Showing results by narrator "Gildart Jackson" in All Categories

Ahren's life consists of being beaten up by his drunkard father or bullied by the village lads. But at the annual suitability tests for apprenticeships, the young boy finds himself selected by Falk, the guardian of the forest, to be his apprentice and his world is turned upside down.

Detective Sergeant Chris Waters got the call at 05.29 that July morning. This is it, said DCI Reeve, you'll be first there, it's all yours, you're the crime scene manager. Suddenly, after months of waiting and wondering, Waters finds himself in at the deep end, and alone at the scene of a puzzling murder. As the investigation proceeds, the detectives at Kings Lake Central find themselves visiting familiar places and talking to some familiar faces, while old enmities reappear in the incident room. Before this is over, Chris Waters will need to make a career-changing decision.

The story opens with the apparently accidental drowning of a sixth form student in the Norfolk countryside. As a matter of routine, or so it seems, the case passes across the desk of Detective Sergeant Smith, recently returned to work after an internal investigation into another case that has led to tensions between officers at Kings Lake police headquarters. As an ex-DCI, Smith could have retired by now, and it is clear that some of his superiors wish that he would do so.

This is DC Smith's third investigation with the Diver and Diver Associates agency. They have been asked by a member of Norfolk's aristocracy to look into the tragic death of her younger brother, Freddie, the late Lord Thorpe of the title. The inquest verdict was of misadventure, but it isn't long before Smith begins to suspect there has been a serious miscarriage of justice.

Swedish author Jan Guillou follows up the highly acclaimed The Road to Jerusalem with the second book in his Knights Templar trilogy. The Knight Templar follows Arn's adventures in the Holy Land, where he discovers that the infidel Saracens aren't as brutish and uncivilized as he had been led to believe, and that in fact there is another, darker side to the teaching of the Cistercians.

A passenger plane explodes. Eighty-three people die. One man is responsible. When a routine operation ends in tragedy, decorated ex-Royal Marine Ryan Kaine becomes the target of a nationwide manhunt. The police want him on terrorism charges. A sinister organization wants him dead. Kaine is forced to rely on two women he hardly knows: one, a country vet who treats his wounds, the other an IT expert with a secret of her own. Battling overwhelming guilt and his own moral code, Kaine hunts the people who turned him into a mass murderer.

On September 28, 2000, former Indiana state trooper David Camm made a frantic call to his former colleagues in the state troopers office: He had just walked into his garage and found lying on the floor the bodies of his 35-year-old wife Kim and their two children Brad and Jill, ages seven and five. Three days later, things got worse when police arrested David Camm for the triple murder. Soon new stories started emerging about mistresses and violent bursts of temper.

Things are going well for Alex Verus. He's on moderately good terms with the Council, his apprentice is settling in, and his shop in Camden is gaining quite a reputation. But when a mysterious woman bursts into the Arcana Emporium one night with an assassin on her tail, Alex is thrown into a plot to revive a long-forbidden ritual.

Welcome to Fountain Reach. Ancient seat of the Aubuchon dynasty. Majestic setting of the White Stone tournament. Alex Verus' (not necessarily reliable) reputation attracts all sorts. Most are plain bonkers. Yet there's one invitation he just can't refuse. At Fountain Reach, Alex is perfectly placed among the noted and notorious to figure out why apprentices have been vanishing.

The Paladins are still short one of their number for them to finally be considered a complete fighting force—the thirteen Champions of the gods. Hence, Ahren and his friends, make their way onto the Ice Fields in the far south, following what scant clues there are in their efforts to track down the man considered to be the father of all Forest Guardians and who was last seen hunting down the fearsome dragon, Four Claws. An odyssey on sea and ice awaits them

Never look back. Alex Verus is a diviner who can see probable futures - a talent that's gotten him and his friends out of many a tough scrape. But what happens when someone doesn't want Alex's help? Alex's friend, the life mage Anne, distanced herself from him when she found out about his past as a Dark apprentice. Now she's in serious trouble but wants nothing to do with him. Alex has to start wondering if Anne's problem is really with him - or if there's a secret she's trying to hide.

Ahren's enormous undertaking to unite the thirteen Paladins has, following years of dangerous journeying, come to a successful conclusion. Now there is only one task left for him to complete. He must lead the Champions of the gods, his other friends, and the free peoples of Jorath in an assault on the Obsidian Fortress. Yet the Adversary is intent on foiling his archenemies' plan before they reach his hordes lurking behind the compound walls. The Dark god's scheme is to spring the trap that was set centuries earlier in preparation for just such an event.

In the peace and tranquility of the woods at Pinehills on a Saturday afternoon, a mobile phone begins to ring. The phone belongs to DC Smith, and it isn't unusual that the call is from Kings Lake Central police station; what is unusual is the fact that he seems to be the subject of an investigation rather than taking part in one. What can the links be between a prisoner's violent death in another county, the disappearance of two teenagers, and the highest profile case in Kings Lake for many years?

Written by Scottish-Canadian author John Buchan (The Thirty-Nine Steps), The Runagates Club is a collection of twelve short stories focusing on members of the eponymous London dining society.

When another resident of the Rosemary House care home is found dead in her chair one Saturday evening in December, no one is very surprised - not until the results of a routine post-mortem reveal something extraordinary. Sergeant DC Smith and his team have to tread carefully as they investigate what took place, and Smith himself has to confront some difficult memories. Others, meanwhile, seem intent on getting him to leave the force altogether.

Jo told him the phone call had been about a woman who wanted to have her husband declared dead. Smith thought for a moment and then said, 'Hmm. There must be a few million women in this country who feel like that. I take it her husband's been missing for a while and she's decided it's time to move on. In the absence of a body, which is always a nuisance, she wants Diver and Diver to confirm there's no proof he's alive. And I've told Jason a dozen times I'm not getting involved in anything matrimonial. I have enough trouble sorting out my own relationships.'

As the first anniversary of the formation of the Kings Lake murder squad approaches, there is a problem—they've run out of murders. As a result, they are given the task of reviewing unsolved cold cases. One of these comes back to life in unexpected ways as the team try to discover the identity of the young woman whose body was found in the Norfolk countryside two decades ago. And even if they can give her a name, how can they possibly find her killer after so many years?

It is AD 976. Olaf Tryggvason, the renegade prince of Norway, has lost his beloved wife to a tragedy that turns the lords of the land he rules against him. With his family gone and his future uncertain, Olaf leaves his realm and embarks on a decades-long quest to discover his course in life. Though his journey brings him power and wealth, it is not until he encounters the strange man in the streets of Dublin that his path to fame unfolds. And in that moment, he is forced to make a choice as the gods look on—one that could either destroy him or ensure his name lives on forever.

In Berlin, Kurt Müller, an Abwehr signalman, discovers a colleague lying dead at his radio receiver. The criminal police dismiss the death as suicide, but Kurt is not convinced. Kurt follows a trail of mysteries, witnessing several atrocities that expose the Nazi regime for what it truly is. When the trail leads him to the German resistance, he faces the most difficult choices of his life. He must choose between his duty and his conscience, between his country and his family, between love and death.

Hardly have they left the Forest of Ire and its horrors behind them when the Thirteenth Paladin decides to head for the Green Sea with his friends to fulfil his old promise of bringing the necromancer to justice, who has been holding the fertile lands surrounding the horse people and their Paladin, Blazing Eyes, in his bony grip for far too long. But it is not alone the necromancer with his deadly traps who is testing the companions.