Showing results by narrator "Jane McDowell" in All Categories

James Blackwell is sexy and handsome and a fighter pilot - every girl's dream partner. At least that is what Diana Arnold thinks when her brother first introduces them. Before long they are in love and marry hastily just as war is declared. Then fate delivers what is the first of its cruel twists: James, the day of their wedding, is shot down over Northern France and killed. Diana is left not only a widow but pregnant with their child.

My name is not actually Penny Dreadful. It is Penelope Jones. The ‘Dreadful’ bit is my dad’s JOKE. But it is not even true that I am dreadful.

New York, January 1896: Arthur Conan Doyle, the renowned creator of Sherlock Holmes, arrives at the Britannic Hotel with his wife, Louisa, ready to begin his first American tour. While he prepares his lectures, Louisa becomes mesmerised by this brash, vibrant, dangerous city, especially when a woman's brutally butchered corpse is found in a Bowery alley and Louisa is convinced from the artist's sketch in the paper that she'd seen the victim at the hotel.

This remarkable book follows the lives of three friends, Solomon Freund, a Jew, Erich Wiesser, his Catholic neighbor and "brother in blood", and Miriam Rathenau, whom both boys love, and who happens to be niece of Germany's foreign minister Walther Rathenau. From their youth helping at their parents' co-owned tobacco shop, the boys find their relationship strained, as was all of Germany, by the growth of the National Socialist party and the descent of Germany into a Nazi hell.

Cambridge is home to 18,000 students, 1,500 academics and one serial killer.... For the students of Ariel College, a siege mentality has developed following weeks of media interest in 'the Cambridge Butcher'. University life has become not about surviving their exams, but simply about surviving. And forensic psychiatrist Matthew Denison is sure that his traumatised patient has the killer's identity locked in her memory.

Not until she was16 did Stella Arnold learn the full truth about her father, how handsome, charming James turned out to be a cold-blooded, psychotic extortionist, racketeer and killer. Knowing now what her father was capable of, she decides to study psychology and the criminal mind, and to further her education in America. In the spring of 1962 she flies to Boston where, being beautiful, bright and fashionably English, she becomes someone of huge fascination and on every invitation list.

Penny Dreadful manages to cause a kerfuffle with three uproarious stories in which she ends up blue, along with her sister’s swan outfit, and turns Joshua Bottomley pale and green by doing a science experiment on him. Penny then cooks up a calamity as she tries to turn over a new leaf in the school show, on a class trip and by making the cake of dreams for her mum's birthday... but somehow her efforts still turn into a huge disaster.

When 12-year-old Katherine Howard comes to live in the Duchess of Norfolk's household, poor relation Cat Tilney is deeply suspicious of her. The two girls couldn't be more different: Cat, watchful and ambitious; Katherine, interested only in clothes and boys. Their companions are in thrall to Katherine, but it's Cat in whom Katherine confides. Summoned to court at 17, Katherine leaves Cat in the company of her ex-lover, Francis, and the two begin their own, much more serious love affair.

Picking up three years after the end of Child of the Light, Journey begins with Miriam now married to Erich and Sol safe in Holland. However, Erich has told Miriam that Sol is in a camp, and her only hope of keeping him safe is to remain Erich's faithful wife. When Solomon learns of the deception, he returns to Berlin to try to bring Miriam out with him. Instead, he ends up in the very hell that Erich had been telling her he was in.

My heart is less than 1% of my body, it weighs hardly anything; it's only a tiny piece of me, yet it's the part Helen finds most interesting. Once it was inside her body, a tiny piece of the son she gave birth to. Now her boy is gone and his heart is keeping me alive. Born with a heart defect, Vivienne Clark's life was saved by a transplant. Now a journalist, she doesn't allow herself to think about the donor, the boy who died so she could live; she can't bear to.

Lainey Hollingsworth has spent her whole life on the outside of a secret. Her mother would never discuss the reasons she abandoned Italy when Lainey was a new born, nor has she ever stayed in touch with the family she left behind. Now Lainey's mother is dead, taking the secret with her, and leaving Lainey free to find out about her roots. Her husband, Tom, appears supportive, until he hits her with a bombshell that shatters the very foundations of their marriage. Another secret Lainey never knew anything about.