Showing results by narrator "Jeff` Harding" in All Categories

From a centuries-old building on a narrow street in the heart of London, a firm known as the System, the world's most lucrative and least-known cartel, maintains a stranglehold on the world's diamonds. The company selects the stones a customer can buy and decides how much he must pay for the privilege. One dealer is tired of the game, and so he sets out to destroy the System forever.

The Time Traveller's Almanac is the largest, most definitive collection of time travel stories ever assembled. Gathered by intrepid chrononauts and world-renowned anthologists Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, here is over a century's worth of literary travels into past and the future. The anthology covers millions of years of Earth's history - from the age of the dinosaurs to strange and fascinating futures, through to the end of time itself.

This extraordinary biography of the legendary screen star Marilyn Monroe was originally published in 1973 by Norman Mailer, one of America's most important writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century. Mailer, the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, was the first writer to explore the relationship between Monroe and Bobby Kennedy.

Strangling vines and meat-hungry flora fill this unruly garden of strange stories, selected for their significance as the seeds of the villainous (or perhaps just misunderstood) 'killer plant' in fiction, film and video games. Step within to marvel at Charlotte Perkins Gilman's giant wisteria and H.G. Wells' hungry orchid; hear the calls of the ethereal women of the wood and the frightful drone of the moaning lily; and do tread carefully around E. Nesbit's wandering creepers. Every strain of vegetable threat can be found within this new collection.

Love is not a singular concept. In this collection, seven award-winning authors explore seven concepts of love: from philautia (self-love) to agape (love for humanity) and from storge (a natural affection for family) to mania (a frenzied, obsessive love).

Four friends, caught in a terrible job market, joke about turning to kidnapping to survive. And then, suddenly, it’s no joke. For two years, the strategy they devise works like a charm – until they kidnap the wrong man. Now two groups are after them – the law, in the form of veteran state investigator Kirk Stevens and hotshot young FBI agent Carla Windermere, and an organised crime outfit looking for payback.

In a tale taut with tension, events unfold hour by hour from the perspectives of nine people involved. They include Willie himself, who knows what really happened, and his father, desperately trying to reach the town jail to see his son one last time; the prosecuting lawyer, haunted by being forced to seek the death penalty against his convictions, and his wife, who believes Willie to be innocent; the priest who has become a friend to Willie; and a mother whose only son is fighting in the Pacific, bent on befriending her black neighbours in defiance of her husband.

Early one morning a foreman shows up at the building site of a mega-mansion. Proceeding up unfinished plank steps, he arrives at the master bedroom. There, lying on a blanket, are a man and a woman, stabbed and bludgeoned to death. Who are the lovers? Why have they chosen a construction site for their late-night tryst? Is the double murder simply a horrific example of wrong-place, wrong-time? Or were the victims stalked? And will the outrage be repeated?

What is it like to broadcast the fateful words "Mayday, Mayday, Mayday," then jump into the unknown? The members of one of the world's most unusual brotherhoods provide the answers in this incredible book. Formed during the Second World War to celebrate the survival of pilots who had been forced to bail out over water, the Goldfish Club has taken on new members ever since. They share one pivotal moment, but their experiences beyond this couldn't be more different.

At 40, Patty Bigelow thought she'd finally figured life out. Then her wayward sister Leila abandons her child, Tanya, on Patty's doorstep. The aunt and troubled niece slowly learn to live together, with the help of Dr Alex Delaware's counseling. Now, 15 years later, Tanya is back in Alex's office. Patty has died and left Tanya with a chilling legacy: a deathbed confession that her aunt murdered a man years earlier.

At the end of the American Civil War, Confederate Colonel Clay Fitzgerald escapes to Ireland, where his uncle has left him an estate, only to find that Ireland is caught up in a civil war of its own. The struggle between the wealthy landlords and the impoverished tenant farmers is growing in intensity, and having just fought and lost a terrible war, Clay wants to avoid the coming conflict. But after witnessing the atrocities that the landowners visit upon the people, Clay is unable to stand by.

Ben Hur could be said to be the first American blockbuster. It combines all the best elements of popular classic, epic and action story against a background of authoritative historical detail. As this vivid reading shows, the story, together with the sweeping rhythm of the writer's prose, make it ideally suited to the audiobook.

An ingenious, intriguing and breathtakingly good novel from the world's number one psychological thriller writer. In a glamorous area of Los Angeles, the Beverley Fauborg hotel is about to close for good. Psychologist Alex Delaware and his girlfriend Robin are making a farewell visit to the hotel bar when one patron in particular grabs their attention - a beautiful but aloof young woman dressed all in white.

Her name is Elise Freeman, and her chilling cry for help - to whoever may be listening - comes too late to save her. On a DVD found near her lifeless body, the emotionally and physically battered woman chronicles a year-and-a-half-long ordeal of monstrous abuse at the hands of three sadistic tormentors. But even more shocking than the lurid details is the revelation that the offenders, like their victim, are teachers at one of LA's most prestigious prep schools.

Eminent scientist Dr Ralph Padley is dying - and he knows it's time to finally tell the truth. Padley has a dark secret which, if it got out, would have deadly consequences. But there are powerful men who will stop at nothing to silence him. FBI special agent Reilly has an agenda of his own. For months he has sought the man who kidnapped and brainwashed his five-year-old son. But that man is a ghost - a highly protected CIA official with no name and no identity, and who may have links to Reilly's own father.

A worldwide diaspora has left a quarter of a million people at the foot of a space station. Cultures collide in real life and virtual reality. The city is literally a weed, its growth left unchecked. Life is cheap, and data is cheaper. When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from Mars, much has changed. Boris' ex-lover is raising a strangely familiar child who can tap in to the datastream of a mind with the touch of a finger. His cousin is infatuated with a robotnik - a damaged cyborg soldier who might as well be begging for parts.

Danny can't afford the private school his teenage daughter, Abby, adores, and he can't bear to tell his daughter he has failed her. By a stroke of brilliant luck, Danny meets Thomas Galvin, one of the richest men in Boston. When Danny accepts a loan from Thomas, the authorities turn up at his door. Now he has a choice: face prison or become part of a sting operation to bring down his extremely dangerous new best friend...

The Secretary of Homeland Security has been shot dead at his home in Washington. The last man to see him alive was Special Agent Jack McClure. Secretary Denis Paull had top-secret information – Information so sensitive it cost him his life. He knew about a mole in the US Government and tasked McClure with finding the traitor. Now Paull is dead, and McClure is wanted for his murder. Jack is in a race against time. He must outrun the FBI, outrun the paid assassins on his trail, and find the real killer before he loses everything.

The Nightingale House is a new beginning for widower Daniel Price and his young daughter, Caitlyn. After months of grief, this will be the place where they start their life as a family of two. But something is wrong - Daniel can’t settle. There’s an odd, cold feeling in the master bedroom, and a mysterious dripping noise that seems to move from room to room. Whispers of I can’t sleep echo through the corridors, long into the night.

Following Artefact and Legion, Origins is the third and final book of the Lazarus War, an action-drenched space adventure series from one of the most exciting new voices in science fiction. For someone who has died and come back as many times as Conrad Harris, the nickname Lazarus is well deserved. His elite military team are specialists in death - running suicide missions in simulant bodies to combat the alien race known as the Krell.