Showing results by narrator "Angela Ness" in All Categories

Nothing stays buried forever. Lifeboat volunteer DI Shona Oliver receives a Mayday call coming from Kilcatrin Island. Upon the beach is the badly burned body of a man, and a boy lies gravely injured nearby. Strewn around them are scores of Second World War incendiary bombs, presumably washed up by the tide from Beaufort's Dyke, an offshore arms dump deep in the Irish Sea. The dead man is a local fisherman – his son the other victim – and it rocks the tight-knit community on the shores of the Solway Firth. As lead detective, Shona has to maintain a professional distance.

Uni friends Stacey, Paula, Bev and Valentina used to be inseparable until one weekend before graduation when nothing was ever the same again. Thirty years later, reunited at Valentina's funeral, Stacey receives a letter written by her late friend asking for one last wish...that the three friends go back to where things fell apart and finally bury the hatchet. As they revisit their old haunts of their uni days and follow a series of clues left by Valentina, their friend's death begins to look suspicious and it is up to them to find out what happened—but they all have secrets to hide.

At the age of eleven youngLizzie Mudies life changes forever. With the death of her mother in the most shocking disaster, Dundee has ever seen, Lizzie is forced to grow up quickly. She discovers a strength beyond her years and when an unexpected legacy bestows upon her the dilapidated Green Tree Mill, she is determined to turn things around.

Nobody likes the North Edinburgh Health Enforcement Team, least of all the people who work for it. An uneasy mix of police and health service staff, Mona, Bernard and their colleagues stem the spread of the Virus, a mutant strain of influenza, by tracking down people who have missed their monthly health check. Now two young female students are missing. Why were they drinking in a bikers' bar? Who are the mysterious Children of Camus cult? And why is the German government interfering in the investigation?

When Scotland's leading virologist goes missing, Mona and Paterson from the Health Enforcement Team are dispatched to London to find him. In a hot and unwelcoming city, Mona has to deal with a boss who isn't speaking to her, placate the professor's overbearing assistant and outwit the people who will stop at nothing to make sure the academic stays lost. Meanwhile, back in Edinburgh, Bernard is searching for a missing prostitute while Maitland is trying to keep the chair of the Parliamentary Virus Committee from finding out quite how untidy the HET office is....

From an irresponsible baron whose body is discovered beneath a silver birch tree, to a classic detective duo solving a historic case as the lights go out across Europe, and an exclusive Tony Hill and Carol Jordan story, the characters McDermid conjures are enigmatic and dangerous. These evocative, atmospheric tales will shock and delight.

The body of Paul Shore toppled onto him, a stream of blood pooling around them on the concrete. Bernard lay back and waited to see if he too was going to die. An undercover agent gone rogue is threatening to shoot a civil servant a day. As panic reigns, the Health Enforcement Team races against time to track him down - before someone turns the gun on them.

A potentially deadly, mutant strain of flu has hit the UK. It's up to the North Edinburgh Health Enforcement Team to contain it, by making sure all citizens attend their monthly health check. But now the pandemic's spreading.... On Friday, three civil servants leading virus policy hold a secret meeting at the Museum of Plagues and Pandemics. By Monday, two are dead and one is missing. Can Mona and Bernard of the HET find the missing official before panic hits the streets?

It was New Year’s Eve the night that dead blackbirds descended, hours before 14-year-old Alex McCarthy's sister Olivia went missing from a party. Committed to finding out what happened to her sister within the previously safe walls of their subarctic Orkney village, Alex knows that dishevelled, sometimes intoxicated Detective Inspector Birkens is her best shot.

Isla's got the designer clothes and dream job as head stylist at an exclusive salon. She's been so single-minded in this quest that she's forgotten to have a life outside of it. When her aunt is in desperate need at her own salon, Isla heads to the remote island of Auchenmor to help. Finn is 35, and reality has just hit him hard. Now his best friends are about to have a baby, and everything is changing. When into his life walks Isla...

