Showing results by narrator "Steven Crossley" in All Categories

An internationally best-selling author, Carole Mortimer has penned over 150 romance novels in her remarkable career. The Duke’s Cinderella Bride stars brooding Hawk St. Claire, Duke of Stourbridge and seemingly plain servant girl Jane Smith. After a chance encounter Jane pays the price for their inappropriate behavior when she is removed from her household. Soon the duke takes in this genteel lass and makes her his ward.

When the wealthy and powerful Ludovic Degroof’s jewelry store is broken into, nothing is stolen, but the jewels have been dissolved in jars of aqua regia, an acid so strong it can even melt gold. In the empty safe is a scrap of paper on which a strange square has been drawn. At first, Inspector Van In pays little attention to the paper. But when Degroof’s offspring also receive letters with this same square, Van In and the beautiful new DA Hannelore Martens find themselves unraveling a complex web.

Unfortunately, unlike his siblings, Arthur hasn't broken a single, solitary world record! But when the Whipples suffer a spate of catastrophes and a curious amount of attention from a pair of irregularly sized and unusually menacing clowns, Arthur might be the only one who can save his family from losing their collective crown… or worse.

Doug Perkins doesn't dislike cats - he just isn't especially interested in them. But the struggling young London public relations firm Perkins and Tate can't afford to be choosy about the jobs they take. So when Doug is asked to do the PR for a glorified feline extravaganza called Cats Through the Ages, he doesn't hesitate. But it isn't long before he wishes he had hesitated. There are some very valuable cats on exhibit - even a few feline celebrities.

After a decade living in England, Jeremy O'Keefe returns to New York, where he has been hired as a professor of German history at New York University. Though comfortable in his new life, and happy to be near his daughter once again, Jeremy continues to feel the quiet pangs of loneliness. Walking through the city at night, it's as though he could disappear and no one would even notice. But soon Jeremy's life begins taking strange turns.

Secret agent Mr. Adolph Verloc operates from a seedy Soho shop, where he deals in pornography and espionage. Idle, treacherous, and self-righteous, he makes the life of his wife, Winnie, one of silent misery. When Verloc is assigned to plant a bomb at Greenwich Observatory, his plans go terribly awry, and his family has to deal with the tragic repercussions of his actions. Joseph Conrad's dark satire on English society, while rooted in the Edwardian period, remains strikingly contemporary.

When award-winning journalist Nick Davies decided to break Fleet Street's unwritten rule by investigating his own colleagues, he found that the business of reporting the truth had been slowly subverted by the mass production of ignorance.

Cambridge, October 1933. Inside the old All Hallows Church on All Hallows' Eve, Dr. Adelaide Hartest witnesses the final moments of a dying stranger. Despite the dagger plunged into the stranger's chest and his last-minute confession, the death is ruled a suicide. The victim, it is revealed, is known to Scotland Yard, and Assistant Commissioner Joe Sandilands is sent up from London to investigate.

The Reign of Terror has ended, and Napoleon Bonaparte has seized power, but shifting political loyalties still tear apart families and lovers. On Christmas Eve 1800, a bomb explodes along Bonaparte's route, narrowly missing him but striking dozens of bystanders. Chief Inspector Roch Miquel, a young policeman with a bright future and a beautiful mistress, must arrest the assassins before they attack again.

Trapped in a London laboratory during a worker uprising in 1924, ex-artillery officer and physics instructor Jeremy Tuft awakens 150 years later - in a neo-medieval society whose inhabitants have forgotten how to build or operate machinery. Not only have his fellow Londoners forgotten most of what humankind used to know, before civilization collapsed, but they don't particularly care to re-learn any of it. Though he is at first disconcerted by the failure of his own era's smug doctrine of Progress, Tuft eventually decides that post-civilized life is simpler, more peaceful.

In The Last of All Possible Worlds, royalty, bankers, lovers, and wives intertwine to create a vivid portrait of Europe in the early 1900s. We meet wise and worldly Prince Sobieski, Vienna's ambassador in London, his enchanting wife, her English lover, and her enigmatic lifelong companion, Josefa. When Sobieski's illegitimate daughter makes a demand of her influential father, the unspoken rules of the family are challenged.

This is the story of Billy and the baron's entrancing daughter, Karin, and the dangerous paths they travel as their childhood attachment deepens to a complex love overshadowed by the rise of the Nazis. Their story takes us from a golden Edwardian summer on the Isle of Wight to London under zeppelin attack to Ireland on the brink of its War of Independence and at last to Germany in the darkening Weimar period, where Billy and Karin come of age in a country wounded by war and seething with hatred.

London, 1811: The twisting streets of Wapping hold many an untold sin. Bounded by the Ratcliffe Highway to the north and the Dock to the south, shameful secrets are largely hidden by the noise of Trade. But two families have fallen victim to foul murder, and a terrified populace calls for justice. Based on the real-life story of the gruesome Ratcliffe Highway murders, The English Monster takes us on a voyage across centuries. A brilliantly imagined debut from a major new literary voice.

In a Parisian restaurant Aleister Crowley, the notorious occultist, chances on Major-General Sir Hector McDonald, who is facing ruin in a shocking scandal, and vulnerable to Crowley's curious offer of help. Follow this unlikely pair on an extraordinary night of revelation and transgression. Be transported to the battlefields of Sudan, the backstreets of Edinburgh, and the sultry tropics of Ceylon. And discover Sir Hector's tragic secret....

Naomi Stride was a wealthy woman, and her death has left several people richer - none more so than her 26-year-old son Theo, with whom she had long had bitter differences over money. She was also a controversial woman, a writer whose novels had been banned in South Africa. But was it for money, politics, or some other unknown reason that she was killed? And why was her naked corpse strewn with flowers and herbs? These are the questions South African Lieutenant Kramer and his partner must answer.

Double trouble surprise! Julia hasn’t seen her husband Max for almost a year, but he’s just walked through the door of their home looking as breathtaking as ever. Max has come to make things right with his beloved Julia. However, a lot can happen in a year and Max hasn’t bargained on meeting two surprise little twin girls. Now, Max has two weeks to prove he can be a wonderful husband and father.

After his father dies, David Balfour is told to go to his uncle for his inheritance. But the uncle has no intention of letting the riches go - so he plots to kill Balfour, ultimately arranging for him to be kidnapped as a slave bound for the American colonies. Balfour's future looks bleak - until he witnesses a shipwreck and befriends the lone survivor, a rugged Highlander named Alan Breck Stewart. Together, they plan their rebellion - and the fight back home to claim Balfour's inheritance.

Sung in moments of personal isolation or on state occasions watched by millions, “Amazing Grace” has become an unparalleled anthem for humankind. How did a simple Christian hymn, written in a remote English vicarage in 1772, come to hold such sway in all corners of the modern world? With this short, engaging cultural history, James Walvin offers an explanation.

The year is 2024, and the residents of the Tower, a virus-proof apartment building, live in a state of permanent lockdown. The building is controlled by James, who keeps the residents safe but incarcerated. Behind bricked-up front doors, their every need is serviced; they are pampered but remain prisoners. This suits Eugene just fine. Ravaged by the traumas of his past, the agoraphobic ex-detective has no intention of ever setting foot outside again.

From William Shakespeare’s series of history dramas, to Sir Walter Scott, and George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire—not to mention the smash-hit TV show Game of Thrones—the British civil war of 1455 to 1485 has inspired writers for centuries. Ed West’s My Kingdom for a Horse illuminates the bloody war fought for thirty long years between the descendants of King Edward III in a battle for the throne.