Showing results by narrator "Becky Hindley" in All Categories

It’s the 1950s, and Grundy’s Travelling Fair arrives in town. When night falls, the local town is drawn to the fair. But when the fairgoers head home, the Grundys are left behind. Hours are long and the work backbreaking. But family and friends hold things together.

Someone has left a severed hand in the centre of Manchester, and the only clue Detective Sergeant Jessica Daniel has to go on is CCTV footage of a woman in a long, black robe placing it carefully on the ground. With a lengthy missing persons list and frantic families wondering if the body part could belong to their absent loved ones, she has plenty to deal with - and that's before a detached finger arrives for her in the post.

Based in Devon in the 1940s, these two dramas follow the lives and loves of a group of young women, all from different backgrounds, but all determined to do their bit for king and country in the Land Army. Billeted in a hastily converted farmhouse, they face cramped conditions and gruelling work - but there's always dances at the village hop and the chance of romance with a GI....

Long before Jessica Daniel became a police detective, Manchester was a ghost city after dark. Fear ruled, and people were afraid to be out by themselves, the notorious Stretford Slasher terrorizing its inhabitants. Now, twenty-five years on, the media are feeling nostalgic. But Jessica has a new case to worry about. Apparent strangers are being targeted in broad daylight, the attacker unworried about being caught. If only Jessica and her team could track him down...

In Mauritius, a retired Law Lord is brutally murdered, while in Manchester, the Labour Party conference is beginning. DC Iona Khan's first case in the Counter Terrorism Unit appears to be a trivial use of false identity, when a Sri Lankan student asks questions about Manchester's tunnel system. But when she learns the identity of the conference's guest speaker, Iona must enter the world beneath the city to prevent a catastrophe.

Dead bodies are piling up for Detective Sergeant Jessica Daniel. Usually when a serial killer is on the loose, the pressure would be building to find the perpetrator, but the victims are all hardened criminals themselves. The national media can't believe their luck with an apparent vigilante on the streets while Jessica's new boss seems grateful someone else is doing their job for them. But things aren't so straightforward when forensics matches blood from the apparent killer to a man already behind bars.

Detective Sergeant Jessica Daniel is first on the scene as a stolen car crashes on a misty, wet Manchester morning. The driver is dead, but the biggest shock awaits her when she discovers the body of a child wrapped in plastic in the boot of the car. As Jessica struggles to discover the identity of the driver, a thin trail leads her first to a set of clothes buried in the woods and then to a list of children's names abandoned in an allotment shed.

It started with a phone call. Just one word - ‘Jessica’ - and now Detective Inspector Jessica Daniel has a big problem. Her missing friend, Bex, called from a battered seaside payphone, and yet, by the time Jessica arrived, there was nobody there. One man claims he can help - but then he turns up on a beach stabbed to death. Jessica believes someone must be framing her. Someone who is always a step ahead. When she finds a boy whose tattoo matches Bex's, she becomes more desperate than ever for answers.

Voluntary nurse Ella is haunted by the soldiers' cries she hears on the battlefields of Dieppe. But that’s not the only thing that haunts her. When her dear friend Jim breaks her trust, Ella is left bruised and heartbroken. Over the years, her friendships have been pulled apart at the seams by the effects of war. Now, more than ever, she feels so alone.

A best seller since it was first published in 1972, Alex Comfort's classic work celebrates human physical intimacy with such authority and clarity that a whole generation felt empowered to enjoy sex. It was groundbreaking and unique in the wide range of subjects it discussed and in its reassuring authority and sense of fun. No other book has come close in providing such a wise, witty, uninhibited - sometimes delightfully eccentric - guide to lovemaking. And the original illustrations are absolutely iconic.

When Cameron and Eleanor Sexton arrive home to find their teenage babysitter missing, their immediate concern is for their young daughter. Detective Sergeant Jessica Daniel is dispatched to find out what's going on, but with all apparently well, she thinks she's been sent on a fool's errand. Soon the teenager's body is discovered in an apparently random house on the other side of Manchester.

When a body is found in a locked house, Detective Sergeant Jessica Daniel is left to not only find the killer but discover how they got in and out. With little in the way of leads and a journalist who seems to know more about the case than she does, Jessica is already feeling the pressure - and that's before a second body shows up in identical circumstances to the first. How can a murderer get to victims in seemingly impossible situations and what, if anything, links the bodies?

University dropout and would-be novelist Johnny Street and his worker-of-the-world mate Arthur Lane are the odd-couple partners in a one-horse, two-man family building firm (slogan: ‘Up Your Street, Down Your Lane’). Together, they travel the Yorkshire suburbs in their white van, tackling tricky household repairs with their unique combination of art and craft.

DI Jessica Daniel is not having a good week. Her wallet's been nicked, the refurbished incident room is already falling apart, and a new football-mad constable is driving her crazy. She also has bigger things on her mind. A student's body has been dumped in a wheelie bin at the back of a university building, with a vague link to an Olympic medallist and a theory that it could have been an induction which went wrong.

Julie and Dicky Otterman arrive at Grundy’s fair with an extraordinary new act: the motorcycle extravaganza The Wall of Death. This seemingly happy couple are the talk of the town, but all is not as it seems, and Dicky’s dark and violent nature means Julie lives in constant fear. There's always plenty happening at Grundy’s fair: Gemma knows Velda's secret. Renata is finally with Donny. New member well-spoken Tom catches the eye of Jenny, the Grundys' lost daughter, returned to the fair very recently....

From a tender age, Flora felt unloved and unwanted by her parents, but she finds safety in the arms of caring nanny Pru. But when Pru is cast out of the family home, under a shadow of secrets and with a young baby boy of her own to care for, it shatters little Flora. But over the years, Flora and Pru meet in secret - unbeknownst to Flora’s parents. Pru becomes the mother to Flora she never had, and Flora grows into a fine young woman. When Flora signs up to become a nurse with the St John’s ambulance, she begins to shape her life.

It starts with the death of a teenage runaway, killed when she leaps from a motorway bridge into the speeding traffic below. The girl's identity remains a mystery - until the discovery of the dead girl's details matches the profiles of three other girls; all recently have been reported missing. A further shocking discovery causes the whole file to be handed over to Greater Manchester Police's Counter Terrorism Unit, with leading detective constable Iona Khan in charge.

In the middle of the night, 14-year-old Samuel is woken by the sound of a terrified scream from the kitchen of his home on a quiet street. The police - finding him sobbing on the kitchen floor, cradling his mother's lifeless body - hit a dead end before the investigation has even begun: because although he witnessed the murder, Samuel is blind. But when Detective Jessica Daniel meets the boy, the way he uses just his sense of sound to accurately locate her hand to shake it convinces her that this clever young teenager could hold the key to the entire case.

The 10th novel from the million-copy best-selling author. Three houses have been burgled in five weeks. The robbers barge in through the back, disable any way to contact the outside world, and then ransack everything - before distributing the stolen cash to local charities. It might be robbing from the rich to give to the poor, but Detective Inspector Jessica Daniel is not a happy bunny. The new DCI has a whiteboard with far too many things on the 'unsolved' side, and he wants the burglars found.

They would fight for their country, at all costs.... When Sibbie and Marjie arrive at RAF Digby, they are about to take on roles of national importance. It’s a cause of great excitement for everyone around them. Perhaps they will become code-breakers, spies even? Soon the pair embarks on a rigorous training regime, but nothing can prepare them for what they’re about to face....