Jade was 13 when she disappeared five years ago, and DS Bill Murphy suspects someone from her family is responsible for recent Dundee murders. But is it her mother, Diane, who now suffers from OCD? Or Emma, her twin sister, who was catatonic for a year after Jade’s disappearance. Or Jade’s brother Ryan, who enjoys dressing in women’s clothes and is going through a sexuality crisis, unsure whether he is gay.

Two years on from the start of a devastating pandemic, food shortages are becoming critical, and rationing looms. So it's more than embarrassing when a truck full of luxury food for Scottish Virus Minister's banquet goes missing. When Bernard and Maitland from the HET team find it, the food is missing—but there is a dead body.

When a chance for freedom arrives will she dare to take it? Odilie Rutherford is known in the small Scottish town of Lauriston for two things - her beauty, and her father, Canny. As a self-made man, Canny has the wealth he dreamed of but not the status and hatches a plan to marry his daughter to local bachelor of note, the Duke of Maudesley. Yet Odilie cannot bear the thought of a life with the ill-mannered Duke, and when the annual summer fair arrives in town for three days she seizes a chance to enjoy the freedom she craves.

The Queen of Scottish Gangland Thrillers is back! Donnie Black. Charming, successful... and utterly terrifying, he rules the Glasgow underworld with an iron fist. Nothing - or no one - will stop him and he's not afraid to get his hands dirty to grow his fortune. Layla Black. She's been married to Donnie for twenty years, enjoying the lavish world he has worked hard to create. But behind the perfect image, Layla is crumbling, numbing her pain with alcohol. But Layla doesn't know the secrets Donnie keeps - and the truth will send her spiralling.

Can Lark take the path of the woman who went before her and learn to follow her heart? Lark is a much-loved forces sweetheart spreading comfort as she sings in the music halls while Scotland’s sons fight in the Great War. But despite her fortune, Lark yearns for a life away from the crowds. She sets out to make a fresh start in the Border country seeking the contentment that has eluded her. Decades earlier, Lark’s great-grandmother, Jane, found herself in the same hills, in unhappy circumstances.

They have survived the worst they could imagine - now they must face the future. After a catastrophic storm tears through the village of Eyemouth in 1881, the villagers have slowly started to move on. Inconsolable at the loss of her husband, Rosabelle Maltman has left Scotland to start a new life, leaving her son behind. Meanwhile, Jessie, her sister-in-law, is finding ways to manipulate the men of the village for her own gains.

The scale and nature of the First World War, and the manner in which the dead were treated, created conditions in which a very particular language of grief and remembrance of the war dead flourished. A Century of Remembrance explores the deeply personal ways in which people mourned their loved ones, and memorialised them, and examines the cornerstones of national-scale remembrance that took hold in Britain throughout the 1920s, from the poppy to the cenotaph.

In 2020, while it seemed that the world was falling apart, psychologist Dr Emma Kavanagh began bringing together the psychological research on the impact of trauma, what it means and what it does for us - the good and the bad. Within the psychological literature, she found important clues about why trauma and stress are not the life sentences they sometimes seem to be and, most importantly, how they can often lead to growth beyond the despair.

Sixteen-year-old Eva and her twin sister, Inge, witness their lives in Berlin change before their eyes. Their best friend, Trudy, betrays them when she becomes a member of the Hitler Youth. A valuable family heirloom, a beautiful emerald and diamond pendant necklace, is confiscated by the Nazis as they harass Jewish families and businesses. Their younger brother, Max, a member of the underground resistance, sees even greater danger ahead. Their father, Oskar, refuses to leave his beloved Germany and believes Hitler will eventually fail.

Caroline and Daniel are twins whose mother died when they were babies. They grow up in a conventional family, their aunt and uncle raising them, and they are truly close only to each other. After their father's remarriage, they're sent to separate boarding schools. When the twins become medical students, a serious accident occurs that somehow seems to happen without damage to either of them, but they cut themselves off from the rest of their family because of it, causing first bewilderment and then anger....