Showing results by narrator "Derek Perkins"

Auguste Dupin is one of the few persons in Paris who can identify the rare Cthulhu Encryption inscribed in the flesh of a dying madwoman. The Comte de Saint-Germain has a second cryptogram that's a partner to the one Dupin now owns, and believes it to be the key to a fabulous treasure hoard buried by the pirate Levasseur. Harassed by shoggoths and tracked by Saint-Germain, Dupin must find the key to the complex puzzle. Can the might of Cthulhu be held at bay? And will any answer that Dupin finds enable him and his friends to escape with their lives?

A short story about a mysterious man who arrives in a small 19th century Orkney Island fishing village. He has the air of an aristocrat, the clothes of a beggar and a leather pouch filled with the biggest pearls anyone has ever seen. The women can't take their lustful eyes off him, the men are jealous, but he only has one woman and one purpose on his mind.

When Holmes gives up the adventurous life of a consulting detective and retires to the Sussex countryside to raise bees, little does he or his old friend Dr. John Watson realize that their greatest adventures lies ahead - an adventure spanning centuries and extending across the solar system.... For nothing less than human civilization lies at state as Sherlock Holmes finds himself moving inexorably toward the final and most terrible confrontation with his ancient enemy, the time-jumping Napoleon of crime, professor Moriarty!

A small-town shopkeeper in the Orange Free State points a revolver at the South African Prime Minister. He is detained and questioned, but his eccentric explanations fail to provide the police with the neat motive they are searching for and he is judged insane. Yet Ebon Prinsloo's gesture of violence is for him a kind of awakening - an awakening from the fantasies with which he has protected himself from a parochial community, a constricting marriage, indeed from the limitations of life itself.

Isabel Drew had done her best in life to live up to her nickname, Jezebel. Sadly, someone believes her efforts insufficient and helps her off the balcony of a theater castle tower. It was a seemingly impossible crime; the culprit escapes detection even though the act is committed before 11 knights on horseback and an entire audience of witnesses.

Nine-year-old Laddy Merridew, sent to live with his grandmother for reasons he does not understand, stumbles off the bus in a small Welsh town where he begins an unlikely friendship with old Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins, the town beggar-storyteller. Through Ianto, Laddy learns of the collapse decades earlier of a coal mine called Kindly Light - a disaster whose legacy has echoed through generations, shaping lives in unexpected ways. And while Ianto spins the lively stories of so many men and women in this town, it's his own history in Kindly Light that is the story he can't tell.

The Other Side of a Frontier is a celebration of the distinguished contribution which V.S. Pritchett has made to English letters over the past fifty years. Introduced by the author, the collection has been chosen from his short stories, literary criticism, biographies and travel writing, and includes extracts from his autobiographies. It provides a perfect introduction to a universally acknowledged master of the English language. V.S. Pritchett explores the connections between Chekhov's life and art.

The Garden is set in Dublin in the early years of the 20th century. Dermot, whose family has settled in England, returns for his summers from English Public School to visit his grandfather, and develops affection for the city. During the course of the novel, war breaks out, bringing an end to the Edwardian summer for a whole generation....

Roy Southgate and Reginald Conynghame-Jervis have nothing in common but their loneliness and their wartime memories. Roy, a retired milkman and Reggie, a former RAF Squadron Leader, are widowed on the same day. To assuage their grief, the vicar arranges for Roy to move in with Reggie as his unpaid manservant. To their surprise, they form a strange alliance, based on obedience, need and the strangeness of single life.

 The Club is a blistering, timely, and gripping novel set at Cambridge University, centering around an all-male dining club for the most privileged and wealthy young men at Cambridge and following an outsider who exposes the dark secrets of this group, the Pitt Club. 

When Octavia Garamond passed away, she left explicit instructions in her will: The police must be present at her funeral, and the coroner should be exceptionally thorough when examining her body. Amelia Kennerly is perplexed to find herself the sole executor of her great-aunt's will, as she barely knew her. Further questions arise when the local parson is anything but happy to conduct Octavia's service. Then someone breaks into Octavia's home and tears the house apart. It seems the old lady's words may have been eerily prescient: "Hell is empty, and all the devils are here."

When the Berebury Footpaths Society created their locally infamous motto, "Every walk a challenge," they couldn't have known just how apt it would be. Avid hikers Wendy Lamport and Gordon Briggs suffer from a good walk spoiled when, while reclaiming a public footpath from the greedy barbed-wire fences of encroaching farmers, a crow drops a severed human finger at their feet. And where there's a finger, thinks Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan, a body can't be far behind.

On the hottest day in living memory, Richard Mallory Tindall, the owner of a patent firm, does not return home to Cleete village. When a man is found crushed to death, Tindall's case goes from missing person to homicide. In the course of solving murder cases, Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan has seen all manner of ugly death. But there's something particularly gruesome about this one, the body crushed beneath the marble and iron of an old Saxon church tower. With rubble blocking off access to the crime scene, no one can get close enough to inspect the body.

After uniting the bandit clans, the Iron Tusk has swept into Shengen and taken control of the empire. With an army behind him, he marches along the Skull Road, ready to lay waste to the lands in the west. The rag-tag defenders of Dunrun are all that stand in his way. With their country besieged on all sides, troubling rumors of a priestess amassing power in the North, and unnatural alliances to the south, no help is coming. Alone, they must hold back the god-like powers of the Iron Tusk, or see life as they know it come to an end.

Food trucks announcing "halal" proliferate in many urban areas but how many non-Muslims know what this means, other than cheap lunch? In this audiobook, Febe Armanios and Bogac Ergene provide an accessible introduction to halal (permissible) food in the Islamic tradition. Historically, Muslims used food to define their identities in relation to co-believers and non-Muslims. Food taboos are rooted in the Quran and prophetic customs, as well as writings from various periods and geographical settings. 

King Arthur’s dog, Cavall, and the rest of Camelot thought their troubles were behind them after they defeated the Night Mare. But when Arthur’s son, Mordred, falls gravely ill, it seems that something sinister is afoot in Camelot once more. The only thing that can cure Mordred is an ancient artifact hidden deep within the fay forest - an artifact that’s been missing for centuries. King Arthur declares a quest to recover it and will stop at nothing to save his son. Cavall must lead his person and his friends deep into the enchanted forest in pursuit of the legendary grail.