Showing results by narrator "William Hope" in All Categories

Brilliant brothers Langley and Homer Collyer are born into bourgeois New York comfort in settled times, their home a fin-de-siècle mansion on upper Fifth Avenue, their future rosy. But before he is out of his teens, Homer begins to lose his sight, Langley returns from the War in Europe with his lungs seared by gas, and when the death of their parents in the influenza epidemic of 1918 leaves the brothers orphaned, they seem perilously ill-equipped to deal with the new era.

In 2008, almost two decades after the Cold War was officially consigned to the history books, an average American guy helped to bring down a top Russian spy based at the United Nations. He had no formal espionage training. Everything he knew about spying he'd learned from books, films, video games and TV. And yet, he ended up at the centre of a highly successful counterintelligence operation that targeted Russian espionage in America.

Two weeks before Kwasi King is due to defend his chess world title, his mother is found brutally murdered at Yale University, a tarot card next to her dismembered body. Soon, more bodies turn up at other Ivy League colleges, all with tarot cards. And lead investigator Special Agent Franco Patrese has received his own tarot card. The Fool. Could he be the next victim of this macabre intellectual battle?

It’s January 1941, and the Blitz is devastating England. As America maintains its isolationist position, Churchill knows that Britain is doomed without its powerful ally. Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s most trusted adviser, is sent to London as his emissary and comes face to face with the prime minister himself and an attractive and determined young female driver who may not be what she seems.

Andrea Heller has been married for seven years, but still likes to pretend she's single. She enjoys sitting on her own in bars, and watching what happens. But there's another couple watching too. They call themselves Saila and Pharaoh, but only after sundown. And it is after sundown that some terrible things are happening in the singles clubs in Cleveland. In six months, three women in their twenties have been brutally murdered. And each step that Homicide Detective Jack Paris takes to find their killer draws him closer....

When a shocking murder and abduction on the streets of London leads investigators to him, Ben Koenig has no idea at first why the highest echelons of the CIA would need his help. But then he realises he knows the woman who carried out the killings. Ten years earlier, without being told why, he was tasked with helping her disappear. Far from being a deranged killer, she is the gatekeeper of a secret that could take down the West, so for years she has been in hiding. Until now.

Richard Ford returns with four deftly linked Christmas stories narrated by the iconic Frank Bascombe. Now 68, Frank resides again in the New Jersey suburb of Haddam and has thrived - seemingly but not utterly - amidst the devastations of Hurricane Sandy. The desolations of Sandy, which left countless lives unmoored, are the perfect backdrop for Ford - and Bascombe.

Yoko Tanaka is one of the best profilers in the FBI. She's been called in to consult on the case of 'Valentino', a killer who steals his victims' hearts. Within 24 hours they have a suspect in custody - a 19-year-old called Jefferson Winter whose IQ is off the charts. Not only does he confess to the murders, he knows details of the crimes that only the killer could know. It's an open and shut case, or is it?

In the heart of the Sonoma Valley, on the edge of a sun-drenched meadow, lies the idyllic community of Greengage - where the residents wear simple clothes and lead quiet lives and whose manners could almost seem to be of another time. Into this world stumbles single mother Lux Lysander, trying to lose herself in the peaceful beauty of the Californian countryside while her young son visits his grandparents. It's a world far away from the unpaid bills piling up and the overwhelming sense of struggle to make ends meet.

The wife of a rich mogul has been kidnapped. Haunted by the death of his wife and daughter, who were murdered in front of his eyes by the notorious Paper Stone Scissors killer, Danny is hired to find her before the kidnappers carry out their threat of execution. But the raid goes wrong, and Danny is left for dead. Can he find her before her kidnappers? And will he be able to save her?

The Farren family has been a plague upon Philadelphia's most dangerous neighbourhood, the Devil's Pocket, for generations. There, row after row of tumbledown houses hide dark secrets - none darker than Billy, the youngest Farren. Afflicted by a syndrome that means he can't recognise faces, Billy must use photographs to identify his family - and his victims. And when your life has bled away, he takes a final, gruesome picture for his wall.

FBI profiler Yoko Tanaka is in Florida helping the local PD with their "Sandman" case. Three mothers and their daughters have been found murdered in their homes, the mothers brutally stabbed while the little girls have been smothered, posed to look like they're sleeping.

Defying protocol, Yoko makes a detour to entice Jefferson Winter to join the case. All Yoko knows is that he's the only person who can help her before the Sandman claims another two victims....

Jo Nesbo meets Homeland in this sophisticated debut literary thriller about a Swedish security force agent sent to the US for a special assignment, which delivers a breathtaking global twist on the darkly riveting narrative tradition of Nordic noir. Ernst Grip of the Swedish security police has no idea why he is being summoned to the US.

When TV talk-show host Elias Claymore is accused of raping a 19-year-old girl, he turns to his friend, Alex Sadaka, to defend him. But Alex has a fight on his hands, for Claymore - a former Black Power activist - is anything but squeaky clean, and this time even the DNA evidence is stacked against him. Forced to share the defence with a lawyer from Claymore's insurance firm, Alex must battle his way through jury tampering, conflicts of interest, and vicious hate mail to uncover the truth.

As he makes an 11th-hour plea for mercy, lawyer Alex Sedaka is resigned to the fact that his client will be executed. Charged with the rape and murder of 18-year-old Dorothy Haufaman, the case seems cut and dry - until the victim's mother makes an astonishing offer.... Dorothy Haufaman's mother offers clemency in return for the whereabouts of her daughter's body before she herself dies of the terminal disease ravaging her body.

In a novel of international intrigue, an American lawyer, Damon Pierce, attempts to save Bobby Okari, the West African leader of a protest movement, from execution by the country's corrupt and autocratic leader. Pierce is in a race against time, and as the complex trial - involving terrorism and the geopolitics of oil, missing witnesses and evidence, and the whims of a lawless country - unfolds, bodies fall and fates dangle.

Touchy Subjects is about things that make people wince: taboos, controversies, secrets, and lies. Some of the events that characters crash into are grand, tragic ones: miscarriage, overdose, missing persons. Other topics, like religion and money, are not inherently taboo, but they can cause acute discomfort because people disagree so vehemently. These stories are about the spectrum of feeling that runs from awkwardness through embarrassment to shame.

At the end of Charles Webb's first novel, The Graduate, Benjamin Braddock rescues his beloved Elaine from a marriage made not in heaven but in California.It is now eleven years and 3,000 miles later, and the couple live in Westchester County, a suburb of New York City, with their two young sons, whom they are educating at home.

Vincent Kahn is an astronaut in training, living with his wife in the desert. He will go on to be the first man to walk on the moon. Fay Fern is 19 years old and working in a dive bar, having rejected her parents' wealth and conservatism. She will go on to become a violent activist and one of the FBI's most wanted. The pair's brief but intense love affair will have repercussions that echo through the American century, intersecting with the race to space, the rage against the Vietnam war and the ravages of the AIDS epidemic.

Beginning with the invasion by Spanish Conquistadors in the sixteenth century, A Brutal Reckoning tells the story of the encroachment on Native American territory in the deep south by the US republic 150 years later, which culminated in the devastating Creek War and the rise of Andrew Jackson.