Showing results by narrator "Sean Barrett" in All Categories

One night, when I am old, sick, right out of semen and don't need things to get any worse, I hear the noises growing louder. I am sure they are making love in Zenab's bedroom, which is next to mine. Waldo, a fêted filmmaker, is confined by old age and ill health to his London apartment. Frail and frustrated, he is cared for by his lovely younger wife, Zee. But when he suspects that Zee is beginning an affair with Eddie, 'more than an acquaintance and less than a friend for over 30 years', Waldo is pressed to action: determined to expose the couple, he sets himself first to prove his suspicions correct - and then to enact his revenge.

A novel in verse form, Byrne echoes and takes further many of the preoccupations of Burgess's earlier fiction. It tells the story of a rampant Irish artist who, in the early days of the century, goes rapidly to the bad and ends up within Hitler's Third Reich.

The chilling phenomenon begins again. On a summer night the dead body of a woman is found on board an abandoned pleasure boat drifting around in the Stockholm archipelago. Her lungs are filled with brackish water, but there are no traces of this water on her clothes or other parts of her body. Detective Inspector Joona Linna takes up the case. Forensics state that it was a simple drowning, that she must have been pulled aboard the boat which explains the lack of brackish water.

Once a successful surgeon, Frederick Welin now lives in self-imposed exile on an island in the Swedish archipelago. Nearly twelve years have passed since he was disgraced for attempting to cover up a tragic mishap on the operating table. One morning in the depths of winter, he sees a hunched figure struggling towards him across the ice. His past is about to catch up with him.

A long buried and shocking secret has been uncovered. In 1940, President Roosevelt and Canada's Mackenzie King secretly agreed to abandon the Allies and make peace with Hitler if the Nazis successfully invaded Britain. Decades later, Soviet agents are ready to use this information to shatter the NATO alliance and use the ensuing geopolitical chaos to strengthen their position in Europe. Only one man stands in their way.

When Kurt Wallander first appeared in Faceless Killers back in 1990, he was a senior police officer, just turned 40, with his life in a mess. His wife had left him, his father barely acknowledged him; he ate badly and drank alone at night. The Pyramid chronicles the events that led him to such a place. We see him in the early years, doing hours on the beat whilst trying to solve a murder off-duty; witness the beginnings of his fragile relationship with Mona, the woman he has his heart set on marrying.

Crestfallen, dejected, and spiralling into an alcohol-fuelled depression after killing a man in the line of duty, Inspector Kurt Wallander has made up his mind to quit the police force for good. When an old acquaintance, a solicitor, seeks Wallander's help to investigate the suspicious circumstances in which his father has died, Kurt doesn't want to know. But when the solicitor also turns up dead, shot three times, Wallander realises that he was wrong not to listen.

A Treacherous Paradise sees Henning Mankell turn his talents for writing gripping thrillers to a world where power and powerlessness meet and passion is a dangerous commodity. Hanna Lundmark escapes the brutal poverty of rural Sweden for a job as a cook onboard a steamship headed for Australia. Jumping ship at the African port of Lourenço Marques, Hanna decides to begin her life afresh. Stumbling across what she believes to be a down-at-heel hotel, Hanna becomes embroiled in a sequence of events that lead to her inheriting the most successful brothel in town.

Jack Solomon is a messenger of death. Working in the fractured remains of Yugoslavia, his task is to identify the victims of ethnic cleansing and to tell families that their loved ones are gone. Years of working in the killing fields have desensitised the former London policeman to the horrors of war, but when a truck containing 26 bodies is pulled from a lake, Solomon is unable to walk away from the case. He sets out to find the only survivor of the massacre, a young girl on the run from the killers. From the brothels of Sarajevo to the high-stakes world of Internet prostitution, Solomon discovers that the killers are closer to home than he thinks....

