan Fabel for his help in tracking down the Carnival Cannibal, a terrifying serial killer who kills at the start of the world-famous annual Carnival. Unknown to anyone, Fabel's deputy, Maria Klee, also heads for Cologne to hunt down a different, even more dangerous killer - one with whom she has a score to settle. Taras Buslenko, a Ukrainian special-forces commander, prepares his undercover unit for a "black" operation into Cologne.

Lennox liked Quiet Tommy Quaid. Perhaps it's odd for a private detective to like - even admire - a career thief, but Quiet Tommy Quaid was the sort of man everyone liked. Amiable, easygoing, well dressed, with no vices to speak of - well, aside from his excessive drinking and womanising, but then, in 1950s Glasgow those were practically virtues. And besides, throughout his many exploits outside the law, Quiet Tommy never once used violence.

1976, war-torn Beirut. Under the cover of a massive firefight, an unknown band of armed men blast their way into the Imperial Bank of Beirut. Over the next 48 hours they load up three trucks with gold bullion, and the raiders and the loot disappear forever. Two weeks earlier, a young SAS Major newly arrived in The Regiment had tasked his men with scoping out just such a Beirut bank robbery - strictly as an exercise only.

Arthur Meadows has just returned home in his HGV from a long trip to southwest Europe, supposedly bringing back a consignment of cloth, yet is actually bringing back something far more deadly. Meanwhile, a young Asian couple are murdered in their small house in the middle of Gloucester, the killings done with ruthless efficiency. Beverley Wharton, now Chief Inspector, does not relish the investigation of the murders because she does not get on with her new sergeant, and because the pathologist Charles Sydenham would not have been her first choice.

In the beginning there were five identical murders - bodies eviscerated and organs scattered playfully around. Beverly Wharton pinned the crime on Melkior Pendred, a highly skilled and autistic mortuary assistant.

Sasha Grover-Williams hated her wealthy father's dubious business affairs - and ended up dead on a railway track. But did she jump or was she pushed? That's the burning question for Chief Inspector Beverley Wharton. She and her pathologist lover, Dr John Eisenmenger - an expert in forensics - are immediately plunged into a messy world of corruption and violence. Who is the father of the Sasha's foetus that unexpectedly comes to light? How can Beverley be mired in the charge of collusion?

When historian Suzan Tan is asked to examine the contents of a derelict villa on the Bosphorus, she is intrigued to discover a Ouija board among the artefacts. Forty years ago, a young girl was found with a knife in her heart in this villa. It is said that before her death this very Ouija board spelled out her name. The verdict was suicide - but what if it was a brutal act of murder and her killer was still walking free? Suzan asks Ikmen to solve the case, and despite his reluctance to get involved, he soon finds himself drawn into the mystery.

There is a killer loose on the streets of London, one that evades security cameras, is not held by locks, and savagely mutilates his victims. When the murderer switches from unknown prostitutes to Julie Longmuir, a beautiful actress at the height of her success, no woman feels safe. As the press begin to draw uncomfortable comparisons with Jack the Ripper, Jane Sullivan, heading up the police investigation, grudgingly has to agree.

After the tragic death of his lover, Helen Flemming, Eisenmenger throws himself back into his work as a forensic pathologist. The newly promoted Chief Inspector Beverley Wharton brings him in to help on the grisly discovery of a severed head in a local farmyard. When a headless – but female – body then turns up in a dustbin, they must acknowledge that this shows all the signs of the work of a serial killer.