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

If, like Kane, you're a Denied Access Area spy for the CIA, then boundaries have no meaning. Your function is to go in, do whatever is required, and get out again - by whatever means necessary. You know when to run, when to hide - and when to shoot. But some places don't play by the rules. Some places are too dangerous, even for a man of Kane's experience. The badlands where the borders of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan meet are such a place - a place where violence is the only way to survive.

A collection of 98 enthralling and pulse-quickening stories, spanning five decades, venerates the remarkable imagination of J. G. Ballard. With a body of work unparalleled in twentieth-century literature, J. G. Ballard is recognized as one of the greatest and most prophetic writers in the world. With the much-hailed release of The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard, readers now have a means to celebrate the unmatched range and mesmerizing cadences of a literary genius.

As a child Chris Hooper dreamed of monsters. But in deep space, he found only darkness and isolation. Then, on planet LV178, he and his fellow miners discovered a storm-scoured, sand-blasted hell - and trimonite, the hardest material known to man. When a shuttle crashes into the mining ship Marion, the miners learn that there was more than trimonite deep in the caverns. There was evil, hibernating - and waiting for suitable prey.

The Black Angel is not an object. The Black Angel is not a myth. The Black Angel lives. A young woman goes missing from the streets of New York. Those who have taken her believe that nobody cares about her, and that no one will come looking for her. They are wrong. She is 'blood' to the killer Louis, the man who stands at the right hand of private detective Charlie Parker, and Louis will tear apart anyone who stands in the way of his attempts to find her.

Winner of the British Book Awards, Book of the Year, 2005.

A murder in the silent, late night halls of the Louvre reveals a sinister plot to uncover a secret that has been protected by a clandestine society since the days of Christ. The victim is a high-ranking agent of this ancient society who, in the moments before his death, manages to leave gruesome clues at the scene that only his cryptographer daughter and her symbologist friend can untangle.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook addition of According to Yes, the hilarious new novel by Dawn French. The Foreign Land of the Very Wealthy - otherwise known as Manhattan's Upper East Side - has its own rigid code of behaviour. It's a code strictly adhered to by the Wilder-Bingham family. Emotional displays - unacceptable. Unruly behaviour - definitely not welcome. Fun - no thanks. This is Glenn Wilder-Bingham's kingdom.

Tormented and racked with guilt over the brutal slaying of his wife and daughter, Charlie Parker, ex-cop with the NYPD, agrees to track down a missing girl. It is a search that will lead him into an abyss of evil. At the same time, he is warned by an old black woman in Louisiana that "The Travelling Man" is about to strike again. Multiple strands converge with a horrific confrontation in which hunter and hunted are intimately connected by guilt.

After an epic and interrupted journey all the way from the snows of South Dakota, Jack Reacher has finally made it to Virginia. His destination, the closest thing to a home he ever had: the headquarters of his old unit, the 110th Military Police. Why? He wants to meet the new commanding officer, Major Susan Turner. He liked her voice on the phone. But now he's arrived, she's disappeared, and things are getting weird. Accused of a sixteen-year-old homicide and co-opted back into the army, Reacher says nothing.

From the Stone Age to the Greek Tragedies, from Shakespeare to Robin Hood, we have always had our heroes. The hero is at the centre of formative myths in every culture and persists to this day in world-conquering books, films and TV shows. But why do these characters continue to inspire us, and why are they so central to storytelling? Scalpel-sharp on the roots of storytelling and enlightening on the history and science of myth, The Hero is essential listening for anyone trying to write or understand fiction.

As a deputy commissioner for the ICC, Alan Decker’s job is to make sure the settlements on LV178 follow all the rules, keeping the colonists safe. But the planet known as New Galveston holds secrets, lurking deep beneath the toxic sands dubbed the Sea of Sorrows. The Weyland-Yutani Corporation has secrets of its own, as Decker discovers when he is forced to join a team of mercenaries sent to investigate an ancient excavation. Somewhere in that long-forgotten dig lies the thing the company wants most in the universe - a living Xenomorph.

