Mostrando resultados por autor "Simon Brett" en Todas las categorías

Charles Paris's star gig is as "forklift-driver-for-a-day" in a corporate video. Charles must position the forklift and then declaim in the trained voice of an actor the wonders of the company and its big, happy family of employees. He delivers his lines with his usual aplomb, but he can't help wondering about the "happy family". It's rather fun to learn to manipulate a forklift. But it's a responsibility, too, as Charles learns to his horror: a forklift can be a tool for murder.

Simon Brett's oldest and most beloved character, Charles Paris, is back. Paris, the often out-of-work actor, has a good part for a change, playing Sir Toby Belch in a summer festival production of "Twelfth Night." But when the director takes ill and then Paris' friend in the production is the apparent victim of intentional food poisoning meant for Paris, it's not long until the bodies start to turn up. Paris is forced to deal with a wild young director whose idea of Shakespeare the bard himself would hate.

Originally published a decade ago and now expanded, this book is a homage to the greatest detective story writer of the 20th century, an Anglo-American who took Los Angeles, his adopted home, off the road maps and into the land of legend. For Raymond Chandler, who died in 1959, his literary descendants will do just about anything, and that includes contributing to an anthology honoring him. Thus, in here we find the likes of Sara Paretsky, Robert Crais, Loren D. Estleman, Jonathan Valin, Robert Campbell, Eric Van Lustbader, Simon Brett, Julie Smith, Jeremiah Healy, Roger L. Simon, James ...

It wasn't the rain that upset Carole Seddon during her walk on the West Sussex Downs. It wasn't the dilapidated barn in which she was forced to seek shelter. No, what upset her most was the human skeleton she discovered there.... So begins the second investigation for straitlaced Carole and her more laid-back neighbour Jude. This time their enquiries take them away from Fethering to the small download hamlet of Weldsham, where gossips quickly identify the corpse as Tamsin Lutteridge, a young woman who had disappeared from the village months before....

'What? You mean the earl does it for money? That's way beyond the barbed wire!' This explosion of disgust from Blotto is provoked when Twinks informs him of the activities of the Earl of Woking. The gentleman in question is owner of Clusters, a stately home not far from Tawcester Towers, and he has been renting out parts of Clusters for private functions - and charging his guests! The discovery of this appalling lapse in aristocratic behaviour sets Blotto and Twinks off on their latest adventure.

When Carole goes for a trim at Connie’s Clip Joint, she doesn’t expect to find herself at the scene of a murder. But in the back room, strangled by the lead of a hairdryer, sits Connie’s young assistant Kyra. Carole and her sleuthing friend Jude are soon enjoying some tactical snooping, and it seems that Fethering’s fingers are pointing at Kyra’s boyfriend Nathan, who has disappeared. As our discreet lady detectives decide there are only so many haircuts they can have for the sake of neighbourhood crime-solving, they also realise that this is no cut-and-dried case....

The Floating Admiral was the first of the Detection Club's collaborative novels, in which 12 of its members wrote a single novel. Eighty-five years later, 14 members of the club have once again collaborated to produce The Sinking Admiral. The Admiral is a pub in the Suffolk seaside village of Crabwell, the Admiral Byng. The Admiral is also the nickname of its landlord, Geoffrey Horatio Fitzsimmons, as well as the name of the landlord's dinghy.

Charles Paris returns again, in a fringe show at the Edinburgh Festival, with another nubile girl to provoke him, his accommodating wife to console him and a gory murder to challenge him. Edinburgh and the Festival are both background and foreground with Charles flitting between a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a ‘mixed-media’ satire, a late-night revue and his own one-man show on Thomas Hood. Then a fading pop star is murdered, there’s a bomb scare in Holyrood Palace and someone makes a suicide leap from the top of the Rock….

Jude has never been averse to a bit of a flutter; her friend Carole, on the other hand, thinks that the local betting shop is a den of iniquity. But when Jude stumbles upon the body of a Polish immigrant, Tadeusz Jankowski, the race is on to find his killer. The odds aren’t looking good. No one seems to know anything about the mysterious Tadeusz - even his sister can’t shed any light on what he was doing in Fethering.