Human remains are recovered from the bottom of the River Clyde. Not an unusual occurrence, but these have been sleeping the deep, dark sleep for eighteen years. Suddenly Glasgow’s underworld is buzzing with the news that the dredged up bones belong to Gentleman Joe Strachan, Glasgow’s most successful and ruthless armed robber.

Early 1944, and with the tide of the war flowing steadily against the Germans, the SAS - born in North Africa as a strategic raiding force behind enemy lines - is performing a similar role in the Italian mountains and French forests. Here, after making common cause with local partisans, they are cutting rail and road links serving the frontline German armies. Hitler knows as much and is determined that the SAS will pay a terrible price for their efforts.

What does a man do when he discovers a process like Omega Minus? He wishes he hadn't. Scientist James Hallet has the intelligence forces of all the world's major powers on his back, and they're not too particular about how they get their information. They wouldn't, for instance, baulk at the kidnap and torture of Hallet's beautiful blonde mistress. Not if it would give them Omega Minus.

A super recogniser is someone who is outstanding at remembering faces, and when Magnus is stuck with a tricky case his colleague suggests his young cousin from Vik, who could identify every sheep in his flock at the age of 12, to help with the case. But this leads Magnus to a murder....

When Mark Hartmann is asked to perform a post-mortem on a lab assistant killed by cancer, everything looks straightforward. But his initial findings are surprising: Millicent Sweet appears to have died of several different, aggressive tumours. Before he can discuss this with colleagues, he's called to a conference in Scotland. A serious error of judgement gives a pharmaceutical company a handle on him, and they threaten to expose his excesses unless he falsifies his report on Sweet.

Poetry can capture the imagination in a few short lines but narrative verse or poetry takes the form of telling a story, whether it be simple or complex in a longer form. Among the most ancient forms of poetry, it has widespread roots through almost every culture. In Volume 4 we bring you the classics 'The Eve of St Agnes' by John Keats; 'Flodden' by Sir Walter Scott; 'The Ballad of Agincourt' by Michael Drayton; 'Tam O'Shanter' by Robert Burns; and 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin' by Robert Browning.

Stopping to use a cash machine one evening, a man inexplicably falls to the ground: dead. A taxi driver is brutally murdered by two teenage girls. Quickly apprehended they appal local policemen with their total lack of remorse. One girl escapes police custody and disappears without trace. Soon afterwards, a blackout covers half the country. When an engineer arrives at the malfunctioning power station, he makes a grisly discovery. Inspector Kurt Wallander is sure that these events must be linked - somehow.

When we think of Oscar Wilde we think of his wonderful wit and of course his plays and short stories. We rarely think of his poetry. We should. His work brings new insights into both his view of the world and how we can view him.

Leaders are forged in the fires of war. Iron Age warriors Dug and Lowa captured Maidun castle and freed its slaves. But now they have conquered it, they must defend it. A Roman invasion is coming from Gaul, but rather than uniting to protect their home, the British tribes battle each other - and see Maidun as an easy target. Meanwhile Lowa's spies infiltrate Gaul, discovering the Romans have recruited bloodthirsty British druids, and Maidunite Ragnall finds his loyalties torn when he meets Rome's charismatic general, Julius Caesar.

Twenty floors above the shimmering lights of the Hamburg docks, public prosecutor Chastity Riley is celebrating a birthday with friends in a hotel bar when 12 heavily armed men pull out guns and take everyone hostage. Among the hostages is Konrad Hoogsmart, the hotel owner, who is being targeted by a man whose life - and family - have been destroyed by Hoogsmart’s actions. With the police looking on from outside - their colleagues’ lives at stake - and Chastity on the inside, increasingly ill from sepsis, the stage is set for a dramatic confrontation.

A listener follows Brendan Archer, a major in the British Army, to County Wicklow in Ireland, where he is supposed to meet the woman he thinks he will marry. When his plans do not turn out quite as he imagined, he decides to stay on at The Majestic - a crumbling coastal hotel - which holds a strange charm and many eccentric, often amusing, inhabitants.