Lincoln Rhyme tracks down a terrifying serial killer in the second in the series. The Coffin Dancer, America's most wanted hit man, is back. He's been hired by an airline owner who wants three witnesses taken care of before his trial, and has got the first, a pilot, by blowing up his entire plane. Enter quadriplegic ex-cop Lincoln Rhyme, who can find forensic evidence to hang a man in the smallest debris, and his assistant, Amelia Sachs.

In the vein of Graham Greene and John le Carré, The Matchmaker delivers a chilling Cold War spy story set in West Berlin, where an American woman targeted by the Stasi must confront the truth behind her German husband's mysterious disappearance. Berlin, 1989. Protests across East Germany threaten the Iron Curtain and Communism is the ill man of Europe. Anne Simpson, an American who works as a translator at the Joint Operations Refugee Committee, thinks she is in a normal marriage with a charming East German.

In The Sisters Strange, the return of the criminal Raum Buker to Portland, Maine brings with it chaos and murder, as an act of theft threatens not only to tear apart his own existence but also that of Raum’s former lovers, the enigmatic sisters Dolors and Ambar Strange. And in The Furies, Parker finds himself fighting to protect two more women as the city of Portland shuts down in the face of a global pandemic, but it may be that his clients are more capable of taking care of themselves than anyone could have imagined.

Did Grace Peltier commit suicide? When a mass grave in northern Maine reveals the final resting place of a religious community that disappeared almost 40 years earlier, private detective Charlie Parker, hired to investigate the circumstances of her death, realises that their deaths and the violent passing of Grace Peltier are part of the same mystery, one that has its roots in her family history and in the origins of the shadowy organisation known as the Fellowship.

Civilization has fallen. The public revelation that shapechangers are real, secretly living among ordinary people, has brought down the government and spread complete chaos. Shaw and Captain Case, both mutated by the monstrous Wendigo, must face the conspiracy of werewolves that successfully ended humanity’s dominance. Ex-detective Lenny and cryptid-hunter Dandy struggle to survive as America collapses around them. In this horrific new world, vicious armed gangs prey on the weak and helpless.

Crease is known in Weaver as ‘the bug guy', the man who takes care of insects and other critters. But what emerges from the shadows of the town's waste plant is beyond anything found in nature. Fist-sized cockroaches. Bird-sized wasps. Spiders, millipedes, ticks, all swollen to enormous bulk with vicious appetites to match. And other things, creatures that should never exist.

It's kill or be killed in America. A young man beats his mother half to death. A girl burns her teacher alive and films it. America is imploding under the influence of 'X', a conspiracy theorist radicalizing innocents on the Internet. And number 1 on X's kill list? Christopher Wren. As civilians on the street open fire, Wren's only hope is to hunt down and kill X before the country rips itself apart.
But X could be anyone, even someone Wren already knows...

Cloud Atlas features six characters in interlocking stories, each interrupting the one before it: a reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified dinery server on death row; and Zachry, a young Pacific islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation.

It begins with a letter... The letter contains a request - think of a number, any number - and a sealed envelope. Inside the envelope is that number... When Dave Gurney, retired NYPD homicide detective, is contacted by an old college acquaintance about some startling letters he’s been receiving, it is at first little more than a diverting but sinister puzzle. Until the acquaintance is brutally killed.Suddenly Gurney finds himself in the middle of a murder investigation that makes no sense.

The Man on the Mountaintop tells the story of Holy Man Joe, an ageing and unassuming man who lives in a hermitage on top of a mountain. During the summer months, thousands of hopefuls line the path leading to his door, seeking his wisdom. From bombastic, wealthy nobles intent on cheating their way to the top to drunkards who gradually build the physical and mental strength they need to quit their addiction, The Man on the Mountaintop is a rousing tale full of humour, wit and life lessons.