Territory is the theme that unites these four humorous plays - whether that means fighting over an allotment plot, dealing with the sudden partition of a country, guarding the privacy of a garden or battling with the council over school catchment areas.

Charles Paris, an out-of-work actor, takes a star gig is as a forklift driver in a Delmoleen Company corporate video. Something about Delmoleen is deeply troubling to Charles. That "happy family" facade may be just that. Mockery, jealousy, lust, envy, they all seem to be pervasive. Still, the work is easy and the money is good; it's even fun learning to manipulate a forklift. But it's a responsibility too, as Charles soon discovers: a forklift can be made into a potent murder weapon

Sisters Anna, Victoria and Charlotte are back for four more series, in which relationships are forged, hearts are broken and family ties are strained - but not severed. Older sister Anna continues to live her life on her own terms, despite her sisters' insistence on being there for her. But when she suffers a couple of knocks to her confidence and needs a shoulder to cry on, they are too self-absorbed to be any use. Fortunately, niece Emily provides moral support and Anna reciprocates with some down-to-earth advice about Emily's love life.

A quick trip to the capital goes horribly wrong when Blotto and Twinks get accidentally involved in London's criminal underworld. It starts innocently enough at the intimate review 'absolutely everyone is talking about', Light and Frothy, where its glamorous star, Frou Frou Gavotte, has rather taken the fancy of Blotto's school friend Giles 'Whiffler' Trumpington. But while Blotto and Whiffler wait for the star outside the theatre to take her to dinner, Whiffler is seized and manhandled into the back of a cab which then drives off into the night.

"I want you all out, gone, dead, exterminated!" high strung Alex Household had cried out when, after a lifetime of struggle, he lost the starring role in a new play called The Hooded Owl to an actor who couldn't remember his lines. But did that mean that it was Alex who had shot the leading man dead during his climactic speech? Charles Paris, for one, could see many logical suspects: from the devious producer, to the gullible playwright, to the young starlet's overprotective mother.

Another hair-raising adventure featuring the aristocratic brother and sister sleuthing duo! The end of the cricket season spells gloom for Blotto until he is invited to bat against the Hollywood cricket team out in sunny LA, where rain never stops play. And so begins the latest adventure for Blotto and his supremely gifted sister, Twinks.

Tawcester Towers, the family seat of the Lyminster family, has suffered an unwelcome injection of distant cousins - so distant that they aren't even British! Count Igor and Count Lyudmilla Bashusky had to flee Russia after the Revolution and have spent the intervening years building up debts in the hotels of Europe's capitals and sponging off ever more exasperated (and distant) relatives.

Charles Paris is in clover. He has been contracted for three whole months to play brainless bobby Sergeant Clump, foil to the charismatic amateur sleuth, Stanislas Braid, in a TV series of that name. Recourse to the whiskey bottle is still needed, however, to get him through a day’s filming - one made all the more arduous by the pompous posturings of the show’s star, and the constant outraged interruptions of the ancient author whose detective novels are being adapted. Indeed, there is plenty of friction about.

Amateur sleuths Jude and Carole take on their third case when a terrible discovery is made in the cellar of a grand old house. Grant and Kim Roxby had hoped that their first dinner party at Pelling House would make an impression with their new neighbours. And the next day it's certainly the talk of the town. For their guests - including the couple's old friend Jude - had been enjoying a pleasant meal before they were rudely interrupted by a gruesome discovery. A human torso hidden in the cellar.

Charles Paris' old friend Mark, who runs a recording studio in Bath where Charles is making a talking book, has a drinking problem that amounts to a death wish. But it's not the drink that kills Mark, it's somebody in the cast of Charles' play who has a dirty little secret that Mark must not be allowed to reveal...

The Elizabethan house of Bracketts is about to be turned into a museum. It had once been the home of the celebrated poet Esmund Chadleigh and is to become a shrine to his life and poetry - but the transition is far from smooth. Carole Seddon had been reluctant to join the Bracketts Board, and now she realises that she should have listened to her instinct. The simmering tension between the board members is about to boil over. A human skeleton is discovered in the kitchen garden, and before too long there is a second body, not yet cold.