Showing results by narrator "James Clamp" in All Categories

It's been eighteen years since Josh Peters left dreary, dying Derton - the seaside town where he grew up - and headed for the bright lights of London. Now his dad is sick and his mum needs him, so he's back - though he's promised himself he won't be staying for long.... Then Josh finds himself unexpectedly detained in Derton, living in his cramped teenage bedroom, with simmering family tensions a little too close for comfort.

As a child, Elisha witnessed the burning of a witch outside of London, and saw her transformed into an angel at the moment of her death, though all around him denied this vision. He swore that the next time he might have the chance to bind an angel’s wounds, he would be ready. And so he became a barber-surgeon, at the lowest ranks of the medical profession, following the only healer’s path available to a peasant’s son. Elisha is good at his work, but skill alone cannot protect him. In a single catastrophic day, Elisha’s attempt to deliver his brother’s child leaves his family ruined, and Elisha himself accused of murder.

Released after a three-year stretch in a mental institution, Royston Blake finds that the world has moved on, even Mangel. Gone are most of his old haunts, including Hoppers, where he spent years working the door. In its place: a huge, gleaming new shopping mall, servicing the town’s every consumer need. But not everyone is happy to see the old ways swept aside. A mysterious opposition group calling itself the "Old Guard" has made its mission abundantly clear on the letters page of the local newspaper, and soon sets about trying to recruit Blake as its agent of retribution.

There’s bad stuff out there. Folks reckon things like vampires don't exist, but they does - Jock from the burger van told me. Plus I found an actual one of ’em, sleeping at the time in the back of a hearse I nicked that first morning. That's how me and Jock got to setting out freeing the world of ’em, using his bag o’ wooden stakes and special bottles of whisky. Course, I knowed that vampires didn’t exist, not when I stopped and done some thinking. And I knowed Jock had mental wossnames, what with his son falling off that roof and him reckoning them immigrants pushed him.

When Helen and Sean Phillips go out for the evening, leaving their teenage daughter babysitting little Frankie, they have no idea that they are about to face every parent's greatest fear. Detective Inspector Patrick Lennon is hopeful that the three children who have been abducted in this patch of south-west London will be returned safe and well. But when a body is found in a local park, Lennon realizes that time is running out - and that nothing in this case is as it seems.…

Julie kissed Mark at the office Christmas party. She doesn’t seem to remember but he’s not been able to forget. What better day to jog her memory than Valentine’s Day? Calum’s found the girl of his dreams on the internet. Trouble is, he’s not been completely honest about himself. Tonight he’s meeting her for the first time but will it also be the last? Nathan’s organized his usual Anti-Valentine’s party for the office singletons. Sophie’s going - again. Though this year, if she gets her way, they might just be leaving together.

Little Sister has vanished. The prototype device - real name IPD400 - has powers of surveillance that governments and terrorist organizations would kill for. They might yet. James Palatine, a trained killer with a surplus of conscience, invented the device and is the only person who can operate it. He's determined to retrieve it, and so is Natalya Kocharian - the arms dealer who "inadvertently" sold the prototype to a rogue dealer.

In the second installment of Charlie Williams’s violent and darkly comedic Mangel series, Royston Blake’s gig as head doorman at Hoppers finds him yet again mired belly-deep in trouble. Blake has noticed a change in the behavior of Hoppers’ already dodgy clientele - the norm of beery violence and lechery has given way to trance-like stares and nonsensical blatherings.

Kosovo, 1999. In the shadow of an impending NATO bombing campaign, James Palatine of the Army Intelligence Corps has joined an elite unit of the SAS for his first mission behind enemy lines. A woman's desperate cry for help draws them to a remote farmhouse, where Palatine makes a split-second decision that he bitterly regrets. Just hours later he sees a chance to redeem himself - in his own eyes, at least - when his unit finds a young girl close to death in the freezing woods

With one sweet, seductive kiss, Megan Kinkead is no longer the impudent child Justin Brant remembers. She was a girl when she left Maam’s Cross Court for school, but she has returned a woman, body and soul. Once Megan’s guardian, Justin, the sixth Earl of Weston, is soon her heart’s obsession. Desire smolders between them, and then he tells her he is married….

As dodgy English towns go, Mangel doesn’t look like much; but it’s everything to Royston Blake. In Mangel, Blake is head doorman at Hoppers Wine Bar and Bistro, drives a Ford Capri 2.8i, and generally has no trouble getting laid. On any given day, he can walk the streets of his town knowing he’s respected by one and all. That is, until a rumor begins to circulate that Blake’s "lost his bottle", and everything goes to hell. Even his best mates, Fin and Legsy, have heard the talk that the formerly hard-living bruiser has gone soft, lost his edge, and become a pushover in a town where he can ill afford it.

Brother and sister dragonology students Daniel and Beatrice Cook are looking forward to returning to their studies with Dr. Ernest Drake and Erasmus, their dragon tutor. But when they discover that the evil dragonologist Alexandra Gorynytchka is searching for the fearsome Hammer of the Dragons – an ancient weapon that can kill hundreds of dragons in a single stroke – Dr. Drake and the children pursue her all the way to the Lost Island of the Dragons, where she is amassing an army of enslaved dragons.

A penetrating study of ordinary people resisting the Nazi occupation—and, true to its title, a dark comedy of wartime manners—Comedy in a Minor Key tells the story of Wim and Marie, a Dutch couple who first hide a Jew they know as Nico, then must dispose of his body when he dies of pneumonia. This novella, first published in 1947 and now translated into English for the first time, shows Hans Keilson at his best: deeply ironic, penetrating, sympathetic, and brilliantly modern, an heir to Joseph Roth and Franz Kafka.

When the world gets more frightening, what do you do? Do you hide in your basement, watching 24-hour rolling news about the latest crimes? And what happens when it comes knocking on your door? Do you double-check those locks? Or do what Hamlet did, taking arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them? Pub-doorman-turned-recluse Royston Blake has never heard of Hamlet, but when headless corpses start turning up all over Mangel, he decides to do just that. And what better way to fight evil than by becoming a cop? Who cares if they all say you’re the worst kind of copper a town needs? What matters is results, right?

Daniel and Beatrice Cook, along with their parents and their dragon chick, Torcher, are getting ready to open an orphan dragon sanctuary near Castle Drake in St. Leonard’s Forest. But then Dr. Drake brings news that several dragon members of the Society of Dragons have been attacked and it looks to be the work of the Dragonsbane Knights, a secret society of dragon killers that was thought to have been eradicated centuries ago. If Dragonsbane is resurfacing, then no dragons in Britain are safe!

London, 1842. Wild Boy, master detective and former freak-show performer, and Clarissa, circus acrobat and troublemaker, are the secret last hope of a city beset by horror. A poisoner stalks the streets, leaving victims mad with terror - and then dead. Can the Black Terror be traced to a demon called Malphas? With their partnership threatened by rules and regulations, can Wild Boy and Clarissa uncover a cure in time to save the queen and